Review: Fascinating Education

Currently I am grading a highschool biology course, I'm doing pretty good on it but sometimes my students ask me a question that requires some research, ergo when I learned about reviewing Fascinating Biology put out by Fascinating Education, I thought, what a perfect opportunity for me to brush up on my highschool biology!! Thank you Fascinating Education for the opportunity to do so.You have been a good help to me.  :)

About Fascinating Education
It was created by Dr. Margulies.  Fascinating Biology, is an online biology course, that comes with 18 lessons.  His goal is to break down the sciences into bite-sized, manageable chunks to increase the learning potential in his students. As you can see, each lesson is broken down into several components.  If you stop your video, it will pick up again where you left off when you return which is ever so handy.  Means you can just stop and not worry about having to start all over again.  Having each section clearly labeled also means you know where he is going as he moves through the lecture.

Each Lesson also comes with a built in glossary/vocabulary section.   If you highlight a word, it's definition shows up below. This is a very handy feature.

How I used it.
One of the things I love about fascinating biology is that I can pick the order I want to do the lessons in.  For instance, one of my students was having a problem with understanding mitosis and meiosis... so I went directly to that section, listened and got the answer.  AND since we get a full course transcript it made it really easy for me to get the answer to my student, and help them find additional support online to help them gain better understanding.  Pretty cool eh?

The 18 lessons are as follows: 

• What is life
• Chemistry review
• The cell membrane
• Take in Nutrients
• Take in Energy (four parts)
• Grow
• Reproduce (three parts)
• Homeostasis (two parts)
• Adapt (two parts)
• Prokaryotes, Protists, Animals, Fungi
• Plants

So other than researching areas of concern for my students, how did I actually use it?  
At night!  Seriously, hubby would go to bed, and I'd put in my ear phones and just listen.  I could work on other things, listen and do my brushing up.  It was great!   When an area was harder to understand I could stop what I was doing, rewind the video and listen again while watching the slides.  Then if I really didn't understand I could pull up the transcript and read through it.  Have these two different ways to access the material I felt completely covered! 

I honestly didn't really look at the tests a whole lot but I did take one and much to my surprise I pulled off an 80% which tells me that if you listen AND read the transcripts...you'll nail the material.  The questions come right out of the script.. so honestly listen, read, test yourself if you like to.  BUT as an adult using it as a refresher, seriously its optional.  As a highschool student needing a transcript.. take the test.  :)

If you do take the route of using the tests, as you go through your results you can easily see where you went wrong. Helps with the learning eh?  But seriously, unless you are you taking this for highschool biology credit, don't worry about the tests unless you love taking them.  :)

Taking the Chemistry course first is recommended, but if you choose to do Biology first they have a short chemistry course you can take first. Six lessons to make sure you understand the chemistry part of biology.  It's called Chemistry Pre-course for Biology.  It's a subset of the chemistry course and would be an added cost.

My thoughts:
I love love love how everything is covered in this biology curriculum.. the full course transcript, the ability to watch or listen to the video being taught, the slides, being able to jump around from lesson to lesson learning what I need to.  It's great.  Seriously.  For the purposes for which I am using it, it has been a useful addition into my household. 

Fascinating Education. 
Fascinating Biology, along with a pre-course (6 lessons that cover the basics of Chemistry bonding methods) to help me brush up on my chemistry.
A full year subscription
Cost $79/yr
Pre-course Chemistry $20
Learn more here.

For the past few weeks I've been reviewing Fascinating Education along with 50 other reviewers.     We've been using these courses:
Fascinating Chemistry
Fascinating Biology
Fascinating Physics
Do check them out, and look over their sample lessons too!
I invite you to click here or on the image below to see what we had to say about them.

You can see my review of Fascinating Chemistry here.

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