While this site is primarily designed to sell an educational CD, there are four free "mitosis movies" that can be accessed: the cell cycle, live animal cell mitosis, plant cell mitosis and embryonic mitosis (fish).
The website shows you images of how the program looks when installed on your computer.
Type of Material:
This is a website intended to sell you a product. Videos.
Recommended Uses:
You would use this website if you were interested in purchasing a learning material to teach cell division to your students. Use in-class to demonstrate concepts.
Technical Requirements:
Quicktime. Flash player and a web browser. The user would require a browser such as Internet Explorer, or Firefox.
Identify Major Learning Goals:
There are not any learning goals associated with this website. The website is intended to sell the user a product. The student will learn the differences between plant and animal cell mitosis, the stages of the cell cycle, and the basics of embryonic cell division in a zebrafish model.
Target Student Population:
This website doesn’t seem to target students, it seems to target teachers interested in teaching their students cell division. A student may purchase this product if they’re interested in learning cell division. Level is Grades 9 - undergraduate biology courses.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:
The only prerequisites for this website are to know how to use a browser. Students should be familiar with cellular structure and organization.
Content Quality
Rating:
Strengths:
The videos on plant and animal cell mitosis are well-done; the animal cell video uses live time-lapse with voice over.
The stages are labeled and explained via the audio in both the plant, animal and embryonic videos.
Videos are short, which means they could easily be used during a lecture to bring life to material covered in the reading/lecture.
Material is accurate.
The topics are well-organized.
The content is well organized and follows good pedagogy.
Concerns:
The cell cycle video is very basic and doesn't seem to add much to a written description. In my opinion a video is not needed in this instance.
The cell and plant mitosis videos are excellent and can stand alone, and the embryonic mitosis video will likely need additional context and explanation.
Collection is incomplete and many of the materials are under construction.
Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool
Rating:
Strengths:
Plant and animal cell mitosis videos build nicely upon one another and can be used to contrast these two processes.
Concepts in these videos build upon one another and would work well to illustrate these ideas in class or as a review.
The images shown are colorful and engaging.
The material is logically presented.
Information provided helps students understand the relatedness of the topics.
Concerns:
Does not identify learning objectives or prerequisite knowledge.
Doesn't provide any assessment options or strategies.
Embryonic video and cell cycle video require additional material to reach optimal learning effectiveness.
Learning objectives are not clear.
Objectives are not clearly stated.
Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty
Rating:
Strengths:
Videos are easy to use and audio is clear.
Videos provide options to advance forward or back to allow for review of specific pieces of information.
Navigation is intuitive.
Information is easy to understand.
The information is organized and follows a logical order.
Concerns:
All videos have a promotional bit at the very end advertising a CD.
Website and videos appear dated; fonts are old, resolution is not crisp and the use of CDs in general is no longer relevant for most classrooms.
Videos require QuickTime 5.0 or later; I had to enable (Flash, I think?) in order to view them in the Chrome browser.
There were several broken links at this site.
Other Issues and Comments:
No other issues than the ones listed above.
Creative Commons:
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