Slice of Life grew in part from the vision of placing especially useful educational materials in the hands of many faculty and many students. Current progress toward worldwide dissemination of thousands of instructional resources is remarkable. Even so every anatomy and pathology department and most other academic units continue to have available "in house," a stash of hands-on teaching materials (often unique or highly selected items) that work better for a particular teaching task in a small class than anything else available. "Stuff" like this ranges from collections of hand-built models of developing guts, to fortuitous histology slides, to unusually well prosected gross specimens. It is often museum quality material.

This demonstration illustrates methods we have used to place immensely useful material like this into students' hands (actually onto their PCs!). Each of the three projects in the demo is 1) educationally useful, 2) based on material readily available (usually a single specimen or example) in our laboratories, and 3) constructed with a minimum of high tech cost (in either equipment or personnel). Two of the three projects were originally constructed in Power Point by content persons, then were adapted for web-based distribution. One was composed and written in Authorware, a significant step up in sophistication and technical demands. Each of the three transforms anatomical materials to which student access is limited into simple (but effective) instructional packages; they provide means of "amplifying" limited resources for simultaneous use. These types of materials can be produced with minimal equipment and modest technical support; some of the time-consuming work can be done by relatively unskilled workers (read students!). The products are readily adaptable for use in lectures and/or can be easily converted for use in exams.

We will demonstrate an atlas of stained human brain sections (3 planes; from unique originals used in our teaching lab), some "Practice Practicals" for Neurobiology simply constructed in Power Point, and samples of a series of labeled radiographs that match those available in our teaching laboratories.

This demo will be of most interest to working faculty who interface with students and typically have more hours (and experience) in the laboratory than at the computer. It is mainly (and intentionally) "low" tech, i.e. simple applications) to illustrate the relative ease of preparing such material. The main advantage over other educational approaches is probably in student efficiency of learning; students prefer easy-to-use resources tailored to specific current topics. The three illustrations in the demo come from courses in Human Anatomy and Neurobiology but the approaches have diverse applicability.

James L. Culberson
Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy
WVU Health Sciences Center, Box 9128
Morgantown, WV 26506
USA
Phone: 304 293 0593
Fax: 304 293 8159
Email: jculbers@wvu.edu
Website: http://anatomy.hsc.wvu.edu

CO-AUTHORS:

Frank Reilly
Jeffrey Altemus
Penprapa Klinkhachorn
Robert Pope
Richard Dey
All co-authors are at: Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy
WVU Health Sciences Center, Box 9128
Morgantown, WV 26506
USA
Phone: 304 293 2212
Fax: 304 293 8159
Email: Reilly freilly@wvu.edu
Altemus jaltemus@wvu.edu
Klinkhachorn pklinkha@wvu.edu
Pope rpope@wvu.edu
Dey rdey@wvu.edu
Website: http://anatomy.hsc.wvu.edu