Health & Bioscience with e's » General

Virtual lab experiments available

Rose Heaney — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:30:46 +0000

We have been exploring two different platforms for virtual lab experiments, namely Second Life and Flash.

Flash seems to be winning out as the preferred option for students but I won’t pre-empt the results of the detailed study currently being carried out by Dr Stephanie Henderson-Begg and Paula Booth. To see the Flash version of PCR and electrophoresis experiments go to:

http://www.uelconnect.org.uk/hab/pcr_lab/

To see the same experiments in Second Life, create an avatar (if you haven’t already got one) from http://www.uelconnect.org.uk/secondlife/register4sl.php and go to UEL HABitat as per info on this post, enter the lab and follow the instructions.

An allied aspect of the virtual lab activities is to make what we do available to a wider audience and so contribute to other open resources in similar areas. Both the Flash and SL experiments are now publicly available as is another Flash resource on general lab skills developed via LTARG funding earlier in the year:

http://www.uelconnect.org.uk/hab/

A bid for external funding to enable the development of more ‘open source’ experiments of this kind is in progress.

Turning Point clickers, zappers …

Rose Heaney — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:32:43 +0000

…..aka PRS, voting systems

As some of you know, we’ve recently taken delivery of quite a few of these and several staff are using them actively. Just a couple of pointers to avoid disappointment or embarrassment in front of a class:

1. Check before you use a lecture room whether Turning Point is installed – the University menu install option does not work on quite a few machines, so either use the supplied CD (inside the boxes) or install it from our supplier’s website:

https://www.leapfrogavit.com/support/index.php?_m=downloads&_a=viewdownload&downloaditemid=11&nav=0,8

N.B. You will need to register to do this but your details will not be passed on.

2. Some features such as 3D charts are only available with the latest version of Turning Point and this may well not be the version installed in the lecture room. So either check in advance or avoid using 3D charts – the standard charts are just as effective.

For useful tips on using clickers see these web resources provided by Southampton University:

http://www.soton.ac.uk/lateu/resources_and_links/zappers/index.html

For further help, please contact your local LTA.

Which video player?

Rose Heaney — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:57:32 +0000

Playing back audios and videos can be a challenge at times when one format works on one computer and not the next as we have discovered through the development of multimedia resources for students.

This is where VLC Media Player comes into the picture. It is available for download for both Windows and Mac OS and the best thing is that it’s free! Although It’s not the playback solution to all, it is capable of reading and playing most audio and video formats out there. See link below to download a copy.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

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