never mind the optics

In my previous post, I spoke about the topical science opportunities that my S2 class had explored since completing their course.  Today, we were really pleased to receive an email from the Head of Volcanology at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh:

To: Thurso High
Subject: fao Sinclair McKenzie Grimsvotn ash

Dear Mr McKenzie and students,

Thank you very much indeed for collecting and sending tape samples to BGS and Edinburgh University. We really appreciate the effort you all went to and in fact we’ve been delighted by the response across the UK.

I attach a preliminary report of our findings which I hope you find interesting. If you’d like to discuss any aspects of it or ask questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

A full analysis of all samples will take several more weeks so we’ll be in touch again then with the overall results.

Thank you very much for your time and I hope you’ll help us again next time!

Sue Loughlin

Dr S. C. Loughlin

Head of Volcanology

British Geological Survey

eBook Download

It’s great when you are freed from the curriculum straitjacket and allowed to explore issues that have captured the interest of pupils outwith the classroom.  At my school, we’ve traditionally had a window to do just that with S2 classes from March until June, when they move on to S3 and a new, externally assessed treadmill.

This year has been a little different.  We’re using the time to trial some new Curriculum for Excellence topics ahead of the new S2 starting them in June. Based around surfing, my class have investigated waves, board design and properties of surfboard materials.

Having some knowledge about waves, they were keen to find out more about the Japanese tsunami in the days after it struck.  Then, with news of problems at the Fukushima reactor complex, we had a few lessons on nuclear physics and performed some background radiation measurements for Drew Burrett’s crowd sourced map of background radiation following the detection of Iodine-131 in Scotland.

We’ve finished looking at the physics of surfing and, just as we were about to discuss possible topics to take us to the end of S2, there was a new volcanic eruption in Iceland and a request from the British Geological Survey to help with a survey of ash distribution.

There is no doubt that ash has fallen on Thurso, just look at the bonnet of my car.

We set up the ash collectors following the BGS instructions.  Three books were positioned around the school; one in each of the quads and another by the roof of the old science greenhouse.

The ash collectors are lengths of upside-down sticky tape.  We used weights from my classroom to ensure the ring binders did not flip over during the collection period.  At the end of each monitoring period, the tape is taken back to the classroom and sent away to the BGS for analysis.  S2 are adding their new Glow Mail addresses to each sample so the BGS can return a copy of the results.

The BGS site also contains a short questionnaire to gauge the current distribution of ash around the UK.  As the map shows, there seems to have been a more noticeable fall of ash over Scotland and Northern England.

I think it’s so important for pupils to have these opportunities to explore scientific stories that appear in the news.  Not only is it highly motivational for pupils to have this say in what they learn, it also promotes the usefulness of scientific literacy in everyday life.  Recent stories in the media, such as the call to ban wireless networks and mobile phones in schools, are typical of the challenges we face when promoting an evidence based approach to doing and using science in society.

By coincidence, the Association for Science Education recently produced a book called Science Newswise 2 to help teachers use news stories effectively in lessons.

eBook Download

Last month, David Noble invited me to participate in an online discussion on Science Education n Scotland. Also on the panel were Nick Hood and Drew Burrett, both physics teachers, and Fearghal Kelly, a biology teacher seconded to East Lothian Council as Curriculum for Excellence Development Officer.

During the conversation, we touched upon;

• assessment in CfE
• the risk-averse culture that exists in the teaching of general science
• do we teach science by presenting a series of facts?
• use of ICT in the science classroom
• support opportunities available from higher education and other organisations

The event was streamed lived and subsequently posted to the EDUTalk posterous site.  I can’t get to the EDUTalk site from my school due to filtering, so I’ve uploaded the audio file to this site.  Click on the player below to listen.  Apologies for the variable audio quality.

Standard Podcast [ 46:42 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Over the past 18 months, I’ve been involved off-and-on with the Scottish end of a Science in Society project called S-TEAM, looking at inquiry-based science teaching.

As a member of the reference group, I’ve given my perspective as a classroom teacher and some of my classroom experiences of open-ended investigation with S1/S2 pupils have been included in articles on the nature of an inquiry-based approach to science in the classroom.

A shortened version of our first article has just been published in the February newsletter of the International Council of Associations for Science Education (ICASE).  The article is based on work I did with a S2 class in 2008.

I blogged about the project at the time.  You can download a pdf of the newsletter using the link at the end of this post, our article is on pages 6-8.

eBook Download

It’s been a while since I posted anything on this site.  Much of my spare time was taken up with the National Mod coming to town.

I thought I would get back in the saddle with a post about a really positive CPD experience I had this weekend.  I drove down to Fortrose for a Saturday event organised by the ASE and IoP.  There was a good mix of workshops on offer and it was great to see so many primary staff joining the physics regulars for the day.

The first session I attended was run by Gregor from SSERC.  He brought a load of laptops with him and we had a chance to try using a useful piece of software called Tracker.  This is a great example of someone developing something for their students, finding out just how great it is and sharing it worldwide with others.  Tracker can do loads of things: analyse projectile motion, rotational motion and do spectral analysis. Best of all, it uses Java, so it works on Windows, OS X and linux.

The second session of the day began with a hands-on example of generating real data with Stuart Farmer, who handed on to Tania Johnston of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh.  Tania shared the Observatory’s latest Deep Space resources for schools.  I worked through a group activity that bore a resemblance to galaxy battleships.

The idea is to work through a series of galaxy photographs and classify them into spiral, elliptical or unknown, then plot their location within the cluster on a quadrant.  By bringing the work of 4 groups together, the pattern of galaxy distribution, i.e. where do elliptical & spiral galaxies tend to appear in clusters, can be determined (I won’t spoil it for you).  There is another activity based on planet formation and exoplanets but I didn’t get an opportunity to try that one…

…the Play-Do looks fun though!  I really liked the observatory’s activities. They have have embedded a series of numeracy tasks into the packs so that they are not just about meeting space-oriented O&Es.

In the afternoon, I went to the Optoelectronics College workshop on illumination and communication with Martyn Crawshaw from Millburn Academy.  On completion of the workshop, I received a specially-designed kit worth £500 to help introduce S1/2 pupils at my to optoelectronics.

One of my AH Physics pupils has already spotted the LED board and plans to incorporate it into his investigation on determining Planck’s constant.

The last session of the day involved building a wet day alternative to the IoP rocket launcher.  Everyone was supplied with plastic piping and connectors to build a twin launcher to propel dragsters.  This would be a great activity for a corridor or school hall if the weather does not allow the use of the compressed air rocket launcher.

I’ve been on the receiving end of some horrific ASG CPD days recently – long, tedious sessions from which I have gained little.  I refer to days like that as herd CPD.  The science event on Saturday was a welcome change. The CPD available was relevant to me and was seriously hands-on.  This seems to agree with my learning style – sometimes the people who plan CPD events forget that teachers have learning styles too.

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!

Standard Podcast [ 4:39 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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.

Standard Podcast [ 44:23 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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.