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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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.

This last trip was accompanied by the 365 days of astronomy podcast, a project to celebrate 2009 as the International Year of Astronomy.  The individual podcast episodes are very easy to listen to, with a maximum length of 10 minutes per day.  Clearly, several weeks of podcasts are necessary for the 5 hour drive to Glasgow.  The topics discussed each day are diverse and I enjoyed learning Swedish astronomy nouns, hearing various speakers talking about our debt to Galileo, different views on Pluto’s reclassification as a dwarf planet and the answer to the question “What would happen if the moon didn’t exist?”

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.

January 9: The Link Between Beer and Space Settlement [ 10:06 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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!

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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?

I attended a training day on the new Energy Foresight resources this week.  Although the programme has run as a pilot before, covering NW England and London, this was the first time that the materials had been presented to teachers in Scotland and the strategy appeared to start at the top and work downwards, since the schools involved were located in Orkney, Caithness and North Sutherland.

The effectiveness of the resource has been investigated by the Open University and, from what I have seen this week, I agree that the content is presented in a fresh, modern style with clear animation and illustration to explain each aspect of the three topics covered: Radiation and Health, Managing Nuclear Waste and Electrical Energy, Production and Distribution.

I particularly like the Radiation and Health section, which contains a lot of Nuclear Medicine.  There are interviews with different healthcare professionals and I was pleased to see a lead role for women in this, since the Standard Grade Physics unit on Health Physics is such a great hook for girls in the classroom.

The Electrical Energy topic essentially covers everything you need to meet the learning outcomes of the first section of unit 6 of Standard Grade Physics, Energy Matters.  The coverage of different electricity production methods is comprehensive and is accompanied by an award winning visualisation that is fully interactive to allow pupils to see each stage of the process.

The final element concerns the disposal of nuclear waste.  There is a clear link to my own community here and I would expect this section to have much less of a following in other areas.  In terms of providing an insight into the kinds of jobs that pupils’ parents might be doing while they are at school, I think that it will provide a valuable local dimension to the resource within my own classroom.  I also hope that this section will help to provide a more informed consumption of the media in relation to the nuclear industry.  One criticism of this section, and I aired this during the course of the day, was that women were not given as high a representation in the case studies.  A site manager and an assistant at an information centre did not seem to be particularly interesting jobs compared to those opportunities presented in the other two sections.  The animations are snappy (see the screenshot above) and are used to good effect to support points made in the short videos.

I will definitely use this resource in my classroom and would encourage any other teacher to take up the Energy Foresight training day if you are offered a place.