The ability to collate information from diverse scientific resources and effectively employ scientific writing is an essential skill for scientists. This lesson describes a semester-long project entitled “Pick Your Poison,” which is designed for use in a one-semester Toxicology course. Students are each assigned to or choose their own individual toxicant as a case study from a pre-selected list of toxicants (poisons) that align with the theme of the course. As content is covered in the course, students complete ten scaffolded, low-stakes writing modules that are shared with groupmates of 4–5 students. Each module covers a major feature of the toxicant, such as chemical features, characteristics of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and elimination (ADME), and organ-specific toxicities. Students share their work with their group mates and the instructor, peer review one another’s work, and then edit their original post as appropriate to produce a concise, 3–4 paragraph product. At the end of the course, students compile their writing modules into an article in the format of the Encyclopedia of Toxicology. This project can be adapted to any toxicology course through alteration of the content and number of modules and/or the type of final deliverable. Several evidence-based and inclusive teaching practices are included, such as writing-to-learn, peer review, and low-stakes assessments.

Primary Image: A picture of the online discussions for two of the ten modules.

Demonstration videos are an excellent way to introduce students to new laboratory techniques, but many available videos are of low quality, too long, lack human diversity, and the main narrator is someone other than the instructor of the course. Videos may feature terminology and equipment different from what the students will use and the availability of the video is also not controlled by the lab instructor. Lab instructors can enhance the lab experience of students by making their own demonstrations videos. The current cell phone camera technology allows instructors to make custom videos. We watched many successful how-to style YouTube videos and distilled several techniques. We then applied these techniques to make more engaging videos for our students. Many of our videos have found success on YouTube. In this paper, we break down our video making techniques for demonstrating laboratory equipment and protocols. We hope the readers will find inspiration to make their own demonstration videos to aide their students.

Primary Image: Successful Instructional Videos for Biology Classes. Still image from a successful instructional video used to teach students how to focus a microscope.