Following up on my last post regarding microscopy as a teaching tool, I want to share with you some of the work my Anatomy and Physiology 2 students completed this semester with prepared slides of nervous system tissues - spinal cord and brain. Once students have successfully focused the microscope slides, I encourage them to use their cell phones to capture photographs of their views.
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| Cerebellum - student cell phone photograph |
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| Cerebellum - Student drawing |
With many years of experience, as the teacher, you are very familiar with the tissues and their appearances that your students are working with, and what to expect when you look at their drawings. I've seen several lovely drawings of water bubbles (wet mount slide preparations by students) or dust specks. A couple of years ago I would have asked the students to step aside and let me take a look through their scope to assess their focusing skills. During COVID, I did not check looking through the scopes as we were practicing distancing. (When students were done working, I had them use alcohol pads to wipe down the eyepieces and knobs) That's what makes the use of phone camera shots in the lab another good assessment tool. In addition, you can zoom in on the photographs and see even more details. Plus the students will have a record of the slides that they can refer to and study from should you plan on a lab practical.
For this lesson, I wanted the students to identify key features of the tissues under observation. I generated the lab sheet below with the instructions for coloring and labeling. Students had the list of vocabulary terms that needed to be labeled.
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| Central Nervous System Microscopy Lab Sheet Student Work Sample |
