Being a science teacher I chose to create a Padlet for an over all unit on cell division. Cell division is very important in biology as it is the basis of all cell growth and expansion. For my unit goals I took cell division and broke it down into all the aspects it consists of. Here students had the opportunity to study the stages of both mitosis and meiosis as well as replication and differentiation.
My main goal for the essential questions was to get students to think about what they were reading about and learning. I know to many science can be very tedious and boring, however that does not have to be the case. I would ask students to answer each question before we began the unit and then have students go through each post and learn new information on the topic. Once the lesson is complete I would ask students to go back and re answer the questions and compare. The information I used for the unit goals and essential questions was based on the lesson plan from interactivity #3. I took that lesson plan idea and rolled with it googling other lesson plans on the cell division, mitosis, meiosis, and replication. I found quite a few interesting approaches to teach this topic and chose what I found fit best.
As I researched cell division I can upon two really interesting websites that I found would be fantastic wrap up activities and or assessments for what students have learned though out the whole unit. CELLS alive and Biology in Motion are two website full of cel division activities simple enough for 8th graders to do yet still require a good understanding of the material. I really liked Biology in Motion’s mitosis/meiosis game as it starts with parent cells and actually requires students to move chromosomes in the correctly order to create a proper result. This gets students active versus having them answer questions on what they learned. Both these websites are great post unit activities to assess what students have learned.
