Immune System Trading Cards and Storyboarding Remotely

I've described the immune system trading cards that my honors biology class makes here. We are remote this week, and we were ready to work on our trading cards. Fortunately, part of the activity is digital anyway. The adjustment that was needed was getting the illustrations onto the cards. 

Usually we pass the cards around and each of the students illustrates their word on every other student's cards. That part is impossible when we are all remote. To adjust, I had each student illustrate their word by hand, take a picture and insert it into the document. I also gave them the option to illustrate the word digitally, they just couldn't copy and paste from the internet. The class was split fairly evenly, with half of the students illustrating by hand and the other half used Google Drawings to put their illustration together. 

Some of our cards from this week.

After we finish the cards, when we are in class, I have them storyboard the immune response to an infection on our lab tables with characters of the immune system that I give them and chalk markers. This time, I put the characters in Google Slides and asks the students to story board in Slides. I love the bird's eye view I get of them working in Slides (even though I can't see all of the students when they are in breakout rooms. It was so much fun watching their storyboards coming together in real time. It allowed me to see some misconceptions as well and address them with the class.

Here's a link to the Google Slides students used to make the storyboard.

Remote Antibiotic Resistance Game Lab

In my Honors Biology class, when we are studying disruptions of homeostasis we do an antibiotic resistance game lab from New Vision's Living Environment curriculum. It's a fairly simple lab...just requiring colored disks and a die.  It gives students a very visual way to see how inconsistent taking of antibiotics can affect the bacteria in their bodies. 

This coming week, we're remote to mitigate any COVID spread after Christmas break, so I needed to convert the antibiotics lab to a remote version. Google Slides are one of my favorite tools when we're remote since I can see what all of my students are doing, even when they are in breakout rooms.  I made slides for each breakout room with plenty of virtual disks. On the slide itself is the number of disks lab groups need to begin with. There are piles of spares on the side to use as needed.  

Students will put their data into a shared Google Sheet and graph the data as well.  I purposely left one of the tables filled in and highlighted to remind me to review with students that they need to add more bacteria after each day.

I have also adjusted the lab document from New Visions to fit my class. I'll link the lab, the Slides and Sheet below.

Student Lab Document

Slides with Disks

Sheets for Data and Graphs