Ricki Lewis,
University of New York at Albany Douglas Gaffin,
University of Oklahoma Mariëlle Hoefnagels,
University of Oklahoma Bruce Parker,
Utah Valley State College
ISBN: 0072919183 Copyright year: 2004
The Active Art Story
McGraw-Hill is the only publisher with Active Art, which an instructor can manipulate any way he or she wants. True, every publisher offers computer files of text art. Some offer alternative versions from which, for example, a user can remove the labels. Some even offer PowerPoint slide series in which complex pieces of art build up stepwise.
None of these alternatives, however, offers the flexibility of Active Art.
What is Active Art?
Each piece of Active Art is simply a PowerPoint file, but it is really four products in one.
First, if an instructor wants to show a static image from the textbook in a PowerPoint presentation, he or she can simply copy and paste the desired slide from the Active Art file.
Second, since every Active Art image is completely ungroupable, an instructor can use any part of any Active Art slide as "biological clipart" in any other PowerPoint presentation.
Third, since every Active Art file is actually a series of PowerPoint slides that build up the art's concept step by step, even a PowerPoint novice can use the slides in an Active Art file as a simple animation.
Fourth, an instructor can remove the colors from any Active Art slide or object, creating black-and-white images for use in lecture supplements or exams.
The most flexibility of any art program
Active Art offers unrivalled flexibility to instructors. No longer will you be limited by space-hogging, totally inflexible bitmapped images. Active Art offers exactly the same information as a bitmap of the same diagram, but it usually uses far less disk space and can be manipulated in any way you desire. Font sizes too small? Make them larger. Colors don't project well in your auditorium? Change them. Want to emphasize or delete any part of the image? No problem at all. You can even add additional text or objects to any slide.
Moreover, instructors who are proficient PowerPoint users can easily apply PowerPoint's animation features to any object in any Active Art slide
How to use Active Art
Active Art works for both simple and complex figures. To illustrate, look at the Active Art list for Life 4/e. One of the simplest figures developed as Active Art is figure 2.9A (Table Salt, an Ionically Bonded Molecule). If you open the file that appears after this paragraph, you will see that the first slide is the complete image, exactly as shown in the text. The next six slides show one instructor's way of building the ionic bond concept, step by step. You can paste the whole series into your own PowerPoint lecture. Alternatively, if you would prefer to tell the story in a different way, Active Art gives you the flexibility to change objects or slides around however you want. Finally, if you simply want a picture of an atom and not the rest of the series, it's easy to ungroup the slide, copy the atom, and paste it into your own presentation.
Figure 2.9A: An ionically-bonded molecule
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Life's figure 19.9 (Replication of HIV) is a much more complex diagram. You can open this file at the end of this paragraph. As always, the first slide in the file contains the complete image from the text. This figure conveys a tremendous amount of information, perhaps too much to show your class all at once. Thus, the remaining 29 slides build up the figure from the very beginning. Again, you may simply choose to paste these slides into your lecture intact, or you may change them as you wish, or perhaps you can use PowerPoint's animation figures to spice up the presentation. Because of Active Art's flexibility, the choice is yours.
Figure 19.9: How HIV infects a cell
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Which art is Active Art?
Of course, not every piece of art in a textbook benefits from Active Art. The images selected for development as Active Art include those that show processes (e.g. action potential, mitosis, photosynthesis) and those that yield useful bits of clipart that an instructor can use over and over (e.g. membrane and mitochondrion structures). So far, every McGraw-Hill biology textbook offers at least 60 pieces of Active Art. Some have many more, and additional pieces are being developed all the time.
Who can use Active Art?
Active Art is free to instructors who adopt McGraw-Hill's biology textbooks.
To obtain an instructor login for this Online Learning Center, ask your local sales representative.
If you're an instructor thinking about adopting this textbook, request a free copy for review.
Figure 2.9A: An ionically-bonded molecule
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2004 McGraw-Hill Higher Education