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.!
A great new project kicked off at EDUtalk this week. John Johnston and David Noble have set the ambitious target of posting a piece of audio every day throughout 2010 as part of their EDUtalk365 project. I think that their idea of educators sharing ideas on the changes sweeping through education is brilliant and the nature of the contributions makes it possible for busy people to dip in and out of the published audio as and when they have the time. I have posted previously on the ease with which audio resources can be accessed while driving, walking the dog, washing the dishes, etc. and I think that David and John are on to a winner here.
To help them on their way towards 365 days of audio, I recorded a short piece on how I have been using Wordle in the classroom as an aid to literacy across learning. You can listen to my contribution here. Better still, subscribe to their Posterous blog or add it to your iTunes podcasts so you’ll never miss an episode during 2010!
Sessions on the first day were booked up well in advance, with 1000 teachers and auxiliaries spending Tuesday at the festival. I had planned to go along on the second day as the programme had more ICT and secondary sessions of interest to me. However, that changed when I became a late addition to Wednesday’s schedule with a double slot to speak about the work I have been doing with blogging and iTunes in my classroom.
The numbers for my sessions were low on paper but two or three times as many people turned up each time. I spoke briefly about running a blog before explaining how SMART Notebook software can be used to produce a videos that can be downloaded as podcasts with iTunes. Then we looked at the ways in which everyday handheld devices such as mobile phones and iPods can be used for mobile learning. I was genuinely surprised by the level of interest shown and the number of questions I was asked during and after each session.
I was delighted when I managed to squeeze into Ollie Bray & Derek Robertson’s games-based learning session at 12.30 in between my own slots. I’d met Derek before, he was one of the tutors from my PGCE course, but I had never met Ollie despite having exchanged tweets and interviewed him on Skype for a podcast.
The single disappointment for me was the way that the event finished so quickly in the afternoon. My last slot was over by 2.30 and by then many of the exhibitors were packing up. If the rumours are true and the event is run again next year, then I think I would try to spend more than just one day there to ensure I could take something from the event for my professional development.
As always, I was economic with slides but I have embedded them anyway. There’s also an audio recording of the morning session attached to this post.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I took the telescope out last night for the first time. I was specifically interested in finding out whether or not one of my Advanced Higher Physics pupils would be able to the the telescope for her proposed investigation on Jupiter’s 4 largest moons and Kepler’s Laws of planetary motion.
I found a good spot, well away from lights. If you have Google Earth download this file for the exact location. I was amazed at just how many stars were visible once I was out of the glare of the town lights.
My finder scope alignment was not as good as I had thought and some small adjustments were necessary to find Jupiter in the eyepiece of the main scope. I could not believe how bright Jupiter appeared though the scope and was even more impressed when I realised that the four Galilean moons were also present in my field of view.
Adjusting the telescope to track Jupiter gave me some problems due to the vibrations at each adjustment. The vibrations also gave issues when I tried to capture video using my mobile phone. I’m going to take the telescope to the local moonwatch events (pdf) at the end of the month to get some advice on how to set up the telescope to minimise vibration.
I tweeted about the experience this morning and mentioned seeing a meteor. Drew Thomson reminded me that the annual Orionid shower had started a couple of nights ago, with peak activity next Wednesday (21st October), so it’s possible I also caught an early Orionid while I was out. The cool thing about the Orionids is that they are caused by the Earth passing through the debris left by Halley’s Comet, so you are actually watching little fragments of the comet each time you observe a meteor – much easier than waiting for another 52 years!
Although they are nothing like the photos posted earlier today by Catherine Baker, I thought I would share my attempt at capturing my telescope view of Jupiter with a mobile phone. I’m afraid it only picked up the planet itself, no moons.
It’s not often that I am able to take part in the fantastic CPD opportunities that “the powers that be” in the deep south organise for teachers. Fortunately, it’s the October holidays up here so I was able to spend Tuesday afternoon in a flashmeeting listening to Greg Whitby speak with a group of teachers at LTS.
So who is Greg Whitby?
He is the Executive Director of Schools and leads a system of approximately 80 Catholic schools serving the Catholic community of greater Western Sydney.
In 2007, he was named the most innovative educator in Australia by the Bulletin Magazine in its annual SMART 100 awards.
He was awarded an ACEL Presidential Citation for his contribution to Australian education.
Billed as Gregmeet, the event was a chance for the Scottish education community to hear his thoughts on where learning & teaching has to be in the 21st century.
His main points were;
lack of relevance has resulted in most young people disengaging from education
realising that the idea of personalised learning represents learners having a deeper & continuous learning rather than an individual education programme
de-privatising of teacher practice: teachers can’t (and shouldn’t) work in isolation
the power of technology to release us from the education timetable that is essentially set in stone at the time of our conception
Greg got his final point across with an equation
who learns what with who where & when
= anywhere, anytime, anything, any device - time table
and suggested that the Scottish education establishment is moving in this direction with the rolling out of Glow across the 32 local authorities.
His point is valid. Why is it that we still create a situation where learning can only take place in a classroom, with a teacher, during the day? In moving to an informal, anytime learning environment, pupils can learn when they are ready to do so. Greg calls this “just in time” learning.
I found myself agreeing with his view that the laptop has lost its original impact in the classroom. So often, technology in the home is far ahead of the facilities we can provide in schools. Greg advocates switching to more flexible technology in the form of mobile phones, pointing out their accessibility, flexibility and cost advantages. While this is a move that is actively resisted in many schools, Greg’s message is that we must learn from research and this shows that handheld devices bring enormous educational benefits.
Greg didn’t use slides but there is a video of the event’s flashmeeting here. Alternatively, I have attached the audio to this post so you can listen using the flash player below.
Physics teachers from across the Highlands got together for a CPD day last Saturday. The event was hosted by Nick Forwood, our local Physics Teacher Network coordinator, at Fortrose Academy.
After a keynote from Tom Balanowski, the SQA Principal Assessor for Advanced Higher Physics, we were able to choose up to three workshops from the list on the right, plus an additional option of learning how to configure the free telescope for schools supplied by The Society for Popular Astronomy.
I presented a session on using blogs, wikis and iTunes in the Physics classroom. It was a demonstration of the resources I have built into my classroom blog, with an update on how using iTunes to push homework exercises and videos homework solutions out to pupils’ home computers had been received.
I also took the chance to show off some of the work that had been produced during the Building Glow Communities event for Science teachers earlier in the week. I was surprised to find that questions were asked about my use of Voicethread and Animoto in the classroom. People who are working on developing their CfE outcomes were interested in the opportunities these tools presented in terms of genuine pupil-focused creativity, digital evidence of their experiences and the chance to produce something other than powerpoint slides.
I was delighted to share my experience of using these sites with them and gave examples of how I had used them in my classroom. The enthusiasm with which they were considering non-traditional activities shows that Curriculum for Excellence really is going to change the way our pupils experience science in the years ahead.
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.
I’ve clocked up quite a few miles lot in the past few weeks. The trip to Perth for TeachMeet Physics (see earlier post), a day trip to Aberdeen to help write resources for science teachers to assist with the new optoelectronics CfE outcomes and then, after 2 days of Easter study school, I headed south for a check-up with my NHS dentist (one filling, btw) and let off some steam in Glasgow.
One thing I like about these long drives south (and back again) is the opportunity to fill my iPod with podcasts that I’ve just not had time to listen to during the typical school week. With such patchy radio reception on the A9, it makes sense to have something else on standby for entertainment. My “binge listening” habit has been commented on previously.
I’m currently looking at the astronomy outcome with my S2 class and one of the ideas they have put forward is the need for any colony to be sustainable. It just so happens that one of the earlier podcasts in the 365 days talks about the space beer brewed from barley grown on the International Space Station. So here we have an example of an arable crop being grown in space. This is just the point my class were making – at some point you have to start growing your own crops if a space colony is going to survive. The people behind the 365 days of astronomy podcast allow the audio to be reproduced, so here is the space beer episode.
A bunch of physics teachers met up in Perth last night for what we believe to be the first ever subject specific TeachMeet. We had a great turnout for an evening meeting outside the central belt, with people from Edinburgh, Fife, Dundee, Aberdeen, Helensburgh and Thurso(!) in attendance. The speakers were;
Drew Burrett (Hermitage Academy) -- Using Glow in the Physics Classroom
Michael Walker (Robert Gordon College) -- Ruben tube (see video below)
Sinclair Mackenzie (Thurso High) -- iPod my Physics
Iain Lawrie (George Watson’s College) - A cup of tea and a chocolate digestive (encouraging pupil engagement with Latent Heat)
Bob Kibble (Moray House) - ’Just a moment, aren’t they simultaneous equations?’ Impress your maths colleagues with wooden beams
Drew Burrett -- National Glow Group for Physics teachers
Dave Spittal (Kinross High) -- things that can be achieved using cheap web cams in demonstrations
Nick Hood (Glenwood High) - A proposal for “Mathematical Modelling in the new Higher”
We also had Andrew Brown joining us from a Glow Meet that Drew had set up and several people followed proceedings via a flashmeeting. The flashmeeting was recorded, so you can click on that link to watch the event. Dave Spittal captured the sessions on his camcorder, so an edited version may appear at some point in the future. As Physics teachers know, it was compulsory to round a night like this off with a curry. Thanks to Neil Winton for recommending the Manzil.
As promised, here is Michael’s video of the Ruben tube in action
Several teachmeet rules were thrown out the window, few stopped talking after 7 minutes and we took questions. I have grabbed the audio of my own talk from the flashmeeting. You can listen using the player below. Be warned -- it’s longer than 7 minutes and it is a bit loud due to the headset microphone we used so you might want to turn the volume down if you are using headphones!
I’m nervous about the first day of term (this coming Monday) because I have been asked to give an INSET session on how I make best use of ICT in my classroom. It all came about from an open evening for the school’s Parent Forum AGM, where several members of staff were approached to show their rooms and resources used in day-to-day lessons. The feedback we received was pretty positive and resulted in a request for us to run an ICT session for the entire staff at the next inset day.
My plan right now is to break the sessions (about 30 minutes each) into the following steps;
show my classroom blog and the different resources I have made available online for pupils – another colleague will also discuss blogs but, having shared our experiences, it is clear that we use them for different things
short focused introduction to the latest tool I have used, screencasting, taking my colleagues through a quick and simple example using the windows software they already have on their classroom pcs and discussing scenarios where this could be used across the curriculum
a look at the video project I produced with my S2 class towards the end of last session, highlighting how open-ended activities such as this could fit into the CfE draft outcomes for Science
I had thought about a short introductory session on Glow, now that we are likely to be switched on in the New Year, but my Glow account has just been activated and looks pretty empty at present.
It might sound daft to be so nervous about talking to colleagues about what I do every day. In principle, I think it is good that the school recognises the need to share good practice. The problem here is that I can’t see there being very much interest in it. Feedback already received from colleagues suggests they don’t want to know about things that would mean spending more time doing school stuff. From my own perspective, I would have preferred to have a willing audience, rather than an audience who are there through compulsion.
Have you found yourself in a similar situation in the past? How did you approach the problem and how was your presentation received?
It’s not often that I am able to take part in the fantastic CPD opportunities that “the powers that be” in the deep south organise for teachers. Fortunately, it’s the October holidays up here so I was able to spend Tuesday afternoon in a flashmeeting listening to 
