Passport to Travel the Human Body with Google Sites

From www. Schooastic.com

Remember The Magic School Bus and Ms. Frizzle? Wouldn’t it be great if we could shrink ourselves down and travel through the human body? Well if you are a student at North Richland Middle School, you can. Kind of.

Seventh grade Science teachers Karen Sanchez and Lindsey Cato have created a PBL called “Passport Travels Through the Human Body”. Students must harness the power of nanotechnology to shrink themselves down to the size of a cell and travel through the human body systems. Their mission is to determine what effect an unknown antibiotic, resistant, disease is having on millions of people and find a cure. In order to do so, students will have to travel through each level of organization to learn more about how the system works. Before advancing to the next level of organization students must have their human body passports stamped. 

Students in Mrs. Sanchez and Ms. Cato's classes working through the PBL.

What a creative way to learn about Science. Since Karen and Lindsey are nationally certified STEM teachers at North Richland MS, developing project-based learning activities is not new to them. The pair of 7th grade Science teachers are always on the look-out for new and inventive ways to facilitate student discovery. For this project the teachers wanted students to be able to work at their own pace and through the body systems in any order they liked. In order for this to happen, they had to develop a vehicle for sharing information that was not sequential and could be individually paced. The best solution (vehicle) for the activity was a website and since G Suite provides access to Google Sites it seemed to be the logical choice. Karen had never created a Google Site but she was familiar with Google tools and other products in G Suite. She found Google Sites to be very user-friendly and creating a professional looking website was not difficult at all.

The entire PBL is facilitated by the website. On the site, there is a section for each body system. Within the sections, students will find items like vetted hyperlinks, key questions, videos, digital and paper activities, animated labs and class labs. Each component presents a clue to curing the disease. Students document their discoveries in their Science journals and body systems passport books (created by Lindsey).

What an exciting way to learn about Science! Way to go Mrs. Sanchez and Ms. Cato. Here’s to hoping your students find a cure!

Curious to know more about this activity? Visit their Google Site at https://sites.google.com/g.birdvilleschools.net/human-body-pbl/home

From: The Human Body PBL Site