Online Dissections
The internet has made dissecting animals cheaper, less smelly, and more humane. If a student has a moral objection to doing a dissection in class they no longer have to sit to the side doing a worksheet - they can take part in the dissection along with the rest of the class. And the best part, now it is free!
To get started I chose to go to about.com, one of the top results when "online frog dissection" is googled.
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| http://biology.about.com/od/onlinedissections/Online_Dissections.htm |
The website that you get will look something like this. Not all of the links are useful, so I have outlined the ones you should take a closer look at in green. Note that all the links with a blue arrow next to them on the left are broken links. They may have been useful in the past, but today you can no longer see what was there.
Frog Anatomy/ Dissection Images
If you are completely new to dissections, frog anatomy is a good place to start. It gives an overview of the anatomy of the frog, and it has links so that you can read up more about the different parts of the frog.
Dissection Simulations
The online dissection page is exactly what you want! It leads to the following dissections:
Non-interactive
Non-interactive dissections give students to explore dissections through theory and pictures. To be used in a classroom, they would probably be best as pre-homework before the students come to school to participate in a real dissection. Or you can use them to compare the physiology of different organisms.
Cockroach - This is a how-to guide with pictures of an online dissection. It is NOT interactive, but will provide good images and is perfect if you have never dissected this animal before because it provides detailed information.
Cow's Eye - This website is a collection of detailed videos which not only demonstrate a dissection, but the physiology behind the different parts of the eye. It has a how-to guide with pictures.
Sheep Brain - This a series of web modules with detailed pictures that point to the different parts of the brain. It is really detailed, so it is most fit for a high school AP class or a college course which is going to explore the topic.
Cat Dissection - This has a series of detailed images of the entire cat's body. It is not for the feint of heart or animal lovers.
Interactive: (online labs)
In this section I will go over various free frog dissections. For suggested paid dissections, see the resource page. Free dissections are great if you are home-schooling your children, if your school has a computer lab and not enough money to afford real frogs for students to dissect, or if only a few students do not want to participate in a classroom dissection.
McGraw Hill
The Virtual lab at McGraw Hill is great and easy to use. By clicking on each section, it takes you through step by step explaining the process of a frog dissection. It includes click-by-click tutorials as well as videos to give you the full experience of a frog dissection for free! It is recommended with students in the middle or elementary school age because of the design and simplicity. However, it does require a lot of listening without a visual component to follow along, so it may be difficult to use for second language learners. It also goes over inner and outer anatomy in detail, so it is great for students to learn about this in more detail.
Net Frog
Net frog is a little bit older, and thus less user-friendly. I would choose the 2002 "updated" version, even though it is still over a decade old. This is good because it involves a good amount of interaction rather than just absorption of the material.
Some of the pages you go through have a try it button, where you will use your mouse to click on the frog images to the side.
This website is great because it has audio video, and textual representations of the information, so it would really work well for English Language Learners.
Frog Game
This game may seem to be on an unprofessional website, but it is valuable because you do an entire dissection step-by-step. It is actually a free version of frogouts, comparable to the trial version that you see on their website. This is good for if a student is absent to class, or if they do not want to preform the experiment. I would not suggest doing this with a whole class though because it is missing a lot when it comes to poking around and exploring different parts of the frog, it also does not provide any information as to why you are doing what you do. The directions are in English, and only work if you follow them exactly.
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