We were just finishing up Unit 7 in AP Biology when we got word that we were closing. I had a weekend to think about what I would prep for the students, knowing that we were about to start our Ecology Unit. I looked at the labs that I do for Ecology and tried to figure out if we could do any of these from home.
One of the labs that I do during this unit is the Cave Explorers Lab. I've been doing this lab for a couple of years now. I use a document from Clifford Nafrada for Cave Explorers and incorporated some of the organism rules that Cheryl Hollinger gave for the alien species for the lab she does. I fill the room with pipe cleaner species, close the shades, and put on cave music from YouTube. I bought a bunch of shower caps and flashlights at the dollar store and give them to my students to cover their shoes (to protect the cave ecosystem) and flashlights to do exploring. They explore the room, recording observations of the species they see, then lab groups are assigned a species to make a claim about that they support with the evidence they collect.
Since my students wouldn't be in the building when I would have done this lab, I needed to figure out another way to do it. I was allowed to go to school after we had closed to students. I set up the classroom with the "species", closed the blinds, put on the cave music and recorded myself going through the room, observing all of the species that I saw.
During our Zoom session, I played the video and students made their observations. I sent them into breakout rooms with an assigned species to make a claim about using the evidence they had collected. They also could rewatch the video. I think it worked great for a remote lab.
One of the drawbacks of the video vs. doing this live is that I found it harder to distinguish between different sizes of the same species. But it allowed us to do the lab, so I'll take it.
The teacher set up document is here, and the document I give to students is here. Here's the link to the YouTube video.
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