Ask a Scientist

My question, which is "How can the body maintain viability of brain and egg cells over the course of many years, when other cell types of the body reproduce and die as a normal part of life?" has not yet been answered. I'll keep checking back, though I suspect that this site gets many questions and the odds of getting an answer are not high.

It was there, I had to use it...

                                     
                                                                  I just had to.

Testing Presentation Tools

This week's exploration of presentation tools took quite a bit of time, since I have no experience with this kind of thing at all. I've never even made a PowerPoint presentation! After looking at what was available, I focused on two tools: Animoto and Prezi.

Prezi is the more complex of the two, but having viewed some of the samples available on the website, I have to admit I am very impressed with what can be done with it. I may have intimidated myself a bit, since I looked at some very complex and polished projects. I'm more at the "drawing stick figures" level at this point. Since you could get the middle level account using your school email, I went ahead and registered. I 

will be doing a bit more exploration this week before I make a final decision. 

Animoto was very simple to use and user friendly, though the presentations not oriented in the same fashion, it's more for "social networking" type sharing. That being said, I was able to use it right away and have already produced my little 30 second trial video, posted in a separate post on this blog. This would be very easy for students to use, and I believe they would enjoy it, even if the free presentations are limited to 30 seconds.

So I still haven't decided which I will use, since both have advantages. My initial reaction is to go with Prezi, but I won't know until later this week. 

My Animoto Video: A test of Web 2.0 tools

My Animoto Video

I tried out Animoto, which was easy to use even for a rank beginner like me. I had to use my favorite subject, of course!