Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

With more than 250,000 scientific photos on hand, CalPhotos is a potentially incredible resource for students working on a project and in need of some visual elements. The site contains photos submitted by a variety of people and organizations in the scientific community. You can perform focused searches or random searches. In either case, your efforts are often rewarded with a handful of wonderful images. The internal search engine also has various levels of sophistication, so you could use scientific terms or specific geographical locations to narrow your search. But that’s not all.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Ever wonder what it would be like to live the life of a wolf in the wild? Well, the free-to-play WolfQuest is about as close as you’re going to get. WolfQuest puts you in the role of a lonely wolf in the wild with two things on your mind: survive and start a family. Along the way you’ll learn about how a wolf perceives the world around him with “scent view” which shows trails of recent creatures and other territorial markers. You can hunt everything from bull elk down to hares (although I was never able to get my teeth around a hare — those little guys are fast!).

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BY: REBECCAH HAINES

Alright, so, maybe my title is a touch misleading. I certainly don’t mean to say that you can actually perform heart surgery without years and years of training, but with Open Heart you and your students can try it out virtually, and learn a lot about how the heart works in the process.

One of the main reasons I adore this website is that it is chock full of interactive components to help teach about the structure and function of the heart. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

Nothing creeps me out like eye trauma. The very idea gives me the shakes. Being a humble English major, I was shocked to find out that some science-minded students actually have to dissect eyeballs. I personally have nothing against dissecting animals in class, but I’m having a hard time even writing about other people slicing open an eye. That’s why I’m relieved, kinda, that there’s a virtual eye dissection app online. (more…)

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Sometimes I struggle to find quality educational multimedia elements. They either aren’t well made or don’t have much tangible educational value. This, however, is not the case over at nature.com in their multimedia section. You’ll find video presentations here on everything from self repairing rubber molecules to a study of honey bee genomes. (more…)

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

When I went over genetics in my biology class in high school, it was Punnett Squares, a bit of Darwin, and not much else. Fast forward more than a decade and the field of genetics has grown exponentially. Things like the human genome project have furthered our understanding of the building blocks of all life in amazing ways. But how do we take all this new knowledge and get it out of the professional scientist’s hands and into the classroom? One answer is the website Scitable, a giant repository of all things genetics. (more…)

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

We had the LEARN NC staff retreat last week, and one of the subjects that received a good deal of discussion was efforts to promote STEM education resources. Seeing as we’re not scientists here at Instructify, the best way we can promote STEM is to shine our light on groups of scientists who are fighting the good fight. In that spirit, we direct your attention to BioED Online, offered by the good folks at Baylor University, is an online repository of lesson plans, teaching resources, full blown presentations and interactive contests for students.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origins of Species 150 years ago, the Galapagos Islands have always been of particular interests to scientist and environmentalist alike. Back then the diversity of species as they evolved in relative isolation formed some of the basis of Darwin’s ground-breaking and controversial scientific hypothesis.

Fast forward a century and a half and a new debate surrounds the famous archipelago and its renowned environmental treasure. Like the rest of the planet, the Galapagos is trying to deal with an ever increasing human population in relationship to a finite amount of resources locally available; it’s a delicate balancing act in an area with a fragile ecosystem.

In order to document and present the challenges the islands face, a website call Living Galapagos has been created with a wealth of information about the current situation in the Galapagos. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

It’s that time of year again when lazy bloggers rehash old material under the guise of “Best of” lists rather than come up with new stuff. Instructify is no exception.

Below are the top 10 Instructify posts of 2009. The rankings were determined via a combination of Google Analytics, retweets, and the capricious and arbitrary whims of the editor.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Do you remember the penguin renaissance of 2005-2007 when every movie was about antarctic fowl going surfing, doing a dance, or marching around? I think I found myself rooting for the leopard seal after a while.

Penguins’ overexposure has subsided since then, as has my irritation. That means I’m finally in a good enough frame of mind to look at Penguinscience, a science-education site that introduces students to Adelie penguins.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Do you like birds? Perhaps more to the point, are you teaching a unit on birds? If so, make All About Birds the next site you visit. Created by the Cornell Lab or Ornithology, All About Birds strives to be “the Web’s best and most comprehensive resource for North American birds, bird watching, and bird conservation — accessible to everyone for free.” It’s a lofty goal, but if this site didn’t achieve it, I can’t imagine anyone else has.

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BY BILL FERRIS

“Birdies are friends!” That’s what my two-year-old son says. He even thinks an owl lives in the ceiling fan in his room. If that’s not a ringing endorsement for the avian kind, I don’t know what is. He especially loves the “birdie book,” a book from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology that plays the songs of 250 birds.

Given how much he likes the book, I’m a little nervous about showing him another great bird resource from Cornell. Round Robin: The Cornell Blog of Ornithology has a lot of fascinating bird content, including video, audio, and images that my little boy will probably want to look at all day long. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

Let’s get the disclaimer out of the way — Get High Now has to do with optical and audio illusions. It in no way advocates getting hepped up on goofball. To quote from the site itself:

“Get High Now is an illustrated, mind-blowing magic carpet ride of more than 175 ways to alter human perception and consciousness—without drugs or alcohol” (emphasis added lest you think Instructify is promoting anything inappropriate for a school audience).

See? We’re still a family site, more or less.

Anyway, the Get High Now website is a companion to a book of the same name. Both catalog stunning illusions of sight and sound, explaining the biology and neuroscience that makes them possible.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Win a trip to Antarctica. Yes, that’s supposed to be an incentive.

PolarTREC will send 36 teachers to the Arctic or Antarctic to work with polar research teams. They’ll take a mittens-on approach to learning about atmospheric chemistry, biology, history and culture in the coldest places on earth. (more…)

BY REBECCAH HAINES

If you know anything about biology, you know about the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. They are involved in a lot of important biological research, and they also make the results of this research available to the public in many ways. One way is through the Biointeractive Virtual Labs.

As the name of the site suggests, you can access five virtual, interactive labs.  The topics of the labs include transgenic fruit flies, immunology, bacterial identification, cardiology, and neurophysiology. I think you’ll agree with me in that I believe this site to be most appropriate for high school biology, and maybe even best for AP biology.  These virtual labs will introduce your students to some very advanced biological techniques.

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