Building Confidence in Microscopy
Science and Plants for Schools will help develop your confidence in using microscopes as an effective teaching tool to help students gain a deeper understanding of microscopy.
ASE are delighted to partner with Science and Plants in Schools (SAPs) to deliver a series of webinars to develop your confidence and knowledge in using microscopes.
In this session:
- You will build confidence in how a microscope works to help you troubleshoot students’ problems quickly.
- You will find out about specimens that allow students to make progress with microscopy more independently.
- Your students will gain a better appreciation of why microscopes need to be operated in a particular way making them more likely to follow the required steps and so more likely to have success with a microscope.
- Your students will be able to develop a deeper understanding of critical concepts in microscopy, helping them become confident users of microscopes and skilled interpreters of what they see.
This webinar is for anyone wanting to become confident in teaching microscopy to secondary students of any age. We will explore some critical concepts in microscopy and suggest some specimens to use. These will help you teach microscopy lessons that help students become confident and enthusiastic users of microscopes and skilled interpreters of what they see. The specimens suggested are readily available and require minimal preparation giving students much more time to practise using a microscope.
We will look at a dandelion seed’s filamentous parachute-like structure (it’s pappus) to explore how mental models of the 3D structure of objects can be built up from the 2D optical slices seen under a microscope. This will be extended to looking at the leaves of the pondweed Egeria densa, where chloroplasts can be seen zooming around cells. Finally, we will see how studying the leaves of Tradescantia zebrina can help students maintain a sense of scale when progressing from the ‘just visible with the naked eye’ to ‘only visible with a microscope’.
This is the first of 3 microscopy webinars that will link adn build on articles published in ASE's Secondary Science Journal, 'School Science Review' (available to all ASE members)
The following 2 sessions will be:
Staining and getting things thin: Preparing slides for effective teaching. Great for technicians and non-specialists
This session aims to support technicians and teachers (ECTs, trainees and those with limited experience in using microscopes) in slide preparation, allowing them to create their own slides to support their teaching. This will enable students to access a wider range of topics through microscopy, but also will build teacher and technicianonfidence in teaching how to prepare microscope slides.
Taking things further, calibrating and measuring: How to develop these skills for KS4 and 5 students
For those preparing students to use microscopes to a higher level, this session will support teachers in the practical and technical aspects students will need to access. Relevant for ECTs, trainees and those teaching out of specialism, this will also offer breadth of ideas for those teaching post 16 biology.
Cost:
ASE Members
1 webinar £20
ASE member 3 webinars £40
Non-member 1 webinar £40
Non-member 3 webinars £80
Please note, all 3 can be booked to receive the discount, even if different people are attending. To access the membership discount, all attending must be ASE members.