Happy Holidays 2010

Wishing you a very Happy Holidays and hope that 2010 was good to you. If not, we've got 2011 to give it another go!

Here's a little diddy to help you get geared for a quiet workweek between Christmas and New Year's.

May your 2011 be filled with continued opportunities to live, learn, and pass on your knowledge!

Google's Tech Quick Tip Videos

I don't know if you're like me, but if anyone in your family thinks that you have some level of tech savvy, you end up being the go-to person for tech troubleshooting for all things large and small.

For example, 20% of the time when my dad comes over to visit and is checking his email on my computer, he'll exclaim, "What happened to my bookmarks?!" Then I'll take a deep breath and remind him that his bookmarks are on HIS computer at home, and the ones on mine are specific to my computer alone.

Well, help is on the horizon now that the young techies at Google have created a fun and useful series of videos at TeachParentsTech.org. The website's name pretty much says it all.

These incredibly short and to the point videos all run under one minute. One of my favorite features is at the end of every video there is a childhood photo of the presenter with their parents.

Tips range from very basic (ie, how to copy and paste, or how to increase text size) to skills that everyone, not just parents, can appreciate (ie, how to take a screenshot (see below)). A lot of the tips are geared towards Mac users, but some do cover tips for PCs.




Feel free to navigate the TeachParentsTech.org website for more videos, or simply browse the related videos in the YouTube right menu after viewing one of their videos.

Share this news with your parents and other frequent tech-frantic but loving family member or friends. They'll thank you for it, and you can thank the folks at Google for making our lives easier.

UCSF's New Teaching & Learning Center opening in January

The brand new state of the art Teaching & Learning Center will be opening its doors in January 2011. The TLC, housed on the second floor of the UCSF Library, will foster interprofessional health education.

This new facility is where students will practice their clinical skills, ranging from working with standardized (actor) patients, to working with simulation models for clinical procedures, and to telemedicine training. The TLC will be the new home as well for the Kanbar Center for Simulation, Clinical Skills and Telemedicine Education.

The project is state funded by Telemedicine and PRIME-US Education Facilities initiative as a result of California State Proposition 1D. PRIME-US is a UCSF specific Program In Medical Education for the Urban Underserved.

In addition to clinical skills learning spaces, there are also seminar rooms, a computer lab, media development center, and community spaces for group discussions and collaborative work. Seminar and classrooms are equipped with multiple large flat panel screens, and high definition video recorders for telecasting with remote learners and for recording class content. Teaching spaces have retractable walls to expand to accomodate different class sizes and equipped with modular furniture to allow for easier collaborative learning.

The TLC will open the first week of January. Come take part in the open house activities the week of January 18th. More info at http://tlc.library.ucsf.edu/ . You will not be disappointed, plus, enjoy views of the cityscape and Golden Gate Bridge.

PubMed's Video Tutorials

Need some answers for how-to's with PubMed, but the librarian isn't available to help? Then you should check out online tutorials put together by the folks at the National Library of Medicine who run PubMed's content.

On PubMed's homepage, select the PubMed Tutorials link under the Using PubMed section below the search box. That will take you to a collection of "Quick Tours", which are narrated tutorials.

Good to know that there are multiple sources of help out there for how to efficectively use PubMed.

25 Basic Styles of Blogging

Are you an active blogger? A newbie blogger? Only in the consideration stage of becoming a blogger? If you are any of these, this presentation gives some very helpful tips on the multiple types of blogging styles that can engage your readers.

Each style is rated by:

(1) Suggested frequency of postings
(2) The "Buzz Index" - how likely the posting will be linked to and commented on
(3) Difficulty level in creating each posting style

My personal opinion is that you should use any combination of several styles to make your blog interesting and engaging with your audience. No one style is dominantly the best. The ratings will help you determine which styles you should consider using most.

The 25 Basic Styles of Blogging ... And When To Use Each One

View more presentations from Rohit Bhargava.

The presentation author, Rohit Bhargava, is Senior Vice President of 360 Digital Influence Group at Ogilvy, a large global advertising company.

May these tips help guide you through your blogging adventures!

Medical Mnemonics Apps

So much to memorize, so little time. Is that the story of your medical school life?

Well, the NerdcoreLearning Board Review Medical Mnemonics app has come to your rescue. This app is available for $0.99 at the iTunes Apps store online. The high-yield content has been selected by attending physicians and students to provide an extensive collection of easily browsable topics and organs systems.

In addition to mnemonics, the app also provides news feeds from the Nerdcore Learning website.

Special thanks to first-year med student Asya Ofshteyn for pointing me to the Nerdcore app.

Another mobile resource is available from Medical Mnemonics.com. It is compatable with Palm OS and is also available as a browsable website and PDFs are available compiling the mnemonics.

Okay, enough talk for now, go forth and learn!

Team-Based Learning - Is It for You?

Team-based learning (TBL) has steadily gained momentum in the field of education. Back in the late 1970's, Larry Michaelsen, a Professor of Management, then of Oklahoma State University, and now of University of Central Missouri, first termed TBL and showed it to be an effective mode of teaching students in small groups of ideally 4 to 7 students per group.

TBL can turn a previously more passive lecture-based class into an active student collaborative environment. A general TBL session would look like this:

(1) Individual Study: Students are expected to have prepared for the session ahead of time by reading teacher-assigned materials.

(2) Individual Test: The time in class is then open for students to assess their knowledge of the material; first on their own by taking an IRAT (individual readiness assessment test).

(3) Team Test: Groups then work as a team to answer the same IRAT question. Students deliberate and decide on a group answer to the GRAT (group readiness assessment test).

(4) Written Appeals: the class reconvenes as a large group to discuss the answers from each group; instructor provides input to direct the discussion.

(5) Application Question: students work in their groups to apply their knowledge and critical thinking skills to answer a question posed to the entire class by the instructor. The class then reconvenes and discusses their answers with the instructor's oversight.

Students can earn points for each section of the TBL sesion that count toward their course grade.

The resources below give an overview of how TBL may work to enhance your course lectures.

Watch this video of Michaelsen describing the significance of different physical set-ups of teams

This video details TBL at University of Texas at Austin and is an excellent introduction to TBL

LITERATURE [click on the titles below to browse content]

Michaelsen, L.K., Watson, W.E., Cragin, J.P., and Fink, L.D. (1982) Team-based learning: A potential solution to the problems of large classes. Exchange: The Organizational Behavior Teaching Journal 7(4): 18-33. [Click here to request article]

Michaelsen, L. K. (2008). Team-based learning for health professions education: A guide to using small groups for improving learning. Sterling, Va: Stylus.

Michaelsen, L. K., Knight, A. B., & Fink, L. D. (2002). Team-based learning: A transformative use of small groups. Westport, Conn: Praeger.

Koles, P G, Stolfi, A, Borges, N J, et al. (2010). The impact of team-based learning on medical students' academic performance. Academic medicine, 85(11), 1739-45.

Parmelee, D, & Michaelsen, L K. (2010). Team-based learning: it's here and it WORKS!. Academic medicine, 85(11), 1658-9.

Parmelee, D X, & Michaelsen, L K. (2010). Twelve tips for doing effective Team-Based Learning (TBL). Medical teacher, 32(2), 118-22.

Parmelee, D X, DeStephen, Dan, & Borges, N J. (2009). Medical students' attitudes about team-based learning in a pre-clinical curriculum. Medical education online, 14, 1-.

Click here for PUBMED RESULTS for a search on team-based learning

Team-Based Learning (Univ of British Columbia website) - http://teambasedlearning.apsc.ubc.ca/

Procedures Consult: an Online Resource to Brush Up on Clinical Skills Knowledge

"See one. Do one. Teach One…Made Better and Safer”. That’s the tagline of Procedures Consult, an online resource that is now available to you thanks to the UCSF Medical Center and the Library’s joint efforts to set up a subscription to this tool. This comprehensive and concise procedural reference tool details how to prepare for, perform and follow up on the most common medical procedures.

View a quick narrated overview tutorial below

Key features include:
· Videos and illustrations for each procedure
· Self-directed procedures training and testing with trackable results
· Pre-, During, and Post-procedure reference
· Procedural checklists and Universal protocols
· Billing codes for procedures

Additional educational benefits:
· Highlights when patient "informed consent" is required
· Reinforces Joint Commission patient safety concepts
· Conforms to ACGME and ABMS (American Board of Internal Medicine) standards

Helpful ways to browse the content from the Procedures Consult homepage are to: (a) look under the Procedures by specialty listed in the left menu bar (b) type a specific procedure into the search box, or (c) select a particular region on the illustration of the human body.

Below is an example of what a procedures listing contains. Go to http://tinyurl.com/pconsult to view a short narrated video tutorial on how to navigate Procedures Consult.

CLICK ON THE IMAGE BELOW TO SEE LARGER VIEW

Options of where to access Procedures Consult:

- Listed under the Popular Resources section on the Library’s homepage
- Download the Clinician’s Toolbar to your browser for a one click link to Procedures Consult

How to access this resource on your mobile device:
- Go to m.proceduresconsult.com *
- Also check out the UCSF mobile page at m.ucsf.edu developed by the Library

Top Reasons to use Procedures Consult:

(1) Clear and concise information about how to perform major medical procedures

(2) Excellent self-review of information you need to know for critical clinical skills training

(3) Ideal teaching tool to offer residents, students, and other medical trainees that allows them to track their learning via self-paced tests

* Setting up mobile access: first go to Procedures Consult - the web resource (http://app.proceduresconsult.com/Learner/Default.aspx) - (NOTE: you must sign into VPN first, if you're accessing this off-campus). In the upper right of their page, click on the "Sign-in" link. Create your account there. That should be what you use to log into on your mobile device when you go to m.proceduresconsult.com.

Use RefGrab-It to Download your PubMed Results

If you've used a citation software, like RefWorks, you know that it takes a few steps to get a citation from PubMed into your citation software. It's a multi-step process that requires saving your citations in PubMed first as a text file before importing into RefWorks or EndNote.

Click this link to see this traditional method.

BUT if you have a RefWorks account, you can actually use the RefGrab-It feature to capture citations in PubMed. This allows you to completely by-pass the traditional method of saving a text file before importing.

You can do this one citation at a time, or as I prefer, if you have several citations, send them to the Clipboard in PubMed and then use RefGrab-It to import into RefWorks.

Watch this narrated video to see how.

RefGrab-It to Cite Information from the Web

So, you've found an article or book that would be perfect to cite in your research. What's a fast and easy way to capture and create a citation from that website?

Here's an idea:

The citation management software, RefWorks, has a RefGrab-It feature that allows you to import information from any website into RefWorks.

Downloading RefGrab-It bookmarklet to your browser:

(1) Go to https://refworks.com/Refworks/newuser.asp to set up a new account if do not already have one. [If off-campus, log into VPN and Network Connect first; RefWorks is free to UCSF users because the Library has a site licence.]

(2) Go to http://www.refworks.com/refworks/BookMarklet.asp to download the bookmarklet


Watch this video showing how to use the RefGrab-It tool to easily import the web citation into your RefWorks account.

Calculate free mobile app

Calculate is a free app from QxMD. It is a decision support tool that has over 150 clinical calculators. It is available for the iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry, and Android.

The app is an upgrade and integration of the other QxMD's apps for Cardio Calc, Neph Calc, GI Calc, Heme Calc and Pregnancy Wheel.

User feedback is very high for this app. Check it out for yourself!

Watch this non-narrated quick tour:

Google Scholar: How to Re-Sort Results by Date

You may have noticed that when you run a search in Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com), the top result is NOT necessarily the most recent publication on your search topic.

As with any result of a regular Google search, the top listing is the most linked-to page on the Internet on your topic. Thus, the top result is based more on popularity on the Web rather than on accuracy or complete relevance to your original search.

It's quite straight-forward on how to re-sort your Google Scholar results. In the light-green bar above your Google Scholar search results, select the arrow next to the "anytime" box. Choose the date you'd like the results to go back to.

To make sure you have a much more thorough list of results, make sure to search a complimentary database, such as PubMed, that always ranks its results by most relevant and most recent at the top.

PubMed Quick Tip #14: Creating a Permanent Link to Search Results

Let's say you want to generate a URL to get you straight to a set of PubMed results from a search you ran. Why would this be useful?

- Instead of telling someone to copy and paste a search phrase you searched in PubMed, you can provide them a direct link to the results

- You want to have a link, to say all the papers you've published that are in PubMed, available on a personal or departmental website

Here's how you can create a permanent link to your PubMed results:

(1) Run your search in PubMed

(2) On the results page, scroll down to the lower part of the right-hand margin, and select the See more... link under the Search details section

(3) Select the URL button

(4) Copy and paste the URL that appears at the top of your browser screen

EXTRA TIP:
Since the URL generated is rather long, you can shorten it, if you like, before you send it to someone, by using a tool that will generate a shorter URL (for example tinyurl.com)

MedFools for Free Scutsheets

Med students and residents - help me out here:

Have any of you used MedFools before?

This not-for-profit site has been around since 2001 and is for "students by students" and "residents by residents". The site provides information ranging from sample personal statements, insider tips and book recommendations for USMLE prep, wards, residency applications, match, pre-med prep, and free downloadable materials.

Their homepage has an item mentioning that their site has been blacklisted by the AAMC. Apparently, some medical school and residency applicants may have lifted sample essays from MedFools and unwisely used them in their own application.

Steering clear of this sticky issue, I wanted to point out a feature that looks quite helpful on this site: The downloadable scutsheets and fact sheets . These free resources can come in handy when gathering patient information and reminders of what to cover during the patient encounter. They're printable and convenient to stuff into your whitecoat pocket.

Subjects include scutsheets and fact sheets for:
- Medicine - General Wards - Pediatrics - OB/GYN - Psychiatry - USMLE (bacteria, fungus, and parasites charts)

Examples of some of these resources:
- H&P form for clerkships - http://www.medfools.com/downloads/megs-history-physical.pdf
- Peds Notes - http://www.medfools.com/downloads/pediatric_notes.pdf
- USMLE Parasites study chart - http://www.medfools.com/downloads/parasite.pdf

Give the site a once over and let me know what you think of this resource.

Medical Radio: free iTunes app

Take a break from listening to the top 25 songs on your iPod. Here's a free app from the iTunes Store that can satisfy your thirst for knowledge while you're at the gym or while commuting.

Medical Radio is a free app from ReachMD. These weekly 15 minute broadcasts, for physicians by physicians, are from the Sirius-XM satellite radio channel XM160.

- Over 5000 searchable podcasts

- Covers medical information, conversation, and education (CME & CE) about general to specialty medicine topics

- Take a CME or CE course exam directly on your mobile device

- Includes FDA and CDC updates

- Compatable with iPhone, iPod Touch, & iPad

Give this app a try and let me know what you think of it. Happy listening and learning!

Google Quick Tip #28

Have you noticed that there are two links in the left menu of a Google search results page?

Hats off to you if your curiosity has gotten the better of you, and you've clicked on those links to see what's hiding under there. Or if you've ignored those links, as I did for a few weeks, you'll be happily surprised by what's hiding under those sidebar links.

GOOGLE QUICK TIP #28

By clicking on either the More or Show search tools dropdown arrows in the left menu of a Google results page, you can further narrow the results to quickly find a more relevant set.

Watch this short non-narrated tutorial to see these links in action

Clicking on the More arrow lets you filter results by format type, such as:
- Images -Videos -Maps -Blogs -Books & -Discussions

TIP:
Clicking on the Discussions category displays online conservations going on out there in the Internet on whatever your search topic is. This can be a great tool for getting a pulse of what different opinions are out there on your topic.

Clicking on the Show search tools arrow further limits or rearranges your results. Some features of note that are particularly helpful are:

- results from the past month, past day, past hour, etc.
- can rearrange results by date rather than the default order by relevance
- Related searches can pull together results that were not part of your original search
- Wonder wheel is a cool visual tool that dynamically changes the results based on topics you select from a central image representing the results on the right

Thank goodness for Google constantly trying to improve their user experience. Hopefully these new features will help you quickly unearth more useful information from amongst the usual pages and pages of results you get when you search Google.

PubMed Quick Tip #13: Creating Results Filters

If you've ever been overwhelmed by the loads and loads of results you may get from a PubMed search, there's a trick to make it a pain-free experience to review your search results.

Creating Filters will allow you to very quickly skim through your search results to look for some highly relevent papers.

Watch this non-narrated quick video below to see how to set up filters for higher levels of evidence literature

Here's how:

(1) Sign into your MyNCBI account. (If you don't have one, register for one for free at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/myncbi/register)

(2) Click on the MyNCBI link at the top right of PubMed

(3) Select the Search Filters link in the left menu bar

(4) Select the PubMed listing under the Choose a database section at the bottom of the page

(5) Click on the Search for Filters tab

(6) Search each one of these following terms and check the corresponding box in front of each listing (meta-analysis, systematic reviews, randomized controlled trial, clinical trial, review)

To see the filters in action, run a search in PubMed (after signing into your MyNCBI account) and in the right menu of the results page will be the filters that you set up, allowing you to easily jump to just those types of papers in the results.

EXTRA TIP

You can add up to 15 filters. There are interesting options to explore if you go back to searching filters (see steps 5 & 6 above). For example, you can search on Qualitative to add filters for qualitative research.

Google Quick Tip #27

My aunt used to complain that while away on business trips, her husband would forever be calling her at odd hours of the night mistakenly thinking that it was a decent time to be receiving a call in the United States.

Well, now Google makes it so that my uncle no longer has to get in trouble for waking up my aunt with his middle of the night phone calls.

GOOGLE QUICK TIP #27

To find out the time in a specific city, simply type in the word time followed by the name of the location.

If you want to know the current time in different time zones in the United States, just type the words time now

PubMed Quick Tip #13: Highlighting Your Search Terms

Who wouldn't appreciate having their search terms highlighted as you browse your PubMed results?

I find it very helpful to use the highlight feature. For example, the title of a paper may sound quite promising, but if you use the highlighting feature to look for where those words appear in the PubMed abstract, you might find that there are very few, if any, of your search terms in the abstract. This indicates that the paper may not be worth reading.

Here's how to activate the highlighting feature:

(1) Sign into your MyNCBI account at the top right of PubMed (if you don't have an account, you can set one up at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/myncbi/register/)

(2) Click on the Preferences link in the left menu

(3) Select the Highlighting link to choose a color

(4) Select the green Save button to remember your preference


TIP:

Keep yourself signed in to MyNCBI with the "Keep Me Signed In" checkbox that appears when you first sign in to MyNCBI. This way your highlighting feature will always be on.

iRadiology App

The iRadiology App is available for free to download at the iTunes Apps store.

This app allows you to browse amongst 500+ radiology cases to improve skills to interpret plain film, CT, and MRI readings.

The cases are based upon materials from Dr. Gillian Lieberman, the Director of Harvard Medical Student training and Associate Director of the Residency Program at Beth Israel Medical Center.

You can increase the zoom capability on your iPhone to better view the images:

1. Go to "Settings", tap "General", then "Accessibility"
2. Tap "Zoom", and slide the Zoom feature to the "On" position

Tapping on the "Findings" link related to an image will bring up more information pertaining to the featured clinical case. One medical student reviewer on the web commented that he found this to be high yield information in studying for the USMLE 1 Steps 1 & 2 exams.

Check it out!

Use Jing to Create Quick Online Tutorials

For the past two years or so, I've been using Jing to produce quick online tutorials (aka "screencasts") that capture what I am doing on my computer screen. Jing, which is free, is a product of TechSmith, the company that produces Camtasia, which is not free.

Jing is great if you need to make quick online tutorials. Noteworthy features of Jing are:

* Record your voice narrating the tutorial

* Create a JPEG image of any part of your screen that can be labeled, annotated, and highlighted

* Immediately generates a URL to your tutorial that you can share with others or post to a website, even to Twitter and Facebook

* Both PC and Mac compatable

For $14.95/yr, you might consider purchasing JingPro. This allows you to save your tutorials as movie files that can be easily uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook or to your own web server.

One big thing to keep in mind about Jing is that you CANNOT edit your recordings. You'd have to buy software such as TechSmith's Camtasia or Adobe Captivate to be able to edit your recordings. These programs I'd suggest you use if you're looking to make lengthier and more interactive tutorials.

But for its amazing ease of use, I'm all about using Jing!

Watch what Jing has to say about itself:

Also check out their blog for more tips

As a huge advocate of efficiency and accessibility to creating online learning materials, I encourage you to go forth and Jing!

Genes to Cognition Online

The Genes to Cognition Online (G2C) website is an amazingly dynamic and interactive way to use multimedia to teach neuroscience. The resource is a project of the Dolan DNA Learning Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

G2C looks across and analyzes six levels of thinking and thinking disorders and research approaches:

*Genes *Biochemicals *Cells *Brains *Cognition (Behavior) *Environment

Its interface appeals to both the visual and textual learner. The dynamic map of networks connect topics and allows the user to interactively explore the content, which includes videos. The site's creators state:

"We hope visitors will integrate information from the levels to gain a broad understanding of topic areas. Ultimately, this networking process mimics the nature of science: amalgamating information from different domains to form a complete picture of the world."

The upper right portion on the homepage has a link to Teacher Feature that provides teacher's guides, student worksheets, and suggested test questions.

Also in the upper right region of the homepage is a link to a Protein-Protein Interaction Database. You can find brief descriptions of proteins and get links to more detailed information from resources such as OMIM and Entrez Gene.

This is the same group that developed the 3D Brain App that's available for free to download from iTunes Apps Store.

Watch their introductory video on how to use this resource.

Making Your Bookmarks Delicious

Can't remember the name of that cool website your colleague emailed you about praciticing auscultation techniques? How about that website your mom told you about how to baste a turkey? Delicious is a way to keep your bookmarks in one place, no matter what computer you're using.

If you're already using Delicious, kudos to you. If not, once you've read this post, you'll be making all your bookmarked websites incredibly Delicious.

Delicious is a social bookmarking site founded in 2003 by Joshua Schachter and acquired by Yahoo in 2005. According to Wikipedia, by the end of 2008, there were over 5.3 million users and over 180 million unique URLs bookmarked on Delicious.

What is social bookmarking? Social bookmarking allows you to untether yourself from your own computer and be able to access your bookmarks wherever you may be at any computer.

You "tag" your bookmarks to describe a website and those tags are shared with others. Exploring similar tags creates a social network of people interested in similar topics.

Here is a quick way to understand social bookmarking:

Great uses for Delicious:

* Storing and tagging websites that you find interesting

* Create subject specific Delicious bookmarks to share with your colleagues and friends; can also have several people add to the same Delicious account. For example, see what the New York Academy of Medicine Library has in their Delicious account.

* Explore what other people have tagged in their Delicious accounts to help you discover sites you were unaware of but would be highly relevant to your interests

The presenation below gives a quick introduction of what Delicious can do for you.

Social Bookmarking; Delicious. How & Why

View more presentations from David Hopkins.

Read what Delicious has to say about themselves - http://delicious.com/help/learn

Click on the Tools link at the very bottom of a Delicious page to get all the info you need to know how to easily integrate Delcious into your web browser - http://delicious.com/help/tools

Medical Education, Baby, and Me

My son was born at the UCSF Children's Hospital in early January, three weeks before his expected due date, and just one day shy of being considered full-term. Being in a high-risk pregnancy category, I knew that I wanted to have the most experienced members of the medical team at the delivery.

Santiago already contemplating life at the tender age of two weeks

I anticipated that I would probably know several of the interns and students that would be rounding while I was a patient, since I teach many literature searching workshops for the UCSF School of Medicine. My conundrum was whether or not I would feel comfortable having medical students and interns I knew professionally taking care of me in a very private and personal realm. It was tough to decide to want to keep my professional and personal life separate.

When I was admitted, I made a request to the senior attending to have only the attending or R3 (third-year resident) be the one to deliver my baby. In the end, I am very fortunate that the entire labor and delivery teams that oversaw my 32 hours of labor provided incredible expertise and support.

The delivery team consisted of the senior attending, R3, R1 (intern), medical student, labor nurse, and anesthesiologist. I was impressed by the incredible level of patience, knowledge, skill, professionalism, and caring that each member contributed to the team. This mixture of strengths ultimately reinforced my realization that when it came time to actually deliver the baby, it was more important to me to have a strong team with me, regardless of whether or not I knew any of them professionally.

In a way, I learned my lesson to practice what I preach. I have helped several faculty, clinicians and students over the years with finding resources to support the educational model of interdisciplinary education and communication skills within team dynamics. It took having to actually go through a personal experience to truly appreciate the power of this aspect of medical education. I have huge respect for the triumphs of medical education. And so very grateful to have a healthy and happy baby.