never mind the optics

We had our inset day for CfE planning on 12th June.  The day was spent in departments, with my own faculty breaking out into subjects (physics, chemistry, biology) for short sessions to overtake specific activities.  Our objective was to build a 9 week course for each subject area – the plan is to have a subject rotation, not a teacher rotation in S1.

Over the day, several different strategies emerged.

• Biology using several “guest teachers” from healthcare professions
• Chemistry colleagues pulled out all the stops to provide stunningly visual experiments (see below)
• Physics went overboard with open-ended investigations.

Each approach has challenges;

• can we get repeat NHS visits to prevent a “school hall” address to S1?
• do the non-Chemists have the confidence/skills to attempt the more demanding reactions with pupils? What CPD is required?
• convincing Biologists & Chemists that they can do Physics? CPD !!

We’ve now identified which outcomes each of the 9 week courses will be designed to meet.  The plan is to provide some form of assessment, possibly in the 10th week.

We saw these subject-specific “minicourses” as focused introductions to each of the sciences addressing questions like “What’s Chemistry / Physics / Biology?” as S2 pupils struggle to complete choice forms for S3 and beyond.

We pinned our suggested S1 courses on the new “learning wall” outside the school’s main office area.

Over the day, the wall was populated with similar information from each of the curricular areas.   Here you can see one of the Maths staff (Mr. Bell) looking for spelling mistakes in the Physics outcomes.

The last activity for the day was a series of demonstrations from the Chemistry folks.  This was a short CPD session where we looked at two different reactions that can be used to create a volcano in the classroom.

The first of these involves aluminium powder and iodine crystals, catalysed by addition of a drop of water.

The reaction must take place in a fume hood as the funky purple smoke is iodine gas, which is bad for you.  Since we are were all moved into new classrooms this year, the session included a briefing on how to use the new portable fume hoods.  A couple of teaching points we discovered here were;

• iodine sublimes (iodine changes directly from solid state to gas)
• this is an example of a gas denser than air (if the extraction in the hood is switched off, a purple cloud builds up from the base of the work bench)

Then we looked at a different reaction that produced a similar effect, this was the burning of ammonium dichromate, an orange solid, to leave a green/black residue of chromium oxide behind.  This reaction does not require a fume hood, so I got close and filmed it.

ammonium dichromate volcano from mr mackenzie on Vimeo.

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Despite the enormous gaps in my timetable due to study leave, I’ve remained pretty busy.  Having had only a peripheral involvement in other activities at school, there seems, for me, to have been a massive shift from working with pupils to working with other members of staff.  The driving force has been the coming of Curriculum for Excellence for our new S1 cohort who will join the school this August.

As a faculty, we’ve recently had a series of sessions looking at what CfE might mean for us.  The opinions expressed in these meetings are diverse and I have been genuinely surprised by just how radical some of my colleagues have been thinking when presented with a blank sheet of paper.

That’s radical as in

• no jotters
• current S1 notes sent to paper recycling skip
• staff issued with magnets to display pupils’ work on our (steel) classroom walls
• pupils to get scrap book and A3 portfolio pouch to store their work
• consensus that records/evidence of pupils achieving new science outcomes might not be written or paper-based artefacts (Flip camera?!)

We have a CfE inset coming up that may allow us the time to hang some further details on this set of ideas.

I’ve been using animoto with a lower ability S2 class as a reporting/presentation tool. I’ve not done much with it myself though, so I decided to try my hand at creating my own short video. Here are some pictures taken last weekend when our band went over to the Orkney Islands. I’ve uploaded a track from our cd to accompany the photos.

I think animoto is a brilliant way to share photos.  Why not try using it outside of the classroom too?