IGCSE Biology: Plant reproduction resources

Hi again.

I tried a little experiment and designed a module that students worked through an interactive PowerPoint presentation and filled in a booklet of worksheets. The presentation was made available via the VLE initially and set up as a PowerPoint Show and set in kiosk mode so that they could only work through it in sequence.

The students were all quite excited by this approach and were keen to get started. Unfortunately our internet connection at school had problems and was quite slow, and as the presentation is quite a big one, it took ages to download. In the end they just saved the actual PowerPoint presentation to their memory sticks and launched it from there. The module took at least a week of lessons and some homework. I also ran through a simpler “teacher version” in review lessons as well.

I am not totally sure how well this module went. There were a few technical difficulties which took the shine off it a little. For example the hyperlinks worked fine on my computer but mysteriously chose not to work on other computers. Equally not all computers prompted to activate the macros automatically so I had to give instructions how to do this (see below for the instruction I placed on the VLE for the students). For some reason the brighter kids seemed more disparaging than those less academically able (and I though it would be the other way round). One student, who is lovely and has ADHD (but has it under control) really liked the module and he seemed much happier learning this way at his own speed and being able to review things at will.

I am still not entirely sure of the efficacy of this mode of delivery (and I had to resist the temptation to then teach it again more formally) and of course I did intermingle the lessons with short practical activities eg. dissecting a bean seed (‘cos we know how to really rock it in Biology!!). One little error is that I forgot to add the nectary to the flower diagrams (I will get round to redoing it eventually) but the kids loved spotting the mistake so that wasn’t a total disaster.

The PowerPoint presentation for students has information slides, multiple choice questions (which have macros to show the answers and are formative), some audio links for additional explanation and links to short video clips. The clips do need to checking before each session as they can disappear from time to time.There is also a “Homepage” that hyperlinks to sections throughout the presentation and the clickbiology icon links on each page links back to this homepage.

I have added the student self-study presentation and the worksheet below. The teachers presentation is also added. If you try it out, let me know what you think.

Here are the instruction I gave to the students:

Plant reproduction

Click on the PowerPoint show. It should ask you to enable macros, if so click yes. If it does not prompt you to enable macros then download the PowerPoint presentation, once it is loaded click on Tools then Macro, next click on Security. Click on the medium setting, the presentation, close it down, re-open it and it should then prompt you to enable Macros. If this does not work then repeat the steps but click on the save low security setting.

NOTE: These are over 7mb so will take some time, it may speed things up in future if you save the presentation to a memory stick rather than downloading each time

Work through each section of the presentation. Ensure that you read each slide carefully, watch any video or listen to audio explanations and do the written activities in your booklets.

Links to the presentation resources are here:

student self-study presentation:

plant-reproduction

Worksheets:

plant_reproduction

teacher presentation:

plant-reproduction-teacher

Great site to get interactive PowerPoint templates

I came across an excellent open source video by Kevin Culpepper which teaches you how to make an interactive matching game in PowerPoint. If you have read my previous post, 13 top tips for teachers, about the use of PowerPoint and how one should limit the use of information slides to, at the very most, 5 in a row and to always incorporate interactive slides then you will see why I am keen on this site. Kevin has provided many templates for games that you can modify and use within your resources and also has videos to show you how to make them yourselves. I intend to have a go at few myself so keep an eye out for some customised matching games etc. Certainly worth having a look so click on the link below:

Culpepper Online