Twig Science Films – free science videos

I was approached by Twig to look at their site and review it. Now I rarely do this as there is so much out there and I don’t want this blog to become another huge link list, in other words you have to be good for me to recommend you! Anyway, I had a peruse of the site and was really impressed and strongly recommend you look the site up (I am not getting any affiliate payments for this by the way). It also appears I am not the only one who rates the site as they have won the BETT Award for 2012 in the Secondary Digital Content category.

Check out the What is Twig video..gives a good idea of what you are getting. More videos are available upon a very affordable subscription.

Twig Science Films

Interactive powerpoint presentation: brain structure and function

This powerpoint presentation is designed for A2 Biology and matches the Edexcel course as it includes sections on brain imaging technology. However it is fairly standard so would suit all exam boards. A key feature of this presentation is that it has interactive drag and drop exercises so gets the students up to the white board. It also has lots of links to relevant short videos and websites. It also includes a mini quiz to help revise the structure and functions of parts of the brain, students can just write their one word answers on scrap paper. I have also included worksheets to fill in during the presentation and some notes pages in case students are absent etc. Note: if you want to incorporate the drag and drop exercises into your own presentation you will have to modify this presentation and add your own stuff to it, the slides will not copy and paste into other presentations without the drag and drop macro.

PRESENTATION: brain-drag-and-drop

WORKSHEETS: The brain

NOTE SHEETS: Structure and function of the brain notes

Inner life of the cell: narrated and annotated version

This is the longer 8 minute version with narration. Again not wide screen as the image stays sharper in this version. Slow to load so give time for buffering. If these links are lost then the main site Biovisions has download versions (but small screen only as far as I can work out).

Inspirational video: Inner life of the cell

I can´t believe I haven´t put a link to this video before. It is from Harvard university and it is truly amazing. The version below is for the three minute version. Although it isn´t wide screen this version seems to be the sharpest and shows up best on white boards. I like to use this as an introduction to cell biology for my students and then tell them that at the end they will understand much of what they see. Then at the end I show them the 8 minute annotated and narrated version. It is my favourite video and there is a TED talk by its creator as well, for anyone wanted to know more of how and why it was made. Give it time to buffer before showing, can take awhile. Enjoy:

IGCSE Biology: Plant reproduction resources

Hi again.

I tried a little experiment and designed a module that students worked through an interactive PowerPoint presentation and filled in a booklet of worksheets. The presentation was made available via the VLE initially and set up as a PowerPoint Show and set in kiosk mode so that they could only work through it in sequence.

The students were all quite excited by this approach and were keen to get started. Unfortunately our internet connection at school had problems and was quite slow, and as the presentation is quite a big one, it took ages to download. In the end they just saved the actual PowerPoint presentation to their memory sticks and launched it from there. The module took at least a week of lessons and some homework. I also ran through a simpler “teacher version” in review lessons as well.

I am not totally sure how well this module went. There were a few technical difficulties which took the shine off it a little. For example the hyperlinks worked fine on my computer but mysteriously chose not to work on other computers. Equally not all computers prompted to activate the macros automatically so I had to give instructions how to do this (see below for the instruction I placed on the VLE for the students). For some reason the brighter kids seemed more disparaging than those less academically able (and I though it would be the other way round). One student, who is lovely and has ADHD (but has it under control) really liked the module and he seemed much happier learning this way at his own speed and being able to review things at will.

I am still not entirely sure of the efficacy of this mode of delivery (and I had to resist the temptation to then teach it again more formally) and of course I did intermingle the lessons with short practical activities eg. dissecting a bean seed (‘cos we know how to really rock it in Biology!!). One little error is that I forgot to add the nectary to the flower diagrams (I will get round to redoing it eventually) but the kids loved spotting the mistake so that wasn’t a total disaster.

The PowerPoint presentation for students has information slides, multiple choice questions (which have macros to show the answers and are formative), some audio links for additional explanation and links to short video clips. The clips do need to checking before each session as they can disappear from time to time.There is also a “Homepage” that hyperlinks to sections throughout the presentation and the clickbiology icon links on each page links back to this homepage.

I have added the student self-study presentation and the worksheet below. The teachers presentation is also added. If you try it out, let me know what you think.

Here are the instruction I gave to the students:

Plant reproduction

Click on the PowerPoint show. It should ask you to enable macros, if so click yes. If it does not prompt you to enable macros then download the PowerPoint presentation, once it is loaded click on Tools then Macro, next click on Security. Click on the medium setting, the presentation, close it down, re-open it and it should then prompt you to enable Macros. If this does not work then repeat the steps but click on the save low security setting.

NOTE: These are over 7mb so will take some time, it may speed things up in future if you save the presentation to a memory stick rather than downloading each time

Work through each section of the presentation. Ensure that you read each slide carefully, watch any video or listen to audio explanations and do the written activities in your booklets.

Links to the presentation resources are here:

student self-study presentation:

plant-reproduction

Worksheets:

plant_reproduction

teacher presentation:

plant-reproduction-teacher