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I teach an introductory course in neurology for the speech
language pathology students in our department.
And I was having trouble finding an appropriate textbook and
appropriate materials to introduce these really complex
concepts to students at the junior and senior level.
I was at a conference looking at some materials published
by Blue Tree Publishing.
And they had a lot of great things to teach about the ear
and the voice and swallowing and other areas related to
communication disorders, but they had nothing
to help instructors teach about the brain.
And so I talked to them and said I wished they had something
like that and was invited to develop it with them.
Developing this software program with Blue Tree allowed me the
opportunity to work with an artist in China who was able
to draw the diagrams just the way I wanted them to be.
So it took about a year to develop the art work
for this program.
And fortunately during that time I was able to use
just those diagrams in class, for the first year I was
just able to use those.
But even that was a great help to teaching the students,
and they loved having those simplified diagrams that had
just what they needed to learn on them.
Then I started working with a computer programmer who
helped me develop the software program, and he was in the
state of Washington.
He would put together a part of the program and
send it to me via the web.
So it was this great long distance collaboration that
resulted in the end product of this software program
to teach basic neurology.
I was able to obtain a Redden Grant to provide the software
to my students via the Citrix server.
So the students access the program at no charge to them
through the server, and they're able to use it for
the whole semester that they're in the class.
And in class, I use the program to teach the different concepts.
For instance, if I'm teaching external structures of
the brain, there's a whole module on that.
And so I have the software projected on one screen and
my Power Point lecture on the other screen, and the students
are able to pull the program up on their own computers and
interact with the program just like I am during class.
Last year was the first year I implemented the software program
in class, and I was surprised to find that I actually finished
the material, got through all of the basic material in the course
two whole weeks sooner than usual, which was amazing because
that allows me to be able to teach more clinical application
at the end of the course.
So the students are able to actually learn that neurology
and then apply it to clinical cases and have a lot more
experience with it at the end of the class.