Teaching ScienceIdeas and help for trainee Science teachers

In the Zone is the Wellcome Trust’s major NEW initiative inspired by the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. It provides a fun, free and fascinating way of using science to discover how our bodies work during sport, activity, movement and rest.

The website is aimed at both primary and secondary schools with two different sections. Both sections contain interactive games which can be used on the interactive whiteboard.

Teachers packs are available for download containing lesson plans, worksheets and ideas for science investigations.

If you are working in a UK school then keep an eye out for the In the Zone pack which is being sent to every school in the UK in Feb/March. Each box contains a teaching guide, curriculum guide, challenge cards and all of the scientific equipment you need to do the investigations on the website. Make sure your office staff know it’s coming, and not to put it in a cupboard.

You can access all the resources here :  http://www.getinthezone.org.uk

These resources were originally part of the Science Year CD produced by the ASE nearly 10 years ago. For a while after that they were also available on the ASE website, but recently I noticed that the website links were no longer working. A shame as there were some great materials there.

I recently found them on the National STEM Centre website – who seems to be archiving a lot of the old ASE resources, amongst other things.

You can access the Inside Body resources here.

The Inside Body resource from the Association for Science Education (ASE) provides a template that students use to produce their own ICT presentations on the effects of a substance on the body.
By completing this activity students improve their ability to select relevant information for a presentation, develop their ICT skills and increase their knowledge on the effects of alcohol, tobacco and solvents on the human body.

Students are provided with a background resource document from which to select information. They insert this text into their presentation. They choose relevant pathological images, which are provided on the PowerPoint template, and use these to illustrate their presentation. They can also insert information that they have researched from other sources.

There are some very gruesome images that you can use in presentations about drugs/alcohol/tobacco and their effect on the body. Suitable for KS3/KS4 pupils.

The rest of Science Year resources are available here.

This is something I have been waiting ages to see. I love Google Earth, Google Sky, Google Moon etc. But there was nothing for the biologists.  And now there is. Google Body browser.

Google Body gives you a fully-explorable 3D body. You can move about, zoom in, like you can in Google Earth. And it’s fast – very responsive – at least on my home computer anyway. At the moment it wont run in every browser (see later) but hopefully that will change very soon.

The slider on the left hand side lets you reveal different body systems, such as the muscular, skeletal, digestive and nervous. You can turn labels on or off. You can choose between one global slider – or switch to having a slider for each system (the bottom icon does this)

Double click on any organ to isolate it from the rest of the body. It will stay visible while the rest of the body fades out to make it clearer to see it.

Unlike other web based body models that I have seen on, you don’t need to have Flash, Java, or other plugins installed. Google Body will run on any browser that supports the WebGL standard. At the moment this means that only developer or beta versions of FireFox and Chrome will run it right now, but expect to see WebGL will be supported by all browsers in 2011 for sure.

This will make teaching about the human body much better on an interactive whiteboard. Combine this with the desktop annotation or image capture and annotate to label organs and systems, or to just explore different organs in detail. Hopefully in the future there’ll be links to microscope or internal images, and maybe links to pages of information about each part. For now the tool is in beta, so there’s scope for more features to be added.