Instructify

January 15, 2009

You never want to set a classroom full of 8th graders with scalpels loose on a long-dead and well-preserved frog without some guidance. Froguts.com offers a paid service, but their free demos are a great tool to introduce the basics of dissection before pulling out the wax trays and pins. When they access the site (click on demos in the top right corner, and then begin on the page that comes up), students can manipulate a virtual scalpel, pins, and scissors to start the process. The demo leads users through the dissection from pinning the frog to identifying its organs.

The paid version offers much, much more, but for a simple getting-started tutorial, or pre-dissection preparation, the Froguts demo is great. It can also be used for those conscientious objectors you may have in your classroom, as an alternative to the actual dissection. In addition to the frog demo, they also have samples of their squid and owl pellet dissection programs.

There are a few other resources that can be helpful in preparing for a dissection lab. McGraw-Hill also offers a virtual dissection, and while it has some great basic video tutorials, its interactivity is limited and not individually paced, and the animations are not as realistic as Froguts. The classic Netfrog and Whole Frog projects still live on the web as well, but show their age. -GRETCHEN SCHAEFER

Froguts

McGraw Hill Virtual Frog

Netfrog (University of Virginia)

Whole Frog (US Department of Energy)