Interactive Notebooking

Your student 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 they document their learning and interact with course content.  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 
  
• Interpreting graphs or diagrams
• 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 your student to interact with the biology content of our class in various ways.  The more ways your student interacts with biological concepts, the more likely he or she is to be able to apply them to new situations, whether it is a test or a lab investigation.  

This document is a continued work in progress and will result in a homemade study guide for the course by year's end.  It is important that your student keep up with their BILL on a daily basis, since this learning log is the physical representation of their processing of course concepts.  We will use this notebook in class on a daily basis to catalog all the learning that students do both inside and outside the classroom, so it is important that they have it with them each day.  Below is a collage that illustrates a little bit about what a BILL is, and how it might appear.