I’m a big fan of howstuffworks.com but there are times you just need to get your hands dirty and find out for yourself. My S3 class spent the last physics lesson of the term taking apart a portable colour tv to see what was inside the box. Of course, they have a fair idea as they have studied the theory of how an image is produced in the screen but I wanted them to see the real thing. Luckily, a friend was getting rid of a broken tv set and I “rescued” it from the bin men.
We ran two video cameras during the “dissection”. One was a Flip Mino HD and the other was an aGent webcam I bought about two years ago to replace a broken firewire webcam. I’ve not used the aGent much this past year as my macbook has a built-in iSight camera but it is a nice piece of kit, with a variety of tripods and clips to position it for classroom filming. I’ve used the aGent for classroom filming before, the same class took a hoover apart but this was the first time I had made much use of the Flip Mino HD.
Three pupils were involved in the dissection while their classmates watched the footage relayed to my projector by the aGent camera. We had a good 30 minutes of unscrewing,wire cutting, removing and identifying various components. Now I have the difficult job, taking footage from the two cameras and producing a short film about the TV during the Easter holiday.
A colleague came to ask for some smartboard help last week. She wanted to do an activity with a class that involved sampling with a quadrat.
It’s hardly the time of year to take 20 kids outside to our muddy football pitch to throw wooden frames around, so she was looking for a way of simulating the process on her interactive whiteboard.
She had been trying to create a table and move it around a Notebook page but the empty cells of the table were preventing her from seeing what lay in each section of her quadrat grid. I suggested that she could create the grid using a series of horizontal and vertical lines, grouping them together as a single item. She called in later that day to say it had worked and several pupils had used her virtual quadrat during the lesson.
My colleague shared the notebook file with me and I have attached it in a zip file, just click on the download link below to save a copy. I wonder if this could be used to introduce the idea of sampling in a virtual environment like Endless Ocean or African Safari?
Ok, so this isn’t really a post about the physics of St. Patrick’s day but the shape of the green Maltese cross we saw in this Teltron tube today provided my S3 class with a timely reminder that it was nearly Paddy’s day.
It’s that time of year when people start wondering what to do with S2. I’ve mentioned this issue here and here in earlier posts. Last year I looked at a space-related CfE outcome with S2. I was going to trial a renewable energy topic with this class until one of them told me last week that there was a brilliant series about the solar system starting on BBC2 that weekend and I should watch it.
He was talking about Professor Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Solar System and I had already set my BT Vision box to record the series. However, the enthusiasm of others in the class to find out more about space, with questions such as “what is the sun?” and “is it true the world will blow up in 2012 and we’re all going to die?” suggested that there was value in trying to follow Prof Cox‘s journey through the solar system.
We’ve got 3 periods a week and some boys have asked if the lesson on Monday could be a repeat of the Sunday evening programme on BBC iPlayer. Here’s the trailer for the series. Perhaps it will explain why the kids are so interested.
It looks exciting, the presenter is young and beard-free – he was even in a band once.
We’ve toured the solar system using Celestia and, this morning, we started to look at the stars. My starter question went something like “What’s the brightest star in the sky?” and they told me it was the sun. Maybe someone tried that trick before, they didn’t say.
The sun apart, we normally consider Sirius to be the brightest star in the night sky. So how do you find Sirius? There is a great free programme called Stellarium that will display the night sky. It turned my smartboard into a planetarium for the duration of the lesson. Most pupils were able to point towards Orion and I showed them how a line towards the ground from Orion’s belt would lead to Sirius. Here’s a screenshot of Stellarium.
The funny thing about stars is that they are back to front. Go into the bathroom and look at your taps. The red one is for hot water and the blue one is for cold. But in astronomy the blue stars burn hotter than red ones. Notice in the screenshot above that the bottom right star, Rigel, is shown in a blueish hue while the top left star, Betelgeuse has a red tinge. Rigel is an incredibly hot and bright star, while Betelgeuse is a lot cooler.
The homework for next week is to go outside and find these three stars in the night sky.
On Saturday, I had the privilege to share a share a platform with Nick Hood at the Scottish Science Education Conference at the Dunblane Hydro. Our session went by the name “Using New Media in Science Education – Not Just for Twits”. The aim was to share some of the online practice taking place both inside and outside the country’s science classrooms.
We spoke about blogging and walked the participants through the process of setting up a free blog. Nick explained RSS and demonstrated why every teacher should use a RSS reader. We also covered podcasting and use of a wiki. For anyone interested in the links we used on the day, find a summary on my wiki.
During the session, we mentioned the lack of blogging Chemistry teachers. Word has reached us that Dr. Taylor has met our challenge head-on and started his own blog. Great job, Dr. T.!
I’m a big fan of howstuffworks.com but there are times you just need to get your hands dirty and find out for yourself. My S3 class spent the last physics lesson of the term taking apart a portable colour tv to see what was inside the box. Of course, they have a fair idea as they have studied the theory of how an image is produced in the screen but I wanted them to see the real thing. Luckily, a friend was getting rid of a broken tv set and I “rescued” it from the bin men.
We ran two video cameras during the “dissection”. One was a Flip Mino HD and the other was an aGent webcam I bought about two years ago to replace a broken firewire webcam. I’ve not used the aGent much this past year as my macbook has a built-in iSight camera but it is a nice piece of kit, with a variety of tripods and clips to position it for classroom filming. I’ve used the aGent for classroom filming before, the same class took a hoover apart but this was the first time I had made much use of the Flip Mino HD.
Three pupils were involved in the dissection while their classmates watched the footage relayed to my projector by the aGent camera. We had a good 30 minutes of unscrewing,wire cutting, removing and identifying various components. Now I have the difficult job, taking footage from the two cameras and producing a short film about the TV during the Easter holiday.
