now move the arm a tiny bit, now a tiny bit more, now dismember the frankenstein…

I liked the stop motion animation thing and my very first instinct was to dismiss it because it looks time consuming. Playing with the cut outs did take a while but the results were very cute. iStopMotion is very easy to use, really user friendly and fairly self explanatory. I thought maybe I could set animated dissection tasks for students who were too squeamish to chop up the real things in the lab. The poor sensitive types are at a disadvantage in anatomy because the virtual dissection we have to contend with is pretty lame. I liked that idea and hadn’t really thought past it.

Next year my teaching schedule changes quite a bit, I gain a lot of hours in some areas, and lose a lot in others. One of the groups I lose hours with is the BTEC first students. I will see them for just over two hours a week and teach one unit with them – Science In Medicine. This was causing me some issues because a lot of what they do in this unit follows on from the cell, tissue and organ physiology they start with in the other biology units. How could I teach application of anatomy when they hadn’t learned the anatomy yet?

Then I remembered that a set of criteria focuses on the developmental stages of a medicine, from hypothesis to synthesis to testing, clinical trials, marketing and development. This year we used a case study of the development of Viagra as an example of how a drug is developed. Next year, right at the start of the year, I think we’re going to make an/some animation/s and have a screening event. I can afford to give them a good few weeks to achieve this and as a way of introducing them to their new course I think it will be lovely. It’ll get them focused as a team of students (peer support in vocational courses is brilliant) very quickly, it’ll force them to work on their planning and literacy and will give me the chance to get through a lot of key and study skills with them at the same time as them getting through an assignment. I’m quite excited really!

for no real reason

It is a little strange this post, I’ll freely admit it.

Today has been a deeply interesting day, I’ve had my first exposure to the mac, I’ve been introduced to a hundred new things to do with a computer, my head is buzzing with ideas and I need an extra bunch of hours in the day to get all of them done.

So today I’m blogging, on well, none of that.

After a long time staring at a computer this afternoon, I needed a lie down and went to bug my housemate because he has better stereo in his room than I do. He is obsessed with maps, loves them, really truly loves them. I’ve never seen anyone derive as much pleasure from an A to Z as this gentleman.

So much so he subscribes to the blog of strange maps. The one he was looking at today was the Amnesty International map of war. I liked the look of it very much so made him email me the link. further inspection was quite impressive, there’s a wealth of information associated with each map, for the one I’ve mentioned there is a heap of interesting quotes and statements and this would be a great start for a discussion….

While this doesn’t obviously link to science there’s some maps in there that would, in the very least, kick start a conversation or give an interesting perspective. You’ll Never Moonwalk Alone for example. I think with a bit of exploring there might be something in there for a lot of subjects.

In conjuction with that I’m also adding a link to a site I’ve been using recently for display work called Block Posters. It’s a simple little tool where you upload a photo (up to 1 megabyte) choose how big you want it (four landscape pieces of A4 wide or two pieces of portrait A4 wide or however large you need for however big a space you have to fill really) and it outputs it as a paneled poster in PDF that you put together like a jigsaw.

I might make my housemate a giant map. I think he’ll like that.

I’m not sure if that’s the best way to enlarge posters like that, so if you know of a slicker technique, please do tell me!