Education & Outreach

Winning entries of the August 2015 “Teaching Tools Proposal” competition

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We had many excellent proposals submitted for the second round of the the “Teaching Tools in Plant Biology” competition, from which we selected two for further development. The competition has one additional submission deadline December 31 2015, and full details can be found at https://blog.aspb.org/2015/03/02/share-your-enthusiasm-teaching-tools-submission-competition/. Here are the two winning proposals and their authors from … Read more

Plants in the News, 2 October: Cannabis, entry point to plant science or plant-that-must-not-be-named?

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  This week, Nature published an excellent Outlook on cannabis science and policy. How do you feel about cannabis as a topic of discussion in the classroom? I’ve tended to shy away from it – in my experience the benefit of increased interest can be outweighed by the distraction of giggles and jokes. However, this … Read more

Countdown to The Martian

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I’m excited to see so many people writing about The Botanist .. er The Martian, including: Alun Salt in AoB Blog (Incidently, Alun wrote about the book back in 2014, inspring me and others to read it), Adam Rutherford in the Guardian, and Chris Martine in HuffPost (who, very coolly, just named a new species … Read more

Plants in the News, Sept 25 2015: Wheat

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In honor of the International Wheat Conference 2015 (#IWC2015), this week’s Plants in the News focuses on wheat. For an overview, one of the best sources of information about wheat science is Peter Shewry’s Darwin Review, simply titled “Wheat”; see also an excellent perspective in the Economist. Global wheat production Wheat provides 20% of global … Read more

“From atom to planet in 90 seconds”: my experience and tips from the ‘Discover Plant Science’ micro-film

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Mary Williams spoke about the potential for plant science outreach films in a recent blog post. In this blog post, I’ll share my own experience in commissioning a 90-second film for www.intobiology.org.uk. “For biology, it has to be visual,” Katie said. A 17 year old who’d left behind her old friends to transfer to a … Read more