Food webs offer serious food for thought!

I am just starting to recover from my summer ‘vacation’… Having revised my Educational Technology course, I had to realign elements to the various standards: the TEKS, the NETS, the PPR, and so on… I’d need a 3D Microsoft Surface table to show you how each ties into the actual course – and over to the others – really. Because my course is cumulative across 15 weeks, the spiral design creates a fantastic interweaving of connections. I’d bet your practice produces a similarly intricate mesh when you take a step back from the general lessons and add in all of the IEPs. Representing such complexity is a challenge. My dream is to realize an interactive volvox model to literally connect the dots within and around the parts that make up the whole of education.

On a more practical note, the Oops, I Broke It activity provides a memorable way for students to dramatize a food chain. Hopefully you’ll have time to extend that simple linear model into a food web. Making the connection to energy, they sometimes forget that all food chains and webs begin with the sun. It’s also important that they realize how inter-dependent both chains and webs are when considered within an environmental context. As a formative assessment, I’ve found this to be a fun way to introduce the topic of food webs or to check for a thorough understanding of the importance of protecting endangered species.Click here to download the ‘analog’ activity detail.


Please refer to the EPA’s website to learn more about the issue of Pesticides, Chemicals, and Toxics and incorporate that issue into your discussion of food webs. Their Design for the Environment Safer Product Labeling Program is one tool for empowering us all to help protect human health and the environment.

HippoCampus Connections: Depending on your curriculum needs, there are several wonderful resources to support this activity in the HippoCampus collection. Hydrothermal Vent Food Web in NOAA: Chemosynthesis and Vent Life provides a real-life simulation of a unique underwater food web. In NOAA: Ocean Pollution, the Biomagnification animation shows how toxins move into and through a food chain.

Instructor Notes: Depending on your students, I was also pleased to find several interesting ‘games’ on the web that might offer additional assessments or appropriate remediation. Exercise your creativity to integrate this topic with geography and social studies! In the food chain game you drag the parts of the generic progressive food chains (from simple to full) to their correct places; when the chain is complete it ‘comes to life’! There are locale specific activities for meadow, arctic and pond chains, Canadian northern or forest food chains, and endangered animals in the Mexican ecosystem and/or you can learn about other animals by level then see complex webs for Australian or African Grasslands and Antarctic or Marine food webs. While the Oops, I Broke It activity targets a particular environmental science concept, you’re certainly not limited to addressing a single standard with such real-world examples!

An obvious benefit of new technologies is the ability to individualize teaching to accommodate different learning styles and special needs cases. With a slightly different tack, I try to design content that fosters individualized learning for everyone. (Yes, I am a true constructivist.) In fact, for my doctoral work I helped my graduate students weave their areas of interest into a single virtual field trip. The closest I’ve come to pursuing my volvox dream is an ancient, home-made project called the GEMweb. (Yes, I use it in my Science Education course each summer! The inter-relationships of ecology, geology, and humankind are basically the same still. Students help expand the site by contributing their own pages.) I’m eager to implement the playlist feature on the new HippoCampus site to let students to exercise a little more of that ‘shared control’ measured on the CLES. How are you empowering students to explore their interests within the scaffolding of our current educational system? How is that changing how you continue to learn?

Adapting to and surviving in new environments with infinite horizons

I truly am a digital immigrant. I like keeping one foot in the analog world while wiggling my toes in the digital world. They’re both quite real and uniquely wonderful – as well as complementary. ‘Home computers’ were introduced the year I graduated from high school. Realizing that was about as shocking as hearing my favorite songs on an ‘oldies’ station a decade (or so) ago… How dare they label my generation! If you read last month’s post, you may have returned to see if I was trying to shock unassuming readers: black-eyed peas? Seriously? Absolutely!

While some religiously champion digital evolution as the solution to the world’s problems, I maintain there is an urgent need for blending tools and strategies – especially in education. Existing and emerging technologies offer empowering tools for meaningful learning. Simply participating in this blog, actively or passively, is evidence that we’ve survived the information revolution. Technology has infiltrated the ranks of higher education even as explained in an enlightening Adobe whitepaper called The Silent Transformation. Eleven years into the 21st Century, what do your students really need to learn? What do you think is the best way to teach them? Both teachers and students must adapt to a changing environment if they want to survive!

Adaptation means survival in any environment on every level. Critical issues impacting our own physical development are detailed on the EPA’s Health and Safety webpage: “children may suffer disproportionately from environmental health risks and safety risks; as we age, our bodies are more susceptible to hazards from the environment which may worsen chronic or life threatening conditions”. Although not as rapid as iPhone releases, the relatively contemporary story of the pepper moths provides a perfect example of how such change can happen in the real world. The Moth Mothers activity demonstrates why the pepper moth had to adapt to survive England’s industrial revolution. Click here to download the ‘analog’ activity detail.

I typically use this activity as a summative assessment, but it’s equally useful as an introductory assignment. Because the effects of environmental changes often occur slowly and slightly over extensive time, students may not realize the link(s) to biological evolution. Few species can adapt quickly enough to survive the rapid impacts of human activity. Leveraging digital advances, I found a comprehensive Flash interactive that beautifully complements this hands-on physical simulation on Mr. Tevis' Class Web. Click here to review the Peppered Moths: Natural Selection in Black and White. This would be a great alternative accommodation for anyone who had to miss out on the lesson.

Instructor Notes: Unfortunately, it’s probably pretty easy to make Moth Mothers personally relevant today. Fortunately, there are many instances of coordinated efforts to shift the balance of the systems involved. For example, because more kids have asthma and other environmentally induced diseases, regulations and policy are critical to our health and safety as global citizens.

Back to the realm of teaching and learning, I love that this ‘science’ lesson affords so many interdisciplinary opportunities. That’s the exciting part about these ‘interesting times’… Case in point: “The mission of the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society is to facilitate cross-cultural collaboration in biology, education and the cognitive and developmental sciences. Science and practice will benefit from rich, bi-directional interaction”. Hands-on, inquiry-based activities that simulate or model environmental issues and concepts are more than applicable than ever today… and the research says that “Action Based Learning” (friend ‘em on facebook) is more critical than ever today. Seriously! See for yourself how well it works with any age learner!