Tips from a teacher…
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Thanks to Rod Blitvich for permission to use this email which he posted to the echalk email list.
Do you have information you would like to share with other teachers? Let us know via the comments button at the bottom of this post. |
Hi Echalkers
I am working on my new Human Biology Course Of Study and was looking for resources.
Last night I got onto the iTunes store
(You need iTunes installed on your computer – download iTunes here)
- Quicklinks on the right
- Power Search
- Under “All Results” select “iTunes U”
- Then type a few words in the “Description” column eg Biotechnology or Fertility or Reproductive Technology etc.
- Then check out the resulting finds
Some will be university lectures, may be audio only, some will be full featured short movies. After checking through you will find some useful stuff.
It is all FREE!!!
It seems many US Universities (and now some Australian unis) have put heaps of their lectures/course material onto iTunes U for free.
As a Human Biol teacher struggling to find new stuff for my new Course of Study, in the short time I spent looking I found and downloaded the following very useful movies/podcasts (see below)
“DNA”
Cassiopeia Project, Biology
3:24 movie
keywords: DNA, Molecule, Blueprint, Chromosome, Strand, Helix, Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, Guanine
“Genes Are Made Of DNA”
Biology 1A|Fall 2008|UC Berkeley
48 min movie
keywords: Crossing over, recombination, gene maps, sex linkage
“Cell To Embryo”
Cassiopeia Project, Biology
4:13 movie
keywords: Cell, Embryo, Ovary, Egg, Fallopian, Fetus, Fetal, Blastocyst, Uterus, Placenta, Pregnant, Pregnancy, Fertilize
“Strategic Alliances in Biotech”
Texas A&M Faculty
41 min podcast audio file
Talks about the Biotechnology Industry
“Advances in Fertility”
Yale University audio podcast
9 min
Dr. Pasquale Patrizio, Director of the Yale Fertility Center discusses advances in egg freezing, male fertility and deciphering the genetic make-up of human eggs at various stages of maturity.
Remember – they are FREE!
iTunes is a free download for Mac and Windoze
from Apple and runs on macs and PCs
Tunes U is a part of the iTunes Store featuring free lectures, language lessons, audiobooks, and more, that you can enjoy on your iPod, iPhone, Mac or PC. Explore over 100,000 educational audio and video files from top universities, museums and public media organizations from around the world. With iTunes U, there’s no end to what or where you can learn Here is a short trailer explaining iTunes U:
http://www.apple.com/education/guidedtours/itunesu.html
Perhaps you may experience some bandwidth/ Internet quota issues when downloading from iTunes.
My ISP is iiNet. Their iTunes downloads are free. Also they have an Off-Peak time between midnight and 8am which creates additional quota.
Regards
Blitto
And of course teachers in other Learning Areas will also find valuable resources here.


January 8th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Comment posted by Jean Anning with permission of Ken Price.
Thanks Rod, great idea.
Yes, there is a stack of good stuff on ItunesU. It also includes materials relevant to teacher PD as well (eg lectures from eminent educators, researchers etc)
Plus it is a nice thing to be able to direct kids to educational iTunesU content that they can access and view on their home computer, iPod etc. This also gets around the bandwidth and blocking issues at school, and gives parents some support on making better use of that computer or iPod they bought their kids for Christmas.
One thing we found was that it was not obvious to some teachers how to distribute the URL for a particular video or group of videos.
However it’s easy to do this – you can right-click (Windows users) on the video title or less obviously on the category title, and then use Copy ITunes Store URL
However for some reason this copy doesn’t always past as expected into emails etc – we’ve found that you may need to paste it into Notepad then copy it from there to paste into email or other delivery systems. Not sure why this is – might be easier for others.
The ability to link to categories and straight to specific videos is very useful.
For example this is the Stanford Uni “teaching and learning” category
http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/itunes.stanford.edu.1292699567.01292699572
while this one takes you directly to a specific video on “Intelligence in Wikipedia”
http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/researchchannel.org.1475689839.01475689845.1797444812?i=1571705300
It’s important to stress to teachers and students that the URLs require you to have iTunes installed.
Other sources of educational video content include TeacherTube http://www.teachertube.com/ and TeachersTV http://www.teachers.tv/
Cheers
Ken