Teaching Scientific Inquiry  

People and Discoveries is a PBS-sponsored websites with information on 120 entries about 20th-century scientists and their stories.

Action Bioscience has links to a large number of articles dealing with biology topics.

Here are some links that might be useful for you and your students:

The Mannahatta Project created maps of what the environment of Manhattan looked like when Henry Hudson arrived in 1609.  Now that project has been broadened to the five boroughs and renamed the Welikia Project.  This is a nice site for linking Scientific Inquiry and Discover New York.

SCIENTIFIC NOTATION
The notion of Deep Time is an ideal place to introduce Scientific Notation!  ex.  I show the students this youtube video to orient them to the concept of the powers of 10 and scientific notation.
http://www.nyu.edu/pages/mathmol/textbook/scinot.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

PROBABILITY
Mendel's pea experiments and Heredity provide an ideal time to review probability via Punnett Squares.  ex.  As part of homework, students create and bring to class their own Punnett squares for dominant and recessive traits, including a (ratio of offspring-traits) question.  Students switch papers with their neighbors and answer the question.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punnett_square

COMBINATORICS, SQUARING, CUBING
When covering DNA there are a variety of fun ways to involve quantitative skills to help students appreciate that the wide variety of genetic variation has concrete roots in simple math and combinations of basic building blocks.  For example, the question:  Given that there are four potential bases in DNA (ATGC) how many possible codon groups can there be?  There are three bases per codon.
Answer:  4x4x4 = 64 potential codons!
Explanation:  for the first base in the codon you choose any one of 4 bases (4x).  The second base in the codon is any one of the four bases (x4).  The third base which completes the codon is any one of the 4 bases (x4)
http://library.thinkquest.org/19037/ebasics.html
Ex.  Question:  There are 20 Amino Acids which make up proteins.  How many potential proteins can we make if we can use the amino acids in any order and in any number?
Answer:  INFINITY
Explanation:  Students might try to use the same method as before, 20x20x20x20...etc.  BUT, This is a trick question!!!  In an ideal world where proteins could be infinitely big, the number of combinations could be infinite!
http://class.fst.ohio-state.edu/FST822/lecturesab/AAcids.htm

Clark Lindgren, a professor of biology at Grinnell College, has written a good article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (April 18,2010) on "Teaching Matters: Turning the Teaching of Sciences Upside Down."

The NIH has posted an article on its website dealing with changes in science education.

NSDL, the National Science Digital Library, is a massive resource with links to information on all sciences and at all educational levels.

On the Gulf oil spill map, you can explore the map you see with the link by clicking the things you want to see on the navigation bar on the left, and you can see it displayed over different types of maps by clicking the tabs to the upper right of the map.  Above the map is a link to a ‘time line’ that has an animated version.
 
Here are two Haiti related maps:
http://www.arcgis.com/home/group.html?owner=esri_event&title=Haiti%20Earthquake

http://www.arcgis.com/home/group.html?owner=esri_event&title=Haiti%20Earthquake
 
You might also find this of interest: http://imapinvasives.org/. It’s quite an interesting site and you can go to maps and data and create interesting queries.

Remember the short lectures that Charles Livermore mentioned at one of our meetings?  I’d said we’d has some presentations of the sort at the last New York State GIS Association meeting I went to. Here is a link that describes a bit of the idea: http://userfirstweb.com/328/successful-ignite-presentations/
 
The science songs I use seem to be taken off the web, but here is another site which might be useful for some people: http://www.songsforteaching.com/sciencesongs.htm