The Tech Savvy Teacher: Microorganisms can be fun!

Wouldn't it be fun if you could visit a pond and collect all your own personal collections of microorganisms to study? Well, seeing that it would be very difficult to obtain all of the microorganisms you wanted to study in one visit, there is an internet tool that can help you reach your goal without having to trod out to a pond! Imagine being able to teach your 6th grade students about microorganisms without having to pull out heavy microscopes and huge textbooks. Wouldn't it be so much easier if you could just click on a website and see all of the organisms you needed to study with all of their information on the same website? Well now there is such website! It's called Virtual Pond Dip and you can access it at: http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/index.html.

In using this technology for the following science activity, you will be completing the Utah curriculum requirements for the 6th Grade, Standard 5, Objective 1, parts a, b, and c. Now to do this activity you will need to have access to computers. If there's not enough computers for every student to have their own then you can turn this into a group activity and have each group at a computer. Even if you do have enough computers for each student, it still might be a good idea to pair off the students in groups. This way the kids are interacting more with one another and it also might be more fun for the students to be in a group of friends.

It is recommended that you make a handout before this activity so that you can give it to the students as a guide as they are navigating around the virtual pond. The handout can be an empty outline or graph that has a columns titled as such: name of organism, size, shape, structure, microorganisms requirements (i.e., food, water, air, waste disposal, temperature of environment, reproduction), where to find them, and characteristics common in observed organisms (e.g., color, movement, appendages, shape). For the shape column in the graph you can leave a little box for the students to draw what the microorganism looks like. The students will break up into their groups and will start clicking on the organisms. When they click on the picture of an organism a little fact file will pull up with all the information on that specific organism. At the end of the activity, after the students have clicked on all of the organisms in the Virtual Pond, you can collect their handouts for grading.

This technology that you can incorporate with your lesson can make all the difference in keeping your students attention! It's fun for the students because they get to work in groups, addressing their social needs. Students usually agree that using computers is always more interesting than just reading out of a textbook. Also, when the students classify and process data in a graph, that is a part of your pedagogy element with TPACK.

Technology always makes class more interesting and it will help keep your students attention more focused and on track with the lesson. As you start to use technology more and more, you'll realize just how much extra time you'll have on your hands because it makes your lessons so much easier. I hope you have fun using the Virtual Pond Dip and I hope you continue in your exploration of the technological world!


First, the students have to go to the website: http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/index.html. Then the students will click on the "Virtual Pond Dip" link.
You can have your students read the directions on the main page (shown above) or you can tell them ahead of time that they need to click on the microorganisms to read the fact files.

This photo above is a picture of the main page and the virtual pond with microorganisms that your students will click on to access information.
Once the student clicks on one of the microorganisms, this page will pop up.Here's a closer picture of the fact file that will pop up and it has all the information that the student will need to fill out their handout.



Once the student pulls up the fact file they will copy the information about the microorganism onto their handout (graph, outline etc.).