A common part of the college general biology lab curriculum is the fetal pig dissection. Students study the fetal pig in order to learn about the viscera and major blood vessels. Obviously, students cannot usually take their fetal pigs outside of the lab for study. However, there are a number of excellent free websites that a student can access to study the fetal pig virtually. One example is The Virtual Fetal Pig Dissection from Whitman College: http://www.whitman.edu/biology/vpd. Another is Fetal Pig Dissection from SUNY: http://faculty.clintoncc.suny.edu/faculty/michael.gregory/files/bio%20102/bio%20102%20laboratory/fetal%20pig/fetal%20pig.htm. Using Twiddla, a student and teacher can both interact with one of these online dissections together.
To use Twiddla to study the fetal pig online, the instructor and the student(s) would have to log onto the same Twiddla whiteboard URL. Once there, they would click the "Webpage" button. This opens a window where you can enter a URL to set as your background. I discovered that Twiddla drawing features do not work on the online dissection from Whitman College (probably because this webpage has advanced features that require Shockwave). However, I found that the SUNY pig dissection does work, so we'll type http://faculty.clintoncc.suny.edu/faculty/michael.gregory/files/bio%20102/bio%20102%20laboratory/fetal%20pig/fetal%20pig.htm into the URL line. At this point, we have Fetal Pig Dissection from SUNY as our background within Twiddla. Whoever navigates to this URL can join the chatroom conversation and mark up the webpage.
Here is an example of how online help via Twiddla might go:
The lab instructor is already in a Twiddla session, during scheduled helproom hours. The URL for the session has been posted to the course webpage. A student navigates to the URL.
Teacher: Welcome!
Student: hi
Teacher: How can I help you?
Student: During lab, I wasn't sure about the pulmonary artery.
Teacher: Okay, let's take a look at some images on the SUNY fetal pig webpage:
The teacher scrolls and finds an image of the fetal pig heart, then using the "browse" button within Twiddla, navigates to the enlarged image. To make the learning more active, the teacher has selected an unlabeled image. The unlabeled image is very large, so the teacher zooms to 50% using "ctrl -" for a wider view.
Teacher: Can you circle where you think the pulmonary artery is?
Student: Okay.
Teacher: That's the left subclavian artery.
Student: Okay. I really don't know where the pulmonary artery is.
Teacher: That's okay. I will show you.
Student: Oh, I thought that was the aorta. It's huge.
Teacher: The aorta is just behind the pulmonary trunk/artery. It descends down the back of the heart so you really don't see much of it from this view. Let me show you:
Teacher: Hmm. I can't seem to change the text font's color. I was able to make one green box so you can read it better, but I can't make anymore for some reason. Anyway, the aorta branches into the braciocephalic (feeds right arm and head) and left subclavian (feeds left arm). The pulmonary artery is basically in front of the aorta. You can check out the website's labeled diagram for better labels!
Student: Okay. I think that's what I needed.
Teacher: You also might want to look at more pictures on this website, so that you can see these vessels from different views.
Student: Okay. I'll try to do that.
End of example.
I had a lot of trouble getting the drawing tools to work consistently in Twiddla. Sometimes the tools would not draw and I didn't know why. Also, I found no way to change the text color, which was a problem since it was very difficult to see the labels I made against the background. There was a tool for making backgrounds for the text, but I couldn't get those to work consistently either.
I would want to figure out those glitches before using Twiddla as an official learning tool.
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