Excellent Short Videos of Protists
Just as my school was getting out for the Christmas break, I was finishing up a unit on the Protists with my biology classes. I am very fortunate to have the use of an extremely well equipped high school lab, but before I took my students to the lab to complete my protist lab, I wanted some short video clips to use in the classroom during my lecture. Most sites that host video are blocked at my school, but I was very pleasantly surprised to find several sites that I could access and use in my classroom.
Here are a few of the sites that I found. What I liked the best was the short length of each clip. With each of these sites, I could show 20-30 seconds of one organism and then move on to another organism.
Each of the sites listed below are free and the quality of the video is excellent.
Nikon Microscopy: This was my favorite site. Not only did it have the clips of the protists I was looking for, but it also has video clips of annelids, cnidarians, crustaceans, etc. I'll be going back and using this site again and again.
Fun Science Gallery: This site has 38 movies of bacteria, protists and freshwater multicellular organisms. This site gives a few short sentences on particular structures to watch for as the video plays.
Natural History Museum Microbiology Video Collection: All I can say about this site is just "Wow!!" If you can't find what you are looking for here, it probably doesn't exist!
After teaching the about the protists in my classroom, I took my students to the lab for my 3-day lab on the protists. Having used the short video clips in the classroom made my lab run smooth and easy. I have already written a blog post about this lab.
You can access it and read about it here: The Living Protists Lab
Happy Holidays and Happy Teaching!