Online Resources for Science Teachers

What a Great Site: Online Resources for Teachers

There are many excellent on-line education resources for Biotechnology and Genetics. Here are a few to get you started…

Access Excellence is the National Health Museum’s site for “health and bioscience teaching and learning”. Many ideas and interactive activities.http://www.accessexcellence.org/

The website for the American Society of Human Genetics has a list of educational resources and descriptions of careers in genetics.http://www.ashg.org/education/

BioEd Online: This website includes streaming video presentations, slide sets and lesson plans, along with a continuous science news feed from Nature, and free on-line web based workshopshttp://www.bioedonline.org/

The EXCITE (Excellence in Curriculum Integration Through Teaching Epidemiology) program from the Centers for Disease Control is really about epidemiology, however this includes some interesting classroom materials for teachers, including middle school science curriculum about scientific method, statistics, microbiology and disease transmission. The main CDC website (http://www.cdc.gov/) has lots of great disease information also. You can get short, understandable summaries of major disease outbreaks in the US – a good way to keep curriculum relevant.http://www.cdc.gov/excite

Colorado State University provides Transgenic Crops: An Introduction and Resource Guide, including articles, slide presentations and assignments to facilitate learning about transgenic crops. http://www.colostate.edu/programs/lifesciences/TransgenicCrops/index.html

The Dolan Learning Center at Cold Spring Harbor provides a wealth of resources for educators. These include on-line laboratories, free-access databases (Bioservers) used by scientists and educators world-wide, and the wonderful Biology Animation Library (Great PCR animation!) – found under the Resources section. You may have to download free software from Macromedia to run the animations, the Dolan site links you to the downloads.http://www.dnalc.org/

The Genetics Education Center at the University of Kansas Medical Center has LOTS of lesson-plans, including a simulated genetic counseling session.http://www.kumc.edu/gec/

The Genetic Science Learning Center web site at the University of Utah has a wide selection of teacher resources including virtual labs.http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute provides an opportunity for kids and adults to ask biology questions.http://www.askascientist.org/

The National Human Genome Research Institute has an incredible list of on-line educational resources links.http://www.nhgri.nih.gov/Education/

The National Institute of Health curriculum supplement series has extensive materials in various formats on current areas of research including: Using Technology to Study Cellular and Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Cancer, and Human Genetic Variation, among others.http://science.education.nih.gov/

The National Institute of Standards and Technology website is an excellent source of information about short tandem repeats used in forensic DNA analysis and human identity testing.http://www.cstl.nist.gov/div831/strbase

The National Science Teachers Association organizes URLs by grade level, content using the National Science Education Standards. It also includes lesson plans and other teacher support materials.http://sciguides.nsta.org/

Oklahoma City Community College offers an incredible web resource designed for high school teachers teaching about biotechnology! The College received grant money to develop this extensive site organizing/categorizing Biotech Internet resources, including on-line labs, curriculum, etc. CHECK IT OUT!http://www.okc.cc.ok.us/biotech

Promega CorporationLinks for educational units and the company's the training support program (50% discount) are provided. In addition, the tabs at the top are useful too; “Resources” includes many technical service resources such as protocols, MSDS sheets, “Profiles in DNA” (with interesting descriptions of forensic applications) and even training videos. The “Products” tab is useful for ordering.http://www.promega.com/education/

The University of Nebraska at Lincoln Ag Biosafety Education Center website provides good background information for teachers on the biotechnology of transgenic plants. Includes links to several lesson plans.http://agbiosafety.unl.edu/education.shtml

Virginia Commonwealth University has compiled the best video segments (to download for free) from the PBS series “Secrets of the Sequence”, along with accompanying lesson plans.http://www.vcu.edu/lifesci/sosq

Why FilesA Wisconsin Resource! The Why Files is a free online magazine from UW that explores the science behind the headlines (example: Stem Cells). It includes Teacher Activity Pages and resources. A new article is featured each week.http://www.whyfiles.org/