Colds, the Flu, and Flipped Lessons

I love everything about the change of seasons from autumn to winter except for the onset of cold and flu season. A couple of my friends have already reported having sick students and or getting colds themselves. What is a cold? What is the flu? And what are the differences between the two? Those questions and more are answered in the videos embedded below.




How is a cold or flu passed from person to person and what exactly is it doing to your body? NPR answers those questions in the following animated video.




What is ‘flu? - Explania
If you want to use any of these videos in flipped lessons, take a look at the tools featured in my playlist of tutorials on creating flipped lessons.

Why Your Eye Sees Things Differently Than a Camera - A TED-Ed Lesson

Eye vs. Camera is a fascinating TED-Ed lesson. In the lesson we learn why our eyes don't always see things the same way that they're captured with a camera. Through the lesson we learn how our eyes perceive and focus on colors compared to a camera. We also learn fun facts like why we can't watch our own eyes shift from side to side in a mirror. The full lesson can be found here. The video is embedded below.


TED-Ed offers some resources to extend the lesson. Optical Illusions and Phenomena will show students more examples of how eyes perceive light and color differently than is captured by a camera. Exploring the Anatomy of Your Own Eye is an activity set extracted from The American Biology Teacher. It contains some examples and explanations of how the human eye works.

The Story of Photosynthesis and Food

A few weeks ago I suggested having students use the Crash Course videos as review materials to view before the end of the school year. There are Crash Courses in Biology and Ecology. As a supplement to those videos consider the TED-Ed lesson, The Simple Story of Photosynthesis and Food. The video could make a good review of or introduction to photosynthesis.

Backpack TV Adds Video Playlists Matched to Books

Back in May I wrote about a start-up company called Backpack TV. Backpack TV is a video site that is creating libraries of free academic videos arranged according to subject area, topic, and video length. This week they added a bunch of new libraries. Backpack TV now offers videos aligned to commonly used Algebra, Biology, and Calculus textbooks. And according to the email I received from them, there are plans for more topics and textbooks to be added in the future.

Applications for Education
If you're looking for some video content to support the textbooks that you have in your mathematics or science department, take a look at Backpack TV.

Video - How Dark Were the Dark Ages?

Back in February I wrote about an educational and entertaining YouTube channel titled Crash Course. Crash Course offers a course on World History and a course on Biology. They are now up to 15 videos in each course. The videos are fast-paced ten to twelve minute overviews of major concepts and themes. One of the latest World History videos is The Dark Ages... How Dark Were They, Really? I've embedded that video below.



Applications for Education
The fast pace of the Crash Course videos makes them better suited to being reviews or introductions to topics rather than a replacement for lectures and documentary videos.

Interactive Biology - Videos and More

Interactive Biology is a website offering a series of videos, quizzes, and study guides for biology students. The site offers study guides for sale, but there some good free resources available too. The best free resource found on Interactive Biology is the Interactive Biology YouTube channel. There are ten multiple choice quizzes based on information in the videos and study guides. Each quiz offers immediate feedback and provides a hint if you get a question wrong and want to try it again.

Here is one of the videos from the Interactive Biology YouTube channel.


Applications for Education
For biology students in need of some Khan Academy-like tutorial videos, Interactive Biology could be a good  review aid. The videos won't replace your classroom instruction, but they could definitely make a nice supplement to the course notes and outlines that you post online.

H/T to Kyle Pace. 

Arkive - Great Videos, Images, and Lesson Plans About Animals and Plants

This morning as I was browsing my favorite fly fishing message board, Fly Fishing in Maine, I came across a video from Arkive featuring an Osprey catching fish. That video prompted me to explore more of Arkive's content.

Arkive's main feature is the extensive collection of videos and images of plants and animals. The videos and images are cataloged according to animal, plant, eco-region, and geo-political region. You can navigate the galleries by selecting one of the broad categories then choosing a subject within that broad category. For example, choose the Antarctica eco-region and then you can explore all of the images and videos about plants and animals found in that eco-region. Videos on Arkive can be downloaded to for your classroom use.

Arkive offers a dozen online games for kids. The games collection is a mix of quiz games and problem solving games. One of the games that I tried out is Animal Survival that required me to keep a Sand Lizard alive by correctly answering questions about Sand Lizards' daily lives.



Applications for Education
Arkive has a nice collection of free lesson plans based upon the images, videos, and games found on Arkive. The lesson plans include PowerPoint files, instruction sheets, and links to online resources as needed. The lesson plans are arranged according to student age from 5 to 18. The bulk of the free lesson plans are targeted for 7 to 14 year old students. Here's a sample of some of the topics covered in the free lesson plans: classification, adaptation, and observation.