Video: Visual cliff experiment

This is a short clip illustrating the visual cliff experiment, suitable for section 8.5 making sense of what we see:

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:

Video: Nitrogen cycle

Here is a short 3 minute video revising the nitrogen cycle. I am learning to use Camtasia at the moment so there are some glitches (if you make it full screen you lose resolution, plus I haven’t edited out the odd error here and there). The video concentrate sonly on the nitrogen cycle and is useful for IGCSE, GCSE and AS level revision.

Videos on Biomolecules from www.edbiol.co.uk

Met up with @edbiol on twitter and checked his website out (WAIT…don’t go to his site yet, finish reading my blog first!!). Firstly, I like the website, very cool and looks much better than mine!!! I can see another weekend lost playing around with wordpress themes again.

He has posted on his site 4 videos covering lipids, carbohydrates, proteins and nucleic acids. They are similar to mine in that I think they are screencasts of PowerPoint presentations. The videos are basically key bullet points and diagrams. The sound quality is good, he has a soft northern irish accent and has a much better voice than me for videos. On some diagrams it can be difficult for a student to follow the audio because he does not use the pointer to direct attention to the section of diagram under discussion but other than that I think they would be very good revision tools for students. I particularly envision them being popped onto iPods for viewing and listening to. I don’t think it matters what exam board you do here as it is all standard biological molecules stuff.

Hopefully he will add more and I have placed a link to his site in my blogroll. Crumbs…that reminds me I should add the Mark Rothery site too!

Any way I have embedded 2 of the videos below plus a link to his site at the end so you can watch the others.

Carbohydrates (16 minutes 30 secs..ish)

Carbohydrates from neal mcknight on Vimeo.

Lipids (8 minutes 32 seconds)

EdBiol from Digmo on Vimeo.

The other two videos are on proteins and nucleic acids and can be found on Neils website:
www.edbiol.co.uk (NOW you can go visit it if you want!!)