Journal Entry Week 11

This week in biology we used Study Island to study for our unit three exam, which was helpful but i still didn't do as well as I had hoped. We have our presidential press conference next week and I'm a little nervous but I think our group will do fine.  I haven't really grasped why we are doing this project but I'm sure it will teach us a very valuable life lesson, like every project we do. We are vastly approaching our last six weeks of school, I can't decide if that is a good thing or not, because that means it is getting closer to E.O.C. week. This week was more laid back because almost my whole class went to Merle Fest which meant that no one wanted to do anything. But we did learn some about the new unit we will be starting next week and it is suppose to be the most interesting unit of the semester. Not that I'm too excited about it though because we have to dissect animals and I don't do very good with intestines.

Journal Entry Week 10

This week in biology we had a short week but we still managed to learn lots of stuff. The most interesting thing that we are learning about now is 2045, I find it hard to believe that we will be so technologically savvy that we will be able to physically move our conscious into avatars or robots. In a way I think it's really interesting and seems fun to think about being a robot but then again why would you want to be a robot? All I have ever seen or ever been taught is that robots have no feelings no hearts or anything. Who knows what will happen with these robots though, i guess we will be finding out soon though because their project is already 85% complete. I think the Transcendence movie will be similar to 2045 in some ways like having the conscious moved into another technological device, but I also think they will contrast because in the movie i think that they are only put into computers but in 2045 you are able to move around. I also think that they will be similar in that they will take over the world, and that only the rich people will get them. Maybe eventually you will be able to switch avatars and that's how the "less fortunate" people will be able to use one, but i will never know until i experience it.

Journal Entry Week 9

This week in biology we have studied DNA fingerprinting and got to do an activity online using DNA fingerprinting, it was pretty interesting because it took us through all the steps needed to give a DNA fingerprint. I am considering forensics as a career path so experiencing a simulation of what would happen was very helpful. We also had our midterm this week, everyone has been stressing all week about it but I did better than I had thought I would. We are getting ready to get into all the crazy biotechnology things which cause lots of controversy and debates. In a video we watched it explained how in the future we will be able to put our personalities and brains into avatars and live "forever" that was pretty creepy. It has been a fun and interesting week.

Journal Entry Week 8

This week in biology everyone presented their projects on diseases directed towards fourth graders. I thought that Luke and I did a pretty good job with this but it was very difficult to stay under the ten minute time limit, I'm not sure that anyone actually stayed under it. Our projects did teach a very important lesson though, the reading level that is most easily comprehended around the would is fourth grade reading level. So that would be the target audience you want to talk to, even though it is difficult to do that I think it taught us that things won't come easy and that time management is key because fourth graders do not have long attention spans which means that everyone on that reading level is most likely at the same place. Also in biology we are working with figuring out off springs blood types with the blood types of the parents that are given, and we have to figure out who the dad could not be using blood types because it won't show you who the dad is. It was difficult to understand at first but it is getting much easier, just as the punnett squares and x linked things are becoming easier to understand.