Growing lettuce on mars
Ten finalists remain in the MarsOne competition and "Lettuce on mars" from the university of Southampton could make a great introduction to an IB topic on photosynthesis. The NoS point in the IB guide...
Christmas Biology lessons
The last few teaching days before Christmas can be a challenge. Some students leave school early to travel to see their families. Those in school until the end of term are sometimes flagging in their...
Impressions of the new Topic 9 - Plants
The new plants topic is more appropriate for HL biology than the old one but it may take longer to teach. Some easy material has been removed. Knowing the difference between onions and potatoes was always...
Cultivating curious observation
On a recent visit to the Barcelona aquarium with my family I noticed a striking difference in the behaviour of my two sons. One, the eldest, wanted to see everything and to understand what the animals...
Serendipity and Ecology fieldwork
In May 2007 the first unequivocal proof that crocodiles shed tears while eating was published in Bioscience magazine although for many years the false remorse of hungry crocodiles has been legendary....
Extraterrestrial life in the new IB guide
When I began teaching in 1991 I never dreamed that one day I'd be teaching about extraterrestrial life in a Biology lesson. I'm always keen to bring new research into lessons and I like looking for ways...
New content in the cells topic
In the new IB guide the IBO have, quite rightly, added some new concepts which have become important recently but were unknown when many of us were studying Biology full time at university. The control...
TOK: Ethics as an area of knowledge
If Ethics is an area of knowledge then its status in the IB diploma is similar to Biology, which is one of the Natural Sciences, another area of knowledge. So if a student asks, "in a world of food shortages...
More TOK examples for students - perception
In TOK students learn how our brain uses previous experience to interpret images we see with our eyes. Sometimes our eyes can play tricks on us and we can see a scary shape in a shadow, or a face in the...
Helping students to link TOK - Reasoning
Students learn about "Reasoning" as a way of knowing in TOK lessons. Often examples illustrate the idea of reasoning like this; This is an example of deductive reasoning, in fact it is a conditional syllogism...