APPLICATIONS

By Katie Williams, NCSA Science Writer -- Early this fall, biology teachers from across the U.S. met in Urbana, IL, and at the Alliance Center for Collaboration, Education, Science, and Software (ACCESS) in Arlington, VA, to explore and expand their knowledge of a new classroom technology—Biology Student Workbench. Originally created at NCSA to meet the needs of professional biologists, Biology Workbench was adapted for use in high schools and junior high schools by NCSA's Education, Outreach and Training (EOT) division. At the recent workshop, nearly 50 participants witnessed the power and the potential of the workbench as a teaching tool. Biology Workbench is a Web-based tool that allows biologists and biology students to search many protein and nucleic acid sequence databases through a simple Web interface. It allows students to conduct bioinformatics research in the classroom, an activity which was not possible only a few years ago because of the time and computing power needed to search databases located at sites all over the world. In addition, classroom teachers create their own science curricula that use the Biology Student Workbench as a tool to teach genetics, evolution, and other biological sciences. At the workshop, participants in Urbana were able to interact over the Access Grid with their colleagues in Arlington, contributing and gaining information and learning about uses for the Biology Student Workbench. Paul Lock of Urbana High School, Sister Susan Cronin and Charlotte Rappe Zales of Immaculata College, Immaculata, PA, Scott Cooper of the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, and Peggy Maher of Austin Community College, Austin, Texas, all demonstrated the projects and tutorials they have created and used in their classrooms. Cronin, an assistant professor of biology, and Zales, an associate professor of education, talked about the five-week workshop they held last summer for high school seniors ( see www.immaculata.edu/bioinformatics ). Although both Cronin and Zales have used the Biology Workbench for nearly a year and a half, both agreed the workshop was good use of their time, encouraging teachers to develop new ideas for using the workbench and to share ideas with other teachers. “The workshop really allowed us to further our understanding of Biology Workbench,” Zales said. “We learned new tricks from all the hands-on activities that the workshop had us do.” Zales and Cronin were even inspired to begin a new project after learning about the many possibilities offered by Biology Workbench. They will soon use the Biology Workbench to conduct an investigation, which will look at organisms and create a dichotomist tree of the evolution of these organisms. Cronin said they hope to use the new project with their students, and when it is finished, they hope it will be used as a tutorial to teach others how to use the workbench. It wasn’t just the hands-on portion of the workshop that encouraged the participants to learn. They also gained a lot of knowledge simply from interacting with each other. “Interacting with other colleagues was very stimulating,” Zales said. “Hearing new ideas about the Biology Workbench was food for thought.” Both Cronin and Zales agreed that the small group interactions that were part of the workshop resulted in quality communications among colleagues, including both high school and college-level educators. Zales said the small groups created a comfort level among the group members that encouraged them to openly share ideas and problems. Cronin and Zales both plan to further their knowledge and uses of Biology Student Workbench. This year alone, Cronin plans to have every student that enters the biology program at Immaculata College--majors and non-majors alike--gain some knowledge of and experience with the workbench. For more information about Biology Workbench, see http://workbench.sdsc.edu --Biology Workbench for use in undergraduate and high school education is funded by the National Science Foundation (see http://bioweb.ncsa.uiuc.edu/educwb/project.html), and the U.S. Department of Education (see http://www.eot.org/edgrid/ct_btw.shtml). ---------- Story re-printed courtesy of NCSA’s Access Online ----------