The ChemWiki
The ChemWiki project is a new approach toward chemistry education where an Open Access textbook environment is constantly being written and re-written partly by students and partly by faculty members resulting in a free Chemistry textbook to supplement or supplant conventional paper-based books. Anyone can view, although a freely available account is required to edit the site modules.
The Process of Research Writing
The Process of Research Writing is a web-based research writing textbook suitable for teachers and students in research oriented composition and rhetoric classes. Instead of focusing on one research paper, I focus on the process of research writing through a series of shorter writing exercises. Students begin by having to carefully think about a topic of research for the semester and by developing a working thesis. They then write a series of shorter essays that explore that topic. All along the
Looking Beyond Themselves: Preparing Students to Become Invested Members of Their Community
As a sixth grade teacher, Pfitzner struggled to find a way to truly reach her students. She wanted to help her students find a deeper connection to what they were learning, allowing them to feel ownership of their knowledge. She developed a project based on community activism to help her students escape the cliques and disconnectedness so common to sixth graders in her school. Pfitzner documented this journey as she and her students identified and addressed a need in their community for a non-fi
Learning From Cases
This site focuses on the use of case writing to support student learning in a Foundations of Learning course for pre-service teachers at the graduate level. It uses a course timeline to organize links that show course materials, the development of one student's case, and student and instructor reflections. The site index also includes an archive of students' cases, as well as a collection of other course materials.
Learning Interdisciplinarity: A Course Portfolio
Linkon's research focused on evaluating the effectiveness of her incremental learning assignments in an interdisciplinary course. She gathered a variety of kinds of evidence of students' learning, ranging from surveys and interviews to students' projects and her own reflections. The three-assignment incremental learning sequence worked well for most students. Linkon's analysis of their work showed a clear development of analytical complexity in their writing over the course of the term. Students
Making Sense of Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Analysis of a Family Nurse Practitioner Prog
The overall goal of this inquiry project was to evaluate approaches to incorporating complementary and alternative medicine into the curricula of nurse practitioner (NP) programs. Specifically, Burman undertook a comprehensive assessment of how the concept of complementary and alternative therapies is (or is not) addressed in her FNP curriculum. The outcome of this assessment is a 'curriculum component portfolio' with selected pieces of evidence, critical reflection and recommendations.
Peer Review of Teaching - Course Portfolio
In this course portfolio, Dan Bernstein reports on changes he has made over three semesters in a psychology course on learning. He has succeeded in getting more students to achieve higher levels of understanding by changing the assessment from short abstract essay questions to problems that asked students to apply concepts in new contexts, and providing web-based opportunities for students to identify what makes some answers better than others. The portfolio includes examples of the assessments
Disaster
The people who came to California in search of gold were faced with the threat of disaster in every step of their journey. Many came by ship, even though shipwrecks were commonplace ? one set of lithographs depicts four shipwrecks that occurred within 60 days. Earthquakes were another fact of life in California. Sensational newspaper illustrations like "Earth Quakey Times," and photographs showing buildings in shambles, helped build the state's reputation as an "earthquake capital." Earthquakes
Growth of Cities
Cities up and down the state of California grew rapidly during the Gold Rush era. Some of these cities were veritable boomtowns: San Francisco, a small village in 1847, was a bustling city by 1849, just two years later. San Francisco's population boom even had an impact on its geography. One image from 1847 shows Montgomery Street on the waterfront; but a photograph taken in 1862 shows that the waterfront had been filled to increase the city's real estate, pushing Montgomery Street inland. South
Action Potential Experiments
Action Potential Experiments is a demonstration/simulation laboratory for neurophysiology based on the 'sodium theory' as originally formulated and tested by A. L. Hodgkin and his colleagues. The application includes simulations of the original experiments of Hodgkins and his colleagues, and of the classic voltage clamp and patch clamp experiments and an animated illustration of the 'sodium theory' explanation of Nernst potentials for potassium and sodium ions. The student can perform simple ion
BioGrapher
PURPOSE: A simple Excel-based workbook with worksheets as a front end for the AT&T GraphViz Graph Layout software suite. BioGrapher enhances Excel-based tools developed in the Chemistry and Biology Departments at Beloit College to allow for convenient visualization of graphs and graphical connections that are important
in systems and computational biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, and genetics.
Case It
This software can be used to investigate common molecular biology laboratory procedures using DNA or protein sequence data. These simulations and cases are based primarily on genetic and infectious disease with techniques such as: DNA electrophoresis, Southern blot, PCR, Multiplex PCR, Dot blot, ELISA, Western blot, 96-well PCR, protein electrophoresis.
Case It! is collaborative BioQUEST project between the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and Michigan State University.
American Journeys
Everything teachers and students need for a successful National History Day project is available at this site -- topic ideas, lesson plans, research advice, and thousands of pages of fully indexed eyewitness accounts of North American exploration. Follow famous explorers. Witness first contacts between cultures. See how the exchange of goods and ideas forever altered people's daily life and ideas. Find out what "America" meant to the people who arrived here long ago and to the people who greeted
Basic Filmmaking for High School Drama Departments
This is a course in Narrative Film Production which shows how drama departments can create short motion pictures as part of a drama class. Currently, we have only one lesson. But eventually, there will be more. And with each lesson, you will participate in the making of a movie based on your own story.
Exploring the Environment
This site features 25 online modules that put students in problem-based learning scenarios. In one module, students predict the impact of increased carbon dioxide on the wheat yield in Kansas. In another, they predict weather 48 hours in advance. Topics include coral reefs, climate change, the Everglades, mountain gorillas, rainforests, volcanoes, water quality, and ozone depletion.
The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
This is an introduction to programming and computer science. This course exposes students to techniques of abstraction at several levels: (a) within a programming language, using higher-order functions, manifest types, data-directed programming, and message-passing; (b) between programming languages, using functional and rule-based languages as examples. It also relates these techniques to the practical problems of implementation of languages and algorithms on a von Neumann machine. There are se
Producing Distance Education Resources
This course focuses on the production of resources (broadly interpreted) for use in online education (including formal and informal settings). In particular, the course focuses on Internet-based tools and technologies, and how they are developed and applied for use in online learning.
Exploring Teaching and Learning in Tertiary Contexts
This course enables tertiary educators to explore teaching and learning in tertiary environments. In doing so, they will focus on their own context and anticipated teaching roles. Through the process of critical self-analysis with reference to the qualities of effective tertiary educators, participants will produce a 'teaching capacity enhancement plan' (TCEP). This plan should be developed in collaboration with professional colleagues who are prepared to work alongside you as members of a focus
Headwaters Province - Idaho and Montana: Earth Science Studies in Support of Public Policy Developme
This resource contains an organized database of resources that provide geoscience data and interpretations to the Federal Land Management Agencies (FLMA) that are basic to sound policy and land-stewardship practices. U.S. Forest Service (USFS) National Forest and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Resource Area Management Plans for the Headwaters Province are in revision, with completion dates from 1999-2003. USFS Regions 1 and 4 have made National Priority Requests for Mineral Resources Program (M
Life Cycle of a Mineral Deposit
This teacher's guide defines what a mineral deposit is and how a mineral deposit is identified and measured, how the mineral resources are extracted, and how the mining site is reclaimed; how minerals and mineral resources are processed; and how we use mineral resources in our every day lives. Included are 10 activity-based learning exercises that educate students on basic geologic concepts; the processes of finding, identifying, and extracting the resources from a mineral deposit; and the uses
