Thursday, December 6, 2007

Using asterpix

What fun!. I took a video on inflating deer lungs. Before you say yuck you need to understand that students love this stuff and every opportunity has a teachable moment.

So, I have a hunter bring in the intact heart and lung assembly of a deer. We discuss the parts and vessels of the heart, I show the differences between the left and right lungs and also discuss the anatomy of the trachea.

Then I take straws and show how the lungs inflate, discuss the parts of the lungs all the way down to the alveoli (air sacs), and most importantly, how smoking messes that all up! What makes all this better is that this year my students wanted to put it up on you tube. I also have it on my wiki. One of my students took over production duties.

Now I have found Asterpix. I signed up last week, had to get it unblocked (can you hear me groan!), and just now started to play. The video in the post below is my first attempt. How cool to be able to add notes and links to your video. Clicking on the little squares makes the clickable areas. Even though I talked about what smoking does to your lungs (and I personally have seen these in a pathology department internship of a big hospital) it is better for them to see it. I was able to find copyright free pictures on the Internet that I linked to that portion of the video. How cool is that! I need to redo one of my notes - it is too long as well as making the boxes smaller. My current problem - you tube is still blocked!

Now I have my students playing! Students are going to take video of pig dissection and use
Asterpix to make links for various systems that other students have trouble with. I will let you know what they think and how it goes!

1 comment:

  1. The deer lung video was great! Even better that the students are using this; they'll learn so much by finding the sites to link to. Thanks for pointing out such a cool tool and such a great way to use it!

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