During the past nine years, the General Biology Program has been integrating multimedia into almost every aspect of its introductory biology curriculum. To facilitate the use of multimedia in all of its forms, the Program developed its own multimedia presentation (UPresent) and database (UGather) software. No software applications of this type existed when our project began. UPresent has been extensively tested over the years, and has been used for presentations to over 100,000 students, while UGather has been used to help us manage a multimedia image library of nearly 5000 items.
As of December 18, 1998, General Biology is providing UGather and UPresent free to anyone, anywhere. Please feel free to make use of these applications in conjunction with your teaching, research, business presentations, whatever (and spread the word!). You are always welcome to contact us to provide feedback and suggestions (see email link below).
User Guides are available in PDF format. If you have questions you can email them to: upresent@tc.umn.edu. We will post updates to the applications from our Web site when they become available. Currently, only Macintosh version of the applications are available, although many non-apple file types are supported. Cross-platform versions are currently under development and should be available soon.
There are a number of documents avaialable here that concern multimedia topics. These range from a case study that specifically discusses the multimedia project we have developed for our large introductory biology courses to other documents that address the mechanics of developing various types of content (e.g., animations, use of paint/draw programs, scanned images, etc.). They are meant to be user-friendly guides for developing and using multimedia content. We have also provided some examples of the type of content we have produced and regularly use in our courses.
