tessawatson.com

Unit 3 of the SQA Intermediate 1 Biology is all about ‘Growing Plants’ Last week my INT1 Biologists and I planted some (100) sunflower seeds (I was estimating a germination percentage of 50). Prior to planting the seeds, we had looked at seed structure and composition.

As an ongoing project, I have been uploading the youngster’s practical images onto flickr. The youngsters have then been able to access these images for their personal projects and slide shows. They have found this resource very useful, much more so than ‘Google Images’ where often, the images are of a low resolution and have underlying copyright. As the pupils were having difficulty remembering the full URL of my Flickr site, as mentioned in a previous post, I decided to purchase the domain name;

Biologybigbrother.com
(The domain name serves as a web forwarding facility at present. I plan to do more with it in the future, possibly with the collaboration of fellow colleagues in East Lothian. More on that later.)

It will be our work on ‘Seeds And Germination’ that will be the main topic up for discussion in our Glow Group during the Phase 2 trial.

Unlike Phase 1 of Glow, the Phase 2 trial will have ‘Remote Access’. This means that the Portal will be available from home. I am hoping to use the ‘Chat’ tool to communicate with the pupils out with the classroom. As the majority of them use MSN and Bebo on a daily basis, I am sure they will use this facility with great ease to enhance their projects and help them with their homework.

Yesterday, I was able to access the portal from my PC at home; albeit for 5 minutes (the portal has been taken down for maintenance prior to the official launch of Phase 2 on Monday) I am pleased to say this was very easy. I was able to have a brief look at the new tools incorporated, and I have added the ‘Chat’ webpart to my INT1 Biology Glow Group. I wasn’t able to activate the ‘Chat’ webpart. The ‘username’ that I was using, didn’t have the privileges. I am hoping that Dave and I can work on this next week. This should be relatively easy if the portal can be accessed from home.

In the meantime, I have approximately 80 lonely sunflower seedlings that are looking for good homes (gardens).

Any takers?