never mind the optics

I was interviewed by David Noble last month.  David is currently researching his doctoral thesis by interviewing educators to determine how they use the social web to support learning, teaching and professional development.  You can read more about his work and the participants on the Edonis Ning site.

I was quite nervous because our telephone conversation was broadcast live online using iPadio and I knew some people were listening.  If you missed it, David has published the audio here or you can download it below.

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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!

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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 know that it’s only a matter of minutes since I posted about the Glow groups I started to create after returning from the Building Glow Communities event but I need to show you all something.  As I started to work on my groups, I realised that I had an obvious source of resources in my classroom blog.  I tried to use an XML web part to bring the RSS feed into Glow but it just didn’t look right, see screenshot below.

The text is all bunched up together and the layout does not let you easily identify the beginning and end of individual entries.  This is a shame because I thought I could pull in homework activities and their solutions in the same way that they are published to iTunes.

Luckily, there’s a very helpful Glow genius called Fraser who came to my rescue.  He has a black belt in XSL and was able to write some code that will allow anyone with a WordPress blog to import their RSS feed into Glow.  This is a major breakthrough for my personal plan for using Glow with pupils and I am sure that there will be many blogging teachers around Scotland who will be eager to take advantage of this solution.

As a before & after activity, take a look at the structure that has been given to my blog feed in the following screenshots.

Notice how the embedded video player now sits neatly amongst the text. There are also clearly recognisable download links, making the feed much more useful.

I use my classroom blog to feed four different podcasts; Advanced Higher, Higher, Intermediate 2 and Standard Grade Physics.  Wordpress category feeds keep the posts in the correct podcast and Fraser has set up the code so I can feed any combination of WordPress categories into Glow, essentially replicating the podcasting process I have been using.

This is a seriously useful piece of code to have for your Glow group.

The dust (sorry!) is starting to settle after 2 fantastic nights of participation in the annual Perseid meteor shower.  The event hasn’t actually finished just yet but the number of meteors per hour will fall rapidly now that we have passed peak activity.

So what was it all about?  I’m no astronomer, nor am I presumptuous enough to think I provide a decent explanation.  Basically, our planet just passed through the debris trail left by a comet called Swift-Tuttle.  You can find out more about the phenomenon here.  What I have found astonishing is the sheer number of non-astronomers (myself included) who have been following events and staying up late to view these blazing trails of light as they stream across the night sky.  How do I know that so many people have taken part? Well, that would be down to Twitter.

Many astronomers have seized the publicity available to them through the International Year of Astronomy 2009 to promote their work/research/hobby to people who have never had any dealing with astronomy before.  The 365 Days of Astronomy podcast dedicated an entire episode to the Perseids just before they arrived.  While these would have contributed to a raised awareness, they are not sufficiently mainstream to attract the unprecedented interest surrounding this year’s event – this is where Twitter comes in.

In the UK, a local astronomy group called Newbury Astronomical Society, who tweet from the @NewburyAS twitter account, seized the initiative by setting up the #meteorwatch hashtag for the Perseids event.  The tag caught on and hundreds of people shared their experiences during the shower by tweeting with that hashtag, taking it to 4th place in Twitter’s trending topics.  The organisation of the Newbury club even drew the attention of the BBC (click link on that page to see video footage) who visited “the bunker” during the first evening.

While the south of the UK enjoyed clear skies on the first evening, I was not so lucky.  As there was no way I could see the meteors, I tried to detect them using a very basic radio technique instead.  I connected an FM antenna to the back of an old Pioneer receiver unit and fed the output into a Griffin imic (with RCA to 3.5mm jack adapter) that was plugged into the usb port of a laptop.  The Griffin components were essential to convert the RCA HiFi electrical connections into a standard computer connection.

I tuned the radio to the lowest clear FM frequency available (87.5MHz) and used a virtual chart recorder package call Radio SkyPipe to record the data.  The recording software is quite straightforward and would be a good introduction to signals and measurement for senior pupils, such as those undertaking AH Physics investigations or the new Science Baccalaureate, as it requires several calibration & signal nulling steps before use.

Unfortunately I didn’t capture any exciting data although there was a curious low frequency amplitude modulation (see below) on the signal that I could not explain.

On the second night, I decided to leave the setting up of hardware for radio astronomy to the professionals and concentrated on looking for streamed data from the web.  I found this site broadcasting from Tavistock in Devon.  I downloaded the BS-Tuner application and pasted in the url of the broadcast site.  To my surprise I heard streaming FM static coming from the laptop.

Every now and then this static was pierced by an eerie scream as radio waves were reflected back down towards the Tavistock antenna by the ionised wake of each meteor.  The signals varied in volume, duration, clarity and complexity but due to their unpredictable nature it was difficult to record one.  However I have attached one of the sounds I captured and encourage you to play it using the flash player below.

I was disappointed to view just a single Perseid at around 2.30am last night, the weather just wasn’t right for it.  However, without those clouds I’d never have considered the potential for homemade radio astronomy.

A Nasa podcast on the Perseids is also available.

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I’ve been using animoto with a lower ability S2 class as a reporting/presentation tool. I’ve not done much with it myself though, so I decided to try my hand at creating my own short video. Here are some pictures taken last weekend when our band went over to the Orkney Islands. I’ve uploaded a track from our cd to accompany the photos.

I think animoto is a brilliant way to share photos.  Why not try using it outside of the classroom too?

After I applied to animoto for an  all-areas education pass, I decided to start following them on twitter.  A few days later, they posted the following tweet

Animoto stickers lying dormant in our office. Tweet @ us why you want some, and we’ll DM you to ask where you’d like your stickers sent.

I replied and asked for one for each of the members of my S2 science class who had been working with animoto as part of our curriculum for excellence trial.  The stickers arrived today and generated a lot of interest in the staffroom.  For me, and I know this might sound daft, the coolest thing was the handwritten envelope, sealed with a sticker, and the handwritten note inside.  It was just so different from the mail-merged post I normally receive at school.  The class don’t know about the stickers yet, it’s a surprise I’m keeping for Monday morning.  

Here’s what came in the envelope.

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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