This year, we actually finished the AP Bio content by the time of the exam. This left us 3 weeks of school after the exam, and time to put together a unit on Epidemiology. Way back when I taught AP Bio before I had children, I would read the class the book, Ebola, and then we'd watch some documentaries. This time, I decided to alternate activities with documentaries and a movie. Our schedule looked like this:
Day 1: Watch the TED-Ed Video What we know (and don't know) about Ebola and then the PBS documentary, Spillover-Zika, Ebola, & Beyond.
Day 2: Complete Virus Explorer from HHMI BioInteractive. Students could also get to it through the PBS website.
Day 3: Watch the Nova Documentary, Plague Fighters. I didn't see this available on PBS's site anymore, but got the DVD from my local library. A quick Google search brought up this movie guide that I had students work on as we watched the documentary.
Day 4: Complete Ebola Disease Detectives from HHMI BioInteractive. First we watched the introductory video, Think Like a Scientist-Natural Selection in an Outbreak. I must confess that I'm tempted to do this activity during our Evolution unit next year. Having to organize the different DNA segments by how many changes have happened led to some good discussions, since the changes didn't fall into neat little groups. Also, the video includes clips from the other documentaries we watched, so separating it from the time we watch the other videos might be helpful. By the way, I laminated the DNA sequence sheet and cut the sequences into individual strips to make it easier for the students to group them (and to help them last for another year).
Day 5: Watch Surviving Ebola from Nova. I also got this DVD out from my public library.
Day 6: Complete Disease Detectives. This came from the Life Sciences Learning Center by University of Rochester. (I just had to request membership and a link to all of the activities was sent to me.) This activity involved some reading and answering questions, but also included some hand-on components. We did find that it was easier to see the antibody-coated bead test when we dropped the samples directly onto our black lab tables. It was too hard to see if the solution became cloudy on the white paper. I should have printed the test circles on colored paper. (The instructions did warn about using white paper for this test.)
Day 7: Watch the movie, Contagion. I found a movie guide for Contagion at moviesheets.com. I made a couple of changes and put it into this google doc. The class loved the movie, although they balked at how it ended.
Day 8: Watch a movie (that was not Ebola or outbreak related). I gave the students the choice of The Martian, Jurassic Park, or Jurassic World. Jurassic World won, but we didn't see much of it, because we spent extra time talking about key concepts to review for the final exam.
We only meet 3 times a week in blocks and some of these days spilled over into the next day. This happened especially since on each day we also did a review Kahoot of a different unit and practice essays to prepare for our final exam at the end of the year.
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