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.!
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.
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.
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 a lot happier with the homework situation. Homework submissions from my Higher Physics class have improved since my last post. Then, this week, several parents came to our school’s senior parent evening with questions about the new system and how it works. I suppose it shows that pupils have been talking about it at home.
Some parents were looking for reassurance that their son/daughter wasn’t wasting time sitting at a computer pretending to do homework, while others wanted to know more about iTunes so they could monitor the subscription themselves and know when an exercise is due. I certainly hadn’t anticipated that parents might be looking for ways to keep up with the work their children were being set.
It’s the last incident that I feel is the most significant though. I blogged a new exercise late last night just before going to bed. After lunch, I was informed by a pupil that she had updated her iTunes library over breakfast and had discovered a fault in the latest pdf file, it wouldn’t open. It turns out she watches the video solutions on the bus to school. She was right, the file had been corrupted and it’s been replaced.
I thought I would say something about my project to place homework and screencast solutions for Higher Physics on iTunes.
This week saw the first submission deadline since homework questions had been made available in the iTunes podcast directory. My feedburner statistics suggested that just over half of the class had downloaded the homework using iTunes. Looking at the Podpress data on my own WordPress dashboard, it looks like the others have downloaded direct from the blog instead. I was pretty confident this was going to work.
When Wednesday came round, I was disappointed to receive only 11 sets of homework from a class of 19. I felt fairly miserable about that and obviously my first instinct was to blame the new delivery mechanism for the sudden fall in submissions. I mentioned it to my faculty head, who uses my room last thing on Wednesdays and he was more upbeat, telling me he’d just had a go at his Higher Biology set for an usually poor homework response and he had heard that the Chemistry dept were also reporting low levels of homework this week. Clearly this was something bigger than a move to iTunes. Perhaps we had hit the senior pupils’ party season?
I went ahead and uploaded the screencast solutions. It had taken quite an effort on my part to prepare these so I was determined to persevere. Since the solutions have gone online, I have spotted distinct spikes in the downloads. It looks like my pupils aren’t using the “get all” option in iTunes but are focusing on certain sections of the solutions that have given them difficulty. This isn’t an observation based solely on this week’s homework either. A similar uneven distribution of views/downloads exists in the original files that kicked off the project on youtube. I am wondering if pupils are actively choosing only to see worked solutions to those problems that presented them with difficulty, rather than watching all of the screencasts to reinforce what they have learned in class?
In the past couple of weeks, a few people have expressed an interest in this idea and have posted questions on Twitter. Joe Rowing has picked up on the idea and is also trialling it. Interestingly enough, Joe also teaches Physics.
I had a light bulb moment last week. It followed on from my post about the inset I gave on the first day back after the October break. I’d been screencasting and uploading narrated worked example to Youtube but I was still relying on pupils actually bothering to go to my site to play the embedded files. My idea was to highlight valuable resources by adding them as podcast content and have them pull everything on to their home computer and I realised I could use iTunes to do it.
I used Quicktime Pro to export the video in MP4 format. I selected the MP4 video format after reading this page which suggested it would be suitable for more than just iPods. You wouldn’t have to use Quicktime for this, an online file conversion service like Zamzar would also work and save you some cash in the process.
I added the PodPress plugin to my WordPress-powered classroom blog to handle the media files. I don’t think you really PodPress but it does provide a neat and automatic icon for the media file in your blog post and it has a widget you can use to add an iTunes subscription button to your blog’s sidebar. For me, the main piece of magic is the Feedburner feed. This is a free service that has excellent features such as the smartcast option.
Smartcast is the killer feature. It allows you to create an enclosure (the thing that iTunes looks for in your blog’s feed) for any rich media file. This is a blanket term that includes file types such as MP3, MP4 and, more importantly, PDF.
So here’s what I’ve done. Pupils in the class have subscribed to my podcast in iTunes to download fully commented solutions to their last homework exercise. This evening, I finished creating their next set of questions and uploaded them to my site as a pdf. Thanks to feedburner’s smartcast, the pdf quickly appeared in iTunes. The next time my pupils open up iTunes, they’ll get the homework exercise downloaded automatically on to their computers and the following week they’ll receive the screencast showing the worked solutions as a video podcast.
I have no idea how this will go down with pupils. When the novelty subsides, will they see it as a creepy tree house? I don’t know if it’s all that different from having a VLE for school work, although pupils know fine well what to find when they log in there. Is the delivery of homework by iTunes an invasion of their recreational space?
