Food Webs Lab: Live or Virtual

For the last several years I've done a food web lab from Serendip Studio, called Food Webs, Energy Flow, Carbon Cycle and Trophic Pyramids. There are both a pdf version and a Word version of the lab on their website. The lab was updated in March of 2019, but the pdf that I converted was from an older version. They are fairly similar anyway, just organized a little differently. 

I wanted to convert this lab to a Google doc to make it easier for my students to complete on their computers. While my students were learning from home, I decided to take the time to convert it and to also upload all of the organism cards for the food web into google slides so that my students could work on them together in breakout groups.  I love Google slides for this since even while they are all in different breakout rooms, I can still see what they are all doing. Then I know when I need to broadcast messages to the groups, such as, "don't forget to stay on your own slides!"  

I did this with my students a couple of weeks ago and was happy with the results. Part of the reason I like this lab so much is that it weaves together so many ecology concepts as well as bringing students back to cellular respiration and photosynthesis. 

One of the things that I did with this lab to make it computer friendly, was to take diagrams that needed to be labeled and made them into a google drawing. For example, one diagram in the lab asks students to draw arrows from one trophic level to another. In drawings, I placed the trophic levels and then added all the arrows and other parts they needed at the bottom of the drawing. All students had to do was double click the drawing and drag the arrows where they should go.  I also added text boxes for students to place their answers in, which I am loving.

A student's finished work, after moving arrows and circles where directed.

In Google slides I put the entire set of organism pictures on slides and gave each breakout group two slides to work on, one slide for their food chains and one slide for their food web. It was a little bit of a challenge to work with so many pictures, but the kids were resourceful and made it work. They made great use of the arrow in slides that connects pictures in their food web. That way if they had a move a picture, the arrow followed along. 

Here's the Google docs version of the lab.

Here's the Google slides presentation to go with the lab.