The Purpose of TIPS/TAPS is to:

•   Provide school districts and other governmental entities opportunities for greater efficiency and economy in acquiring goods and services.

•   Provide quick and efficient delivery of goods and services by contracting with “high performance” vendors.

•   Equalize purchasing power for smaller entities that are not able to command the best contracts for themselves.

•   Maintain credibility and confidence in business procedures by maintaining open competition for purchases and by complying with purchasing laws and ethical business practices.

•   Assist entities in maintaining the essential controls for budget and accounting purpose.

This means that members can order with confidence knowing that all purchasing requirements have already been completed during the RFP process, saving the time and expense associated with competitively bidding each purchase.

Ordering is simple:

1.    Create a purchase order (use your district’s normal procedure). Be sure to write or type in DIGITAL FROG somewhere on the purchase order. If you want product shipped by courier please include your EIN number (federal tax id) for US Customs.

2.   FAX the purchase order to TIPS/TAPS at 866-839-8472

3.   Digital Frog will apply the 10% discount and ship your order within 2-5 business days.

I’ve been trying to come up with a pithy little introduction here, but really all we wanted to share is that we’ve put together a short(ish) movie as an introduction to Digital Frog International’s educational software programs. We think it does a pretty good job explaining what you get with a DFI program, the range and depth of topics we cover and why you and your students can benefit from our software.

So grab some popcorn, but your feet up for a few minutes and let us show you what you get with a Digital Frog product. And if you’re really inspired, you can head over to our DemoWare pages to get your free demo versions to try for yourself.

(If you’ve never checked out the Digital Frog YouTube channel, you can find a growing number of videos, from sample dissection videos from The Digital Frog 2.5 to the shockingly popular time-lapse of a decomposing rabbit, with more going up in the coming months.)

In our frog dissection, anatomy and ecology program The Digital Frog 2.5, we address environmental concerns and the effects they have had on frog populations. Since we first published in 1995, new research has identified other possible causes, including urban noise and tiny parasites which have been found to cause damage to devloping limb buds.

It looks like it’s time to update the ecology section in The Digital Frog, part of which you can read here:

Introduction

Many scientists consider frogs important bio-indicators. Frogs have permeable skin and live both on land and in water. As a result, environmental problems quickly affect frogs. Recently, frog populations have declined or disappeared around the world, and deformities and mutations are becoming common. People have found adult frogs with misshapen bodies, extra legs, missing or abnormal organs, and even eyes growing inside mouths!

A Thousand Friends of Frogs

A Thousand Friends of Frogs Project was founded in 1995 to collect data on deformed frogs, and pass the information to research scientists. This project links students, educators, families, and scientists from around the world, and helps to educate people about frogs and their importance to us.

Possible causes

Frog deformities, mutations and declining populations are not likely to result from any single cause; it is much more probable that many factors affect our amphibian friends. Scientists have identified holes in the ozone layer, chemicals, pollution, habitat loss and frog harvesting as possible causes.

Ozone layer

Laboratory tests with ultraviolet light have produced frogs with leg deformities. Scientists speculate that holes in the ozone layer may allow enough ultraviolet light through to affect frogs in the wild.

Chemicals and pollution

Amphibian skin absorbs chemicals from both land and water. Tests show that some chemicals, pesticides, and industrial pollutants cause mutations, abnormal growth, or fatal deformities in frogs.

Industrial and agricultural by-products can harm local frogs. Acid rain and runoff rain can carry these chemicals to places far removed from human habitation.

Habitat loss and frog harvesting

Habitat loss is probably the biggest single factor in declining frog populations. Wetlands are frequently drained, filled in, or otherwise destroyed, depriving frogs of places to live. Commercial harvesting is another pressure. Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of frogs are captured each year and used in laboratories, schools, and restaurants; this causes serious declines in certain species.

Did you know?

We used four frogs in the original Digital Frog and none had deformities. This version required five frogs, and we discovered internal deformities in three of them.

We added one additional video that we recorded but were never able to use in a finished product: a time lapse showing the decomposition of a rabbit over eight days, reduced to one minute of video. This has become a surprising breakaway smash success on the Digital Frog YouTube Channel, closing in on 400,000 views and over 1200 comments.

We produced the video for a forest ecology program that was never completed as a way of demonstrating natural decomposition in a manner that words alone could not describe. It can be a bit disturbing for some, but quite dramatically shows how quickly the process happens, the various insects and organisms who help in decomposition, and goes a long way to explaining why you don’t often see the carcasses of dead animals in the woods‚ they don’t last long.

The version above is a new, higher resolution version than the original, allowing to you to see a bit more clearly what happens over the week the video was shot.

While our YouTube channel has been a bit quiet over the past while, we’re looking forward to putting up new videos both from our existing educational software and others that have not been publicly seen before. We’ll provide updates here, or you can also subscribe to the Digital Frog YouTube channel to see when new videos come online.

(If you’d like a downloadable version, we’re currently working on a new version of this video with narration to describe what is happening and the processes at work. That will be available exclusively through our Digital Frogger Club. You can sign up now and be notified when the video is ready for download.)

We could not help wondering why a practicing pathologist, who dissects human tissue for a living, would be taking the time to research dissection alternatives. This is what she says on the Dissection Alternatives website hosted by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine website:

“As a pathologist, I perform careful dissections every day‚ on human tissues, not on animals. It’s my job to know the relationship between anatomy and physiology, between health and disease.

But it wasn’t the frog or cat dissections we performed in public school that inspired me to study science. It was my excellent science teachers! The energy they poured into our classrooms, the academic heights they challenged us to reach, and their own bright intellects drew me into this field.

Decades later, I’ve come to regret those dissections and have since studied computerized alternatives that are extremely comprehensive. As a doctor who performs autopsies, I can assure students that computer images of well-preserved tissues look more like the “real thing” than the squishy gray organs of a formalin-fixed specimen. Simulated dissection is very realistic, the accompanying text is elegant, and the graphics are superb. Computerized alternatives are rapidly replacing animals in medical and veterinary colleges across the country. And the same is true at earlier levels of training. That means that younger students can easily learn biology by taking advantage of state-of-the-art methods that do not involve dissecting at all. My heartfelt gratitude goes out to science teachers everywhere who are creating a passion for humane scientific study. Tomorrow’s great physicians and researchers depend on it.”

We were not involved in the production of this video, but are thrilled with all that Nancy has to say about our program, Teh Digital Frog 2 and that she is one of our biggest supporters and proponents. And Nancy will not even allow us to buy her a cup of coffee!

We find it interesting that The Digital Frog 2.5 has also been voted the best dissection alternative by eSchool News readers. However, we created the program to teach anatomy and physiology, not dissection skills. We included the dissection module to bridge the gap between the traditional way of teaching anatomy and physiology and the 21st century way – better, kinder and much more cost effective way.

And one thing that Nancy does not mention is that schools can save huge amounts of money by teaching anatomy and physiology with The Digital Frog instead of with wet labs and textbooks. We have just returned from a science teachers conference in Texas. One middle school principal, who purchased a Building Site License for The Digital Frog 2.5 last year, stopped by our booth to say that he has already saved $1,200! You’ll be amazed at the cost savings, especially for large schools.

If you’re using QuickTime version 7.6 or later, you may encounter a problem when you try to launch our software with QuickTime not being recognized. You may be prompted that you need to install QuickTime to use the program even if you have it installed and will be unable to run the program at all. Unfortunately this effects both full and free DemoWare versions on all versions of Windows that run our programs.

Thankfully we have two pieces of good news:

1. We’re working on a fix.
2. Until then, we have a workaround solution that will allow you to run the programs. You can get full details on a support page on the QuickTime issue.

We regret if this creates any problems for our users. The cause of the issue was out of our hands. But we’re doing all we can to make things just work as they should again.

We had a canine team of three when Widgett, my Border Collie X pup, started coming to work with me. He joined Whiskey, a 12 year old German Shepherd and Dudley a one year old Golden Retriever. Whiskey was the office boss and took this job seriously (as any boss does) reminding the young guys to stay in line and out of her spot. Whiskey is the dog made “famous” in Digital Frog software, she is featured in the eyeshine section of The Digital Field to The Rainforest and, randomly on various Quit screens in the other programs. Sadly this spring Whisley’s age caught up with her and she is no longer patrolling our office and preventing the planes from landing on the property.

We run an educational software company and when customers call the office they can often hear the dogs “chatting” to us or to each other in the background. Dudley is very vocal and “talks” to his friends to get them to play. When not allowed to do as he pleases Dudley will think nothing of standing his ground and giving us his best back-talking woofs, and as with a toddler in trouble it is hard to not to laugh at his back barking.

With two pups in the office things aren’t always safe. A favorite thing to steal is the bubble wrap from the shipping department and just like kids they like to pop all the bubbles.

I spend a chunk of my day stepping over, around and on dogs! The young dogs love to lie under my desk and chair so I have run over stray ears,tails and feet on more than one occasion.

With Whiskey gone, a new dog was adopted from the local Humane Society for the Digital Frog security team. A handsome two year old Shepherd cross named Kado who now calls us his family. I can now bring my older dog Beemer (a clash with Whiskey) to work as well.

The canine team of four is a good one, one dog for notifying us to the imaginary cars driving up and the other three for reinforcements in case no one is really there!!

We have some messy moments, like when Dudley decided to go visiting the neighbors, uninvited. He had to have a swim in their pond and he likes to swim under water.I was so happy to find him up the road until I realized I would have my own Digital Field trip to the Wetlands in my car once he jumped in. Being a dog lover gave me no choice but to invite him into my car, sopping wet, covered in duck weed, algae and smelling like a swamp beast.

Some days are not as productive as others in our office; it depends what the dogs have on the agenda for the day. We laugh at the dogs everyday and some days wonder what we were ever thinking having four dogs, getting in the way causing mayhem and havoc. If you call our office and it sounds like a kennel, remember it is our dogs in the office.

We believed this to be such a fundamental topic in teaching about frog ecology that we even dedicated an entire screen in The Digital Frog 2.5’s ecology section to the issue. On the page about environmental concerns, we wrote:

Many scientists consider frogs important bio-indicators. Frogs have permeable skin and live both on land and in water. As a result, environmental problems quickly affect frogs.

Recently, frog populations have declined or disappeared around the world, and deformities and mutations are becoming common. People have found adult frogs with misshapen bodies, extra legs, missing or abnormal organs, and even eyes growing inside mouths!

Frog deformities, mutations and declining populations are not likely to result from any single cause; it is much more probable that many factors affect our amphibian friends. Scientists have identified holes in the ozone layer, chemicals, pollution, habitat loss and frog harvesting as possible causes.

Laboratory tests with ultraviolet light have produced frogs with leg deformities. Scientists speculate that holes in the ozone layer may allow enough ultraviolet light through to affect frogs in the wild.

Amphibian skin absorbs chemicals from both land and water. Tests show that some chemicals, pesticides, and industrial pollutants cause mutations, abnormal growth, or fatal deformities in frogs.

Industrial and agricultural by-products can harm local frogs. Acid rain and runoff rain can carry these chemicals to places far removed from human habitation.

Habitat loss is probably the biggest single factor in declining frog populations. Wetlands are frequently drained, filled in, or otherwise destroyed, depriving frogs of places to live. Commercial harvesting is another pressure.  Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of frogs are captured each year and used in laboratories, schools, and restaurants; this causes serious declines in certain species.

We used four frogs in the original Digital Frog, and none had deformities. This version required five frogs, and we discovered internal deformities in three of them.

New research suggests that there are two more natural causes contributing to frog deformities:

1. The fungal condition chytridiomycosis which has brought rapid extinctions to some amphibians.

2. The deformed frogs are actually victims of the predatory habits of dragonfly nymphs, which eat the developing hind limbs of tadpoles! Remarkably many tadpoles seem to survive the ordeal, resulting into as much as 10% of frog populations missing limbs. You can read more on the BBC’s Earth News page (and even watch the video evidence of one hapless tadpole being made a victim by a dragonfly nymph).

In other frog research news, yet another recent study suggests that up to one billion frogs are taken from the wild for human consumption each year. Not to mention the millions of frogs that are cut up every year in schools around the world. No wonder frogs are used as the poster children of the natural world!

The bulk of the funding is coming through the economic stimulus package. While the Education Department is cautioning school leaders that the stimulus marks a large, one-time increase in federal education funding‚ and they shouldn’t count on having this much funding every year‚ the funds are being billed as a “unique opportunity to make short-term investments with the potential for long-term benefits.”

The stimulus grants are intended to fund sustainable projects and activities that will improve teaching, learning, and educational outcomes for all students, and especially those with disabilities. And the funding may be coming sooner than later, according to the eSchool News:

“The first pool of money is for established formulas such as Title I, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and the Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) program. Federal officials will release the first half of these funds to state education departments by the end of March, and school systems should see this money by the end of April.”

Digital Frog International’s educational science software addresses several of the key areas the package is intended to fund and may be eligible under the stimulus package funding. Here are just some of the ways our software addresses the different areas being targeted:

While payments have always been processed through secure servers, we have had some customers concerned that the entire store was not hosted on a secure site. And we’ve taken those concerns to heart.

We’re happy to announce that as of today, the entire store has been upgraded to ensure that every step in the ordering process is secure and all information transmitted to us is encrypted. It’s an extra layer of security to ensure that you can feel safe placing your order through our online shop.

Photo by AMagill released under Creative Commons.