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By Dr. Eric Chudler, University of Washington
- Make contact with the teacher as soon
as possible (several weeks before your visit) and maintain
communication with the teacher prior to your visit.
- Make sure that students are prepared for
your visit. This may involve providing material to the teacher
before your visit. Keep lectures short and to the point,
especially for elementary school children. It is best to
have hands-on activities for the students. Actual brain
specimens are always of interest. Bring appropriate protective
equipment.
- Make sure that you leave time at the end
of your visit for questions.
- If possible, provide handouts for students
to take home. This will allow students to share the day's
events with their families.
- Follow-up with the teacher after your
visit. Find out what worked and what did not work.
- Provide teachers with the rationale and
importance of studying the nervous system. Neuroscience
is often an area of science that teachers have NEVER taught.
- Conduct the workshop like an "in-service"
presentation. Have the teachers work through hands-on projects
as if they were students. Provide background of each project
and references for more detailed information about each
project.
- Provide sources (i.e., company names,
stores) for all materials that you use.
- Provide an item that they can take back
to their classes (e.g., a poster or a stained slide).
(excerpted from Neuroscience for Kids Newsletter
- Volume 2, Issue 1, Dr. Eric Chudler, Editor)
It is my belief that a Web site is never
finished. There are always more graphics and information to
add, new technology to incorporate and language to correct
on any Web site. I have tried to make the "Neuroscience
for Kids" pages content rich - that is, filled with information,
illustrations and tables. Some people who have used the site
have told me that there is not enough information; some have
said that there is too much information! It is hard to find
just the right balance especially since people who are using
the site include students and teachers at all levels, university
professors, physicians and parents. I think it is better to
have too much information rather than too little. This way
the person using the Web site can read as much or as little
as he or she wants. That is also why I include many links
on the pages - to allow everyone to explore a particular topic
in more detail by visiting another Web site. Of course, I
cannot control the content on these other pages and sometimes
these other pages just disappear from the Internet.
Creating a Web page is not too hard. I am
NOT a professional Web page designer. I learned how to make
Web pages by reading a few books and looking at the "source
code" on pages that I thought were well-designed.
For many of the graphics, I use Photoshop.
This program allows me to get graphics into a form that can
be read over the Internet. I have also found that there are
some "on-line" programs that can be a big help in designing
Web pages and I would like to share these with you. I hope
if you have your own Web page or are thinking about starting
a Web page, that these sites can help you. They have helped
me!
- My favorite Web page "helper" is
a site called "Gif Wizard".
This is a site that will take an image (in "gif" format)
and shrink the file size. This is especially important so
that pages will load faster. The larger the size of the
image, the slower the page will load. I try to keep all
the image sizes on my pages as small as possible for this
reason. The "Gif Wizard" reduces the file size for free!
- One way that I add graphics to my
site is by using clip art. There are several great places
on the WWW to get free clip art. Here is the one that I
find to be the best:
Barry's
Clip Art Server
- There are also some Web pages that
will check the spelling, the load time, HTML coding and
the links on pages. This is like taking a car in for a tune
up - these sites check to see if the pages are running smoothly.
The pages that I use are:
WebSter's
Dictionary 2.0 , Doctor
HTML
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