PowerPoint enhancements to blackboard lectures: effort led by Graham Walker My most time-consuming personal contribution to our group activities was to try an experiment I had been thinking about for years, namely adding PowerPoint enhancements to my blackboard lectures. I wanted to keep lecturing on the blackboard because that forces me to focus on the absolutely most important points, and also ensures that the students have time to make good notes of the material I am discussing. However, it also tends make the lectures seem dry to a generation of students raised on video games. I therefore used PowerPoint on a screen at the side of the lecture hall. The screen was dark much of the time but, using a remote control with a built-in laser pointer, I would then use it in a variety of ways that I felt might excite or engage the students. For example, I assembled a set of striking images - ranging from detailed protein structures to pictures of various organisms expressing green fluorescent protein - that I showed at appropriate moments. I also showed the students various animations and movies (including some spectacular ones I first saw at research meetings), which illustrated critical points. The students have often resisted my past efforts to provide a historical background to some of the key discoveries in biology, but this year seemed to respond quite differently when I showed them pictures of the people I was talking about. Also, I showed articles from current newspapers and magazine that would help the students appreciate the relevance of the material. For example, on the very day that I was going to be discussing DNA sequencing, the front page of the Boston Globe had, not only an article announcing that the sequence of the human genome had been completed, but also an article saying that the SARS virus genome had just been sequenced! Although I received a few movies and images from colleagues as personal favors for use only in my class, I gathered most of the material from the web and, within the next few months, plan to make this material freely available on our (presently under construction) HHMI Education Group web site and on the HHMI Professors web site.

Video Clips Along with displaying static images in lecture, Graham began showing short video clips. These clips were collected from the web, fellow researchers, and one was even created by members of his lab after seeing Jo Handelsman's guest lecture. This clip, which can be accessed by clicking on the link below, demonstrates the ice-nucleating ability of a bacteria followed by repeating the experiment with another bacteria that lacks this ability. When the movie was shown in class Graham narrated what was on the screen and asked the students to develop hypotheses for how this effect occurred. Ice Nucleation Video

Symbiotic nodules formed by Rhizobium bacteria in the root hairs of Alfalfa plants

The nitrogen-fixing bacteria Sinorhizobium melioti invading an alfalfa root as the first step in establishing a symbiosis. The rhizobia are green because they are expressing GFP (green fluorescent protein).

Student Response Focus groups were held to discuss the value, pros and cons of using the Powerpoint enhancements in lecture. The results are summarized below. The good points: - pictures of famous living people (especially from mit): the students could picture themselves having a similar future - stepwise animations seemed to help - mitosis videos helped to picture what was going on - also to show that the cartoons we draw are 'really close to what's actually happening' and not just cartoons. The things to watch out for: - be SURE to have an explanatory caption - in case the students didn't catch the explanation - when showing data, be careful about how indirect the evidence is (for example, the slide of more colonies in a DNA-repair-deficient strain - this was strange for them, why would more mutations be better???) - just because it makes sense to the instructor doesn't mean it will make sense to the student - need to see it from their point of view. - need to be clear about what to look for - you only need a few slides of people make the point about their biographies (more is redundant) .