Linking Educators As a Resource Network
BioLEARN (Linking Educators As a Resource Network) is an on-line collection of biology education materials created for and by Wisconsin high school and middle school biology teachers. They are the outgrowth of a teacher professional development program coordinated by the Center for Biology Education in collaboration with Wisconsin life science teachers, biology faculty/staff from UW System campuses, the Wisconsin Society of Science Teachers and other educators around the state.
BioLEARN teams composed of teachers, UW System biologists and other educators worked together to enrich their teaching by sharing their best practices, aligning teaching materials with Wisconsin Model Academic Standards and incorporating standards-based student performance measures.
Representative activities are available in the following biology subdisciplines:
- Botany
- Using Plants for Student Research Projects
- Ecology
- Observing and Identifying Freshwater Protists
- WANTED: Exotic Invasives
- Taxonomy
- What Is Life? – Scavenger Hunt
- Teaching Tools
- Generic Lab Write-up
- The Study of Radish Seed Germination Using a Constructivist Approach
BioLEARN activities are formatted as pdf files and will require Adobe Acrobat Reader for viewing. (Adobe Acrobat Reader is available as a free download.) Many of the activities also include supporting documents such as student/teacher handouts, posters, worksheets, rubrics, etc.
BioLEARN Activity Development Resources
BioLEARN participants collaboratively developed the following resources to guide the development of their own teaching materials and to evaluate activities for inclusion on this web site.
Activity Template (Download 80kb pdf file ) to serve as a standard organizational scheme for teaching materials.
Activity Evaluation Rubric (Evaluation rubric, 76kb pdf file; Scoring sheet, 80kb file) to use as a scoring guide for developing materials, sharing feedback with peers and reviewing activities submitted for this web site.
Peer Review Process (Download 84kb pdf file ) for reviewing activities, providing feedback to authors and accepting revisions from those individuals prior to publishing their materials on the BioLEARN web site.