The Wired Campus has an interesting article on nursing students at Tacoma Community College. In John Miller's class, the students practice interviewing patients in Second Life. This sort of activity, of course, is one that could be carried out in a classroom, but I can see the advantages of having ...
For many years, I had my biotech students do projects where each group of students would analyze their own data, in addition to all of the data gathered by the class. I would draw a table on the white board and each group would enter their data. At the end ...
The University of Virginia does. They survey students every year to find out what they're up to tech-wise. Apparently 99% of their first year students own computers. And, a large majority of those computers are laptops (3058/3113 or 98%). And, what's on those laptops? Let's have a drum roll: 60% ...
Cofactor Genomics is offering to sequence a genome for a few classes for free using Next Generation DNA Sequencing technology (either Illumina GA or via AB SOLiD). Quoting from their site: Cofactor will ask course organizers for a 1 page description of how their ~700Mb sequencing project could be used ...
If you're a high school or college student with an interest in biomedical sciences, or healthcare careers, the NIH has set up an electronic mentoring program to help you find a guide. The mentoring happens via email and students must be 16 yrs or older. The site claims the mentors ...
One of the newfangled ideas that's popped up in education in the past few years has been notion that more interactive methods of teaching will lead to better results. There's an appealing logic to this notion. Figure 1. A traditional lecture may not be the ideal way to transfer information ...
I love using molecular structures as teaching tools. They're beautiful, they're easy to obtain, and working with them is fun. But working with molecular structures as an educators can present some challenges. The biggest problem is that many of the articles describing the structures are not accessible, particularly those published ...
Congratulations to George Cachianes (who I've written about before), his amazing students from Abraham Lincoln High School, and collaborators at UCSF! These students, from a public high school no less, placed in the top 6 finalists, along with only one other US team. The other top teams were: Peking University ...
A few weeks ago I heard a story from a friend in Oklahoma. She works with high school science teachers, helping them learn how to add biotechnology to their courses. One teacher, in particular, has taken the new science activities to heart. Her students did so well, they won a ...
Teachertube looks and works much like YouTube, but you're much less likely to run across videos that Not Safe For the Classroom. All of these videos are made by students and teachers. According to the Dallas News, there are 54,000 videos on the site already and 800,00 visitors every day ...
On-line courses were a still a new phenomenon when I was teaching full-time. Our school was pretty gung-ho about on-line education but many instructors were skeptical, some were still lamenting having to learn how to use a computer and losing the services that used to be provided by departmental secretaries ...
This quarter, I'm using a wiki with my bioinformatics class and posting sometimes about the things that I learn. Two things I've been experimenting with are: Setting up pages for individual students so they can take notes while they're working. Embedding a Google form into one of my wiki pages ...
Last fall, this blog got nominated for the 2008 Edublog awards, in the Best resource sharing category. I was a bit distracted in December so this information came and passed without any acknowledgement. Now, I would like to thank whoever nominated Discovering Biology in a Digital World. I'm especially thankful ...
About mid-morning, my 16yr old daughter called me from school and asked me to help her get an interview transcript that was on her computer. Four years ago, when my older daughter was in high school, I would have printed that document and driven to the school to deliver it ...
I just love this title! It's nerdy and cute, all at the same time. I read about this in www.researchblogging.org and had to check out the paper and blog write up from The Beagle Project (BTW: some of you may be interested in knowing that The Beagle Project is not ...
It's funny but even though I work with data on a regular basis, I can't always predict the best way to manage data until I have my own data to manage. My classroom wiki site is no exception. Now, that I've been seriously using a wiki with my class, I've ...
