CMIS Evaluation WACE Courses

©Elisabeth Fall

ELIZABETH BLACKBURN has become the first Australian woman to win the coveted Nobel Prize award. The Australian science community is celebrating along with the recipient. There have been 10 previous Australian recipients - 9 for Science and Medicine plus 1 for Literature – Patrick White.

Professor Blackburn, whose research is conducted at the University of California San Francisco,  shares the award with Carol W. Greider, from John Hopkins University and Jack W. Szostak from Harvard Medical School. The award in the field of physiology or medicine was given for the discovery of telomerase, an enzyme that plays a key role in normal cell function, as well as in cell aging and most cancers. The research leading to this award has been carried out over a period of more than 25 years when Professor Blackburn first made the discovery.

Elizabeth Blackburn was born in Hobart and studied at Melbourne University High School. An inquiring mind, mentored by her chemistry teacher and inspired by reading the life of Marie Curie, Professor Blackburn has shown the Science Lab can indeed be a “woman’s place”.

Find out more from the following links and News articles:

• The TIME 100
• Australia Prize 1998
• Wikipedia Article
• Science of Aging Timeline
• Women@Google
• Press Conference

The announcement of the award was made by video from the Nobel Institute

Related Links:

• The Prime Minister’s Prize for Science
• Women in Science [Wikipedia]
• WA’s Chief Scientist – Professor Lyn Beazley

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.

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.

THANKS ROD

At Balcatta SHS Rod Blitvich’s Year 12 Human Biology students have created podcasts summarising the Human Biology course.

Rod says it was a useful exercise in students constructing their own knowledge and he is happy for you to use the podcasts with your students. You need broadband and quicktime installed. Quicktime for Windows is a free download.

The Process
If you’d like to get your students to do the same thin with any area of work, check out Rod’s Human Biology 12 Podcast Assignment for full details.

Thanks to Rod for permission to share this example of a very positive use of ICT with upper secondary students.

The Nuffield Curriculum Centre has recently added two useful websites for Science teachers to use in the classroom.

The Practical Biology website allows teachers to download a wide range of experiments to illustrate concepts and processes that should work in any school laboratory.

Practical Physics also experiments for teachers to use in the Physics Laboratory. There are also videos of different experiments online.

The aim of the centre is to explore new approaches to teaching and learning by developing, managing and supporting curriculum projects.  Main areas of interest include Science, Mathematics, Design and Technology and Citizenship and exploring the creative use of ICT to support teaching and learning in these fields.