This week's essential question was, "How has the explosion of web based video changed the teaching and learning landscape?"
With the explosion of web based video, many things can be visualized that could only be described previously. Here is a video showing the surface tension of water in a fascinating example:
Further, advances in video technology can show, including time lapse, pinhole cameras, and so on can show all sorts of processes never before possible. Here is a clip from the outstanding video series "The Private Life of Plants" with Sir David Attenborough.
All of these videos no longer have to be sourced long in advance as part of the school or department library. Rather, they can be found and streamed so quickly that they can be used to demonstrate a phenomenon as it comes up in discussion, or at latest, in the following class (because of course one sometimes wishes to sort through the options to find the most effective videos).
In biology, there are few things as powerful as vivid imagery as seen in photo and video. They can express clearly and memorably very complex ideas. In that way, they are a great advantage in the biology classroom.
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I agree that the motion of plants and animals as perfected by Attenborough are excellent for a biology course. I think for our IB courses, though, the animations that show the processes of protein synthesis, dissolving of crystals, mitosis, and enzyme action are vital, because they accurately protray processes students cannot see in real life.
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ReplyDeleteOh, I totally agree with you, Harvey, that animations are even more useful than traditional online video for biology classes. I just didn't think that "web-based video", at least as we looked at it in class, included animations and that's why I didn't discuss them. But I definitely agree they're at least as, and probably more, useful than video. After all, if a picture's worth a thousand words, what's a movie worth?
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