BILL

Biology Interactive Learning Log

Why An Interactive Notebook?

You will also be spending a lot of time with something called BILL. In our AP Biology course, students keep an interactive student notebook (ISN), where you will document your learning and interact with course content. You will also take notes for the videos you watch each day in this notebook. Our ISN is called a Biology Interactive Learning Log, and we will use it daily.

On any given day, we could be doing one of the following things in our notebook:

• Solving practice problems
• Answering practice multiple choice exam questions
• Interpreting graphs or diagrams
• Building models and answering questions about them
• Creating graphic organizers or concept maps about biology content
• Writing practice free response questions

The activities we will do in our BILL are meant to allow you to interact with the biology content of our class in various ways. The more ways you interact with biological concepts, the more likely you will be able to apply them to new situations, whether it is a test or a lab investigation.

You will be asked to color code, highlight, ask questions and interact with your notebook on a daily basis, so it is important to bring it to class each day and to keep up with it every day. I also keep a BILL to help you understand where to place items, but understand that it is a skeleton and does not have the assignments completed. You are always welcome to look at my notebook to see where items should be placed. Keeping the items inside in order is important in helping you to organize your learning and keeping the flow of course content in a logical order. This will become even more important when you are reviewing for the AP exam in the spring.

It is important that you keep up with your BILL on a daily basis, since this learning log is the physical representation of your processing of course concepts. We will use this notebook in class on a daily basis to catalog all the learning that you do both inside and outside the classroom, so it is important that you have it with them each day. Below are some collages that illustrate a little bit about what a BILL is, and how it might appear.