never mind the optics

I wrote a post last term about my S2 class asking to base their lessons for the remainder of the year around the science of space.  Since returning from the Easter break, I’ve been working on incorporating numeracy and problem solving into these classes.

The first time they returned to my class, there were funny looks in my direction.  I rearranged the desks to create working groups and pointed towards the equipment they would use; very large measuring cylinders, some tubing and stopwatches.

The scenario I used was

You are an astronaut joining a 10-day mission on the space shuttle.  NASA needs to know how much air you will need during the trip.

There was confusion.  The responses included

• NASA know how much air to pack
• they give astronauts a personal oxygen cylinder
• that’s impossible
• how do you measure gas?

In other words: “Houston, we have a problem.”

If the lesson was going to go anywhere, I would need to give some hints.  I started by asking where we had obtained oxygen for earlier experiments. Some pupils remembered heating potassium permanganate, probably because of the near-explosive results we had achieved that day.  I had to remind them of the time we collected oxygen gas under water from a cylinder.  The measuring cylinders were really just large gas jars and so we could exhale into them through a tube.

We aimed for at least one person per group to measure the volume of air they could exhale in one breath.  Some pupils used stopwatches to count the number of breaths per minute and I could see that they were starting to identify a strategy to answer the challenge.  More importantly, they began to explain their understanding of the problem to the others in their group and, within minutes, I had someone from each group ask for a calculator.

By the end of the lesson, and it did take around 45 minutes, each member of the class has calculated an answer and compared it with someone else. We discussed their answers and I explained that we use problem-soving methods like this in the real world.  Someone said it was like a mobile phone contract, I probably showed my age when I compared it to working out an electricity or gas bill.

I wasn’t going to post about this lesson.  That changed when I watched Dan Meyer’s TEDxNYED session.

Dan’s analysis of our current approach to problem solving is spot on -- I often remark to senior pupils that the question setter is leading them by the hand through a problem.  In this lesson, I avoided asking

How much air do you breath in

(i) one minute

(ii) an hour

(iii) a day?

and, in doing so, the class took ownership, rationalised and shared what they were doing.

Let’s make over the problem solving we do in science as well as maths.

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.

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!

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Education staff in the Highlands have just participated in a mammoth CPD event called the Highland Learning Festival.  Hosted by Dingwall Academy, the event was billed as a Highland Curriculum for Excellence Showcase.

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.

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I went down to Stirling Management Centre recently for the Building Glow Communities workshop for science teachers.  My experience of Glow is very limited and I have to admit to being less than impressed with my encounters to date, e.g. here & here.  There were two factors that influenced my decision to apply for a place at the event.  I wanted to learn about Glow and I wasn’t sure when or if local training would delivered.

There was a very broad range of Glow experience among the attendees, ranging from beginners like myself to teachers who use Glow daily in their classroom.  Over the 2 days, we learned about Glow Groups and how to use web parts to introduce content.  We worked in small groups to produce shared Glow groups on a range of diverse topics to support delivery of the science curriculum, including Advanced Higher Physics, Science transition from level 2 to level 3, Famous Scientists & The X-tra terrestrial Factor.

I’m particularly proud of the group my own team produced to support the outcome on considering the potential for life on other planets.  We created activities to…

consider the environmental factors affecting alien physiology
	build a model of the solar system
explore the Martian surface
	Find out about NASA’s mission to find habitable planets

The group building sessions were broken up by short introductions to new web parts & techniques, information about intellectual property rights, demonstrations on how to create content such as a Voki or Wordle and embed it in your group to make the group pages more visually appealing.

It was a great CPD opportunity and I’ve already started work on my own Glow groups for use in school when pupil logins are rolled out.

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 thought I would include a second Animoto video.  What’s interesting is that pupils did not feel it was necessary to extend their videos beyond a minute, even when they had access to the all-areas education pass that allowed for full-length animations.

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So what might we consider to be evidence of achieving a Curriculum for Excellence outcome?  I’ve been working on one of these with a lower ability S2 science class.  The outcome we explored was

I can use my knowledge of the basic needs of humans, and the bodies of our solar system, to put together a reasoned report on whether we can colonise space.

I like the way this ties together aspects of physics and biology.  A lot of people out there have this idea that physics and chemistry go well, as do chemistry and biology.  How many people have experienced the intersection of physics and biology though?  I understand this gap a little as I used to work as principal engineer in a biophotonics instrumentation company developing laser-based laboratory equipment for protein analysis in the drug development sector.  When I attended meetings, I was amazed to see so many presentations from researchers who were using biology and physics to solve their problems.

As I mentioned in another post, my class have researched the bodies of the solar system.  They then reviewed their prior learning on the gases in the air, respiration and photosynthesis to make an informed choice of potential colony – they decided on Mars.  Our timing was spot on, as we were able to follow the European Space Agency’s Mars500 project, looking at the potential effects of long term isolation on astronauts travelling to Mars.

For a lower set, writing a report was a daunting prospect.  So we threw out that idea and I took them to the library and introduced them to Animoto, GoAnimate and Glogster.  Once we got round initial problems of web filtering, pupils experimented with all 3 and unanimously agreed to work with Animoto.  I applied for, and received, a free education all-access pass from the Animoto folks for 6 months.  Without this, their films were limited to 30 seconds.

I’ve attached one of the short films they produced to this post.  Are these clips evidence of achieving an outcome?  I feel that they are at least part of the way.  One of the things I like about them is that there is not a powerpoint presentation in sight.  My concern when I hear people around the school talking about implementing CfE is that too many of the outcomes might be assessed by the quality of a powerpoint presentation to the rest of the class.  If nothing else, I hope I have shown this class a different way of structuring and showing information.

Oh, did I mention that they had fun doing it?

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My school will be implementing something along the road towards the new CfE outcomes for Science for S1 after the summer holidays.  I don’t know how far down the road we will go in our first year of implementation, it’s unclear if anyone has the answer to that yet at this stage.  

Perhaps unsurprisingly, assessment seems to be an issue already.  It’s disappointing as I thought perhaps there would have been sufficient flexibility in our approach to allow the classroom teacher to assess pupils against the 4 capacities when it came to report card time.

There may be some consensus in the need to get away from the treadmill of racing through a course to meet the requirements of an exam, but so far all I can see is the potential for a “core” science curriculum to be taught in same way by all members of the department and “extension” topics where creativity and opinions of pupils may have some input into what and how a specific outcome progresses.  

The “core” science would be assessed as it always has been, with formative assessment of the additional outcomes.  This assessment policy by committee does not live up to my hopes for CfE.  How are other schools planning to implement CfE in Science?