Worksheets
Teachers will find worksheets available here. These sheets help direct your students activities when using the cell tour.
Instructions for use
Using the online textbook is quite simple. After clicking on the Virtual Textbook button on the homepage, select the chapter you wish to use from the table of contents, and then use the controls at the bottom of each page to move forward and backward through the content. You can also skip to any section in the chapter from the chapter introduction page, which contains a complete index for the chapter.
The Virtual Cell Tour is also fairly simple to navigate. Selecting a section of the cell will give you a tour of that organelle. Use the buttons on the top of the frame to rotate the organelle left and right, and zoom in and out. Note that not all organelles can be manipulated in all ways at all times; buttons which are not currently available will grayed out. The controls on the left edge act as Next, Previous, and Home buttons. In most cases you must follow the on-screen instructions in order to move to the next page of the tour.
Due to the fact that many users may have bandwith problems, or lack enough internet connections to use the Virtual Cell in a classroom setting over the internet, the entire site is available for download as a series of ZIP files, so that it may be installed on your computers and used without an internet connection (a web browser is still required, however). To learn more about this, click here.
System Requirements
The online textbook componant of the Virtual Cell Web Page can be viewed with virtually any web browser, on virtually any system. The movies and animations are all presented in one of two formats: Animated GIF or QuickTime Movie.
Your web browser should be able to view the animated GIFs without any plugins or additional software. Viewing QuickTime Movies on a PC (Windows-based computer), however, may require that you install the plugin and software which is available from Apple's website.
The Online Tour of the Virtual Cell Web Site requires at least Netscape Communicator 4.0 or Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0. We recommend Netscape Communicator, as it was used to design and test most of the site.

This site is best viewed with Netscape Communicator |  |

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Copyright (1998): All the models and animation included on these pages belong to the Virtual Cell Web Page.