Ask a Scientist

I was really excited to find out there was a website available to post questions on and get answers from real scientists! I was a little disappointed that I posted my question over a week and a half ago and never got a reply. My question was as follows: If cells are constantly performing mitosis to repair dead or damaged tissue, what causes scar tissue to build up & why do some cuts repair themselves leaving no scar behind, while other cuts leave scars?
Since I didn't get an answer form the website, I went to my own real scientist for an answer; my supervisor! I told him the situation and presented him with my question. He explained to me that when a cut is fairly superficial, the cells are still in close enough contact with one another to communicate proper healing and are able to repair the tissue so that it looks as if a cut ever happened. However, if a cut is very deep and/or wide, the cells in the surrounding area are not close enough to be able to communicate and you are left with scar tissue. Makes sense to me!
I'm not sure I would be willing to use this website since I never got a response. I'll be curious to see if others heard anything back. I love the idea of this site and would like to use something similar because I get questions regularly from my students that I can't fully explain and I could post their question immediately and hope for a response.

Web 2.0 presentation tools

The two presentation tools I'm reviewing are Prezi & PowerPoint. After watching the Prezi tutorial, I was excited by some of the presentation tools that come with Prezi and feel it would be a good tool to use for my Course Project. It seems easy enough to use & I like the idea of being able to have my students add to it from their own computers. My biggest concern with Prezi is based on the email we got from Dr. Lyman about the stability of Prezi. I worry that because I am not yet familiar with all the components associated with Prezi, if I run into any issues, I'll loose all my work. I also read a few on-line reviews from other Prezi users who had some similar complaints, although most liked the Prezi interface well enough.

For this reason I'm going to use PowerPoint for my Course Project. I use PowerPoint almost daily in my classroom and am very comfortable with it. I already know how to insert text, pictures and videos. Since I already have it installed on my computer, there is no additional cost to me. (unlike the fee that Prezi requires to register.) I post alot of my PPT presentations on my school website so that mys students can access it from home for additional review help. I worry that I used Prezi, most of my students are not familiar with its uses.