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The Review! ScienceMan has had a blast using A.D.A.M. Interactive Anatomy... but he pretty well had to mortgage the lab to do it! If you want something a little cheaper but equally as useful for your classroom, consider the outstanding Interactive Physiology series of CDs instead.
Yeah, I know the picture shows 7 CDs... that's the old version. What you get now when you shell out your $460 is a 9 CD set which includes;
The instructors's guide contains very useful print info. Each of the 8 physiology CDs is an interactive masterpiece! For the sake of brevity, I'll take a close look at one of the nervous system CDs... but take my word for it, they're all excellent! When you insert the CD and click on the icon, you get a choice of four subdivisions, plus an orientation feature that does a wonderful job of helping you on your way!
So, once you've made a choice you get a splashscreen that welcomes you to the topic - the program "speaks" as text is written on the screen. Along the bottom of the screen are intuitive controls that allow you to jump to any place in the lesson, adjust animations speeds, playback volumes or jump back to the main screen. You have access to onscreen help at all times if you get lost!
This is no pedantic page-after-page lesson! Each page is loaded with animations... the lesson carefully coaxes you to click on neurons, synapses and axons in order to "stimulate" the animations (sorry, I couldn't resist!)
So what if you don't want to go in order? What if you want to prepare a lesson that involves the use of only pages 3, 8 and 11? No problem! The program conveniently allows you to save bookmarks - simply jump from mark to mark!
The pages show wonderful integration with other CD's and topics in the package, leading you naturally from lesson to lesson. When you reach the end, you can take the prepared quizzes, which are also completely interactive! No boring text review here! (If you want the boring text review, that's available too, both through the instructor's guide and textbook links!) What I like about these CD's is that they are extremely flexible - the large clear displays lend themselves well to demonstrating on a TV or projector. If you want assign particular topics to students as a computer assignment, these work wonderfully as well. Last but not least, they work wonderfully for individual instruction on a tutorial basis. This set is impressive and when you consider you are getting 9 CD's with tons of animations, the whole thing is a real bargain as well. I really wouldn't want to teach biology without them.
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