BIOLOGY Exploring Life takes a new approach.

BIOLOGY Exploring Life consists of a:
          textbook
          Web site
          lab program

All are conceived of and designed together — that is, built to work as three companion parts of a whole. The authors first mapped out each chapter of BIOLOGY Exploring Life content and then carefully planned how the media and laboratory experiences could be constructed to complement the textbook for the greatest clarity and richest experience. The illustrations are rendered with all three components in mind, so that students see beautiful illustrations in the printed material that are then brought to life in Online Activities. The complementary designs of the book, Web site, and Lab Manual allow for a seamless user experience — students feel as if they are moving between "three rooms of the same house." References in the book to the media activities and to the Lab Manual include brief descriptions and screen shots so that students and teachers know exactly what to expect when they get there.

In the Teacher's Edition the authors lay out a suggested order for working through a BIOLOGY Exploring Life chapter: engage the students' interest in the chapter's topic with the WebQuest, then have students read each key concept in the text, go online to complete the activities, and end by assigning the Online Chapter Assessment. Another way to describe this is that we expect students will READ about a concept in the book and then go online to DO an activity to reinforce that understanding.

We know that teachers will need to adapt BIOLOGY Exploring Life to fit their own courses and students. The program's structure is flexible enough to accommodate many scenarios and we suggest alternate plans for the most common classroom configurations (block scheduling, media labs that need advance scheduling, etc.). Additionally, teachers may opt to not cover certain concepts or their companion Online Activities and that can easily be done with no loss of continuity. However, in building the Online Activities we assume that the student has read the text chapter to go with that activity. That keeps us from burdening the media activities with too much explanatory text, it allows us to concentrate on the visuals and interactivity, and it anchors the activities to the material covered by the book chapter. In this way, the Online Activities cover the same intellectual ground as the companion text chapter but they tackle it from a slightly different perspective - asking the student to interact with the science in an active way to further their understanding.

Each chapter begins with a WebQuest. These are short (20-25 minute) activities that can be used to jumpstart the chapter and motivate the students' interest in the material to come. WebQuests are really online scavenger hunts. Students are given the necessary background on a topic and are then sent to four or five reputable, external Web sites to gather information to help them complete a brief activity.

Following the WebQuest, students can begin working through the chapter's core activities. There is one Online Activity for every concept in the program. On average, there are five to six concepts per chapter. With 36 BIOLOGY Exploring Life chapters that comes out to approximately 216 activities for the entire program.

For selected concepts, optional activities called Closer Looks that are more in-depth on a given topic than the textbook. If a teacher opts to skip a Closer Look, there is no continuity loss. As a development team, we selected concepts appropriate for a Closer Look when an obvious, deeper level of content exists that some teachers teach and some do not. Glycolysis, the Krebs Cycle, and electron transport are all examples of Closer Looks in the cellular respiration chapter.

In still other places where the authors determine that the student could benefit from a media experience with content not covered by the textbook, we build special feature activities. These feature activities come in different content "flavors": Careers, History of Science, Science, Technology & Society. Since this material all resides online it can be regularly updated to remain fresh and topical.

We all have those times when the server is down or just not working — for those "bad technology" days, the BIOLOGY Exploring Life program will come with a backup CD-ROM containing all the Online Activities, Lab Online Companions, as well as access to the text narrative. The Online Activities (one for each concept in the book) do not rely on external Web site links and can therefore be captured on a CD-ROM. The WebQuests and Features, which do depend on external links, are not included on the BIOLOGY Exploring Life CD-ROM.

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