www.BioTopics.co.uk
Site author Richard Steane
The BioTopics website gives access to interactive resource material, developed to support the learning and teaching of Biology at a variety of levels.

Notes on this material

Target audience

I have produced these units for people studying for GCSE and A level Biology in the UK (age 14-16 and 16-18), but I know there are users at other levels and in other countries.

I have also tried to provide enough information to meet and exceed requirements of some specifications (syllabuses). I know some of these limit the amount of detail or present topics in a strange order, so that detail required in one module would have helped in a previous one. For this reason I have sometimes gone into a little more detail than may be expected. I know that not all of this will be retained by a student, and anyway I do not want to insult anyone's intelligence!

There is a careful balancing act between "Do we need to know this? Will this be in the exam?" and "Isn't this obvious? This is everyday stuff that everyone knows".

Topics relevance

Although I have written most of this material in response to something on one of the syllabus specifications over the last few years, I have still left them here as specifications change in case someone wants to fill in a few gaps. I have tried to keep the topics in a logical order, and some of the navigation assumes you are following them in a set order as dictated by syllabus specifications, but it is not always easy to accommodate different specifications. As a result, there is some duplication, and a number of different menus. In the future, I might make some of the units shorter (and punchier?), or cut existing units into several sub-sections so that they can serve several purposes.

Language

I like to start with statements that can be easily understood and then to add some more detail, with a view to increasing the level of factual knowledge. I have also added a few sections - mostly extension or slightly whimsical - which are shown as tooltips on mouseover, usually (but not only) based on green text. I hope that this knowledge can be used to explain and predict, and I am not always concerned with answering exam questions.

In science generally but specifically in Biology there are certain technical terms that sometimes cause problems; students either gloss over them, hoping that they will make sense later, or they ignore them assuming they are either irrelevant or or relevant to someone else (the swats?).

I have tried to put in some pointers to assist the understanding of these technical terms and even their derivation. Science means knowledge and ignorance means the opposite, and you can check the Latin roots!

Graphics

I know that diagrams and photographs are better than words, and they certainly inspire more optimism than pages of text! I like to produce my own graphics, but sometimes I use them from other sources. In fact it used to be said that a good teacher knows and brings together information from a number of resources such as textbooks.

Comparison with other material

Please let me know if anything here conflicts with statements in your textbook (or your teacher!), or if other websites are closer to the mark!

Compatibility

This material generally gives effective results on a variety of computer systems including laptops and projector systems. There is a considerable reliance on Javascript for mouseover image swapping and text manipulation, and tooltip drop-down boxes.

Some features are less reliable on tablets. Apples's iPad does not support Java, so the 3D molecules using the JMol Java Applet are not shown. However, other Apple computers are OK with this. There is very little Flash on the site, although I may use it for some video and audio - Apple (iPad only?) has a problem with this.

I am interested to know how many of the features are supported on Android tablets/browsers and (smart?)phones. Sadly some of the tooltip dropdown features I have associated with graphics and text do not work with these. Some dropdown menus are compromised by the lack of a hover behaviour on tablets.

And then there is the issue of text size and layout with smaller devices - phones and smaller tablets. In future, I may make separate smaller screen-friendly versions of some files.

You can get in touch via a form or email from almost any unit.

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