"She Blinded Me with Science!" Using MySciLife in My Classroom

Long time, no write.  Here's a new post!  There may be another one coming soon when I have a few more things together.  :)

 

This is the third year I am part of MySciLife (myscilife.org), an online social media site for 6-9th grade science students.  7th grade students learned genetics concepts as they work through various learning tasks.  They practiced the main vocabulary (genotype, phenotype, dominant, recessive, etc.) through creating a Wanted Ad for a perfect mate (they all have assumed identities as their creature, ex. GumDrop, Gloombug, Striped Horn, etc because this site keeps identities anonymous).

Because we are nearing the end of our unit, most have picked a mate and are putt to use their background of Punnett Squares to show how their creatures pairs pass on genes to their offspring.  There has been quite a lot of creativity in their work this year.  I have quite a few extension choices for students that are fast workers and at least one student has chosen to create a game based on our genetics unit.

Also, to build up excitement/motivation, I created a ThingLink to house all of our ads so each creature could easily search for them:  https://www.thinglink.com/scene/758811875428270081 

In this colony, the female creatures choose the mates, so I would play "It's Raining Men!"  as a signal that there new ads that the female creatures could peruse.

This is my first year using it with 8th graders, and they created Birthday Trading cards that tell astronomical and weather related things that happened on their birthday.  They just finished up working on infomercials with a small team to share with their classmates on the topics of moon phases, eclipses, tides, and seasons and these will be shared out on MySciLife as well.

This link allows the public to see the public feed of work:  myscilife.org ." (Right now, quite a bit of it is from our school.)