My personal story…
- AS A STUDENT
I think I learned pathology the hard way in medical school, we did not had a pathology lab, everything was theoretical. Our class members were divided in teams and assigned certain pathology topics that needed to be researched, discussed with the teacher, and later presented to the whole class in a big auditorium. We researched only from pathology books, studied images with captions from those books, and some old slides from our teacher, and maybe from one or two journals. That was it!
But we learned, with a lot of effort but we did it.
- AS A TEACHER
When I first started as a teacher, internet, power point, and projectors helped us to explain pathology in a much easier and practical way. We could get a lot of gross and microscopic pathology images (free) for teaching, we could make great powerpoint presentations. Students could search the web for pathology sites and find interesting cases.
But students complains were: “I see the picture, I read the caption, but I cannot find what the caption is explaining.” Another common complain was: “Everything is blue and pink, that’s all I see”.
It was time, we needed to change again.
So classes needed to be more interactive, students needed to participate more, to engage with the material and understand it.
We used collaborative learning in our classes; it started working! Students were enjoying and seeing pathology as a challenge. But it was still difficult and still blue and pink.
After a few years we had a new plan, a new curriculum and a practical pathology class. But it couldn’t be with those old microscopes and glass slide collections, specific lab room hours, waiting for available microscopes and available glass slides. We decided it was time for a new pathology lab a digitized virtual pathology lab.
This new era started about four years ago… The story will continue…
drapatologia 