Fizzics

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.

I mentioned previously that the group of UK teachers behind EdTechRoundUp had released a discussion-based podcast on the use of VLEs. One of the contributors to that show, Doug Belshaw, also blogged about it in a post where he asked the question “What is a VLE?“. He tweeted today to tell us he was called into his school office today to be told that the supplier of one VLE mentioned in the blog post and podcast were demanding that he remove the post and accompanying podcast from the web or face “legal action”.

Core Projects & Technologies (UK) Ltd are the people who sell the TALMOS system. Their approach to Doug is heavy handed. They might not like the fact that he said something negative about their product but that’s life. It speaks volumes about a company that makes a living selling interactive software to react in such a “web 0.5″ way to a single blog entry comparing VLE systems. Incidentally, the link I gave for Doug’s blog shows the version he edited today, possibly an act on his part to appease his employer who should never have been involved in the first place. Here is what Google’s cache told me he said in the original post

“There are other VLEs available - for example Doncaster, where I teach, has gone for FrogTeacher from 2008/9 onwards. Despite the bizarre name, I was quite impressed with it when I had a play with it at the BETT show earlier this year. Up to now we’ve been using TALMOS. Well, not using it, actually, as it’s so difficult to use, cumbersome and singularly un-useful…“

There are lots of questions raised here. Doug himself raises the professional versus personal aspects in a post he made today. I’m concerned by the way in which these people get heavy on his employer when something he does outwith his classroom annoys them. I’ve been googling today and the one thing that I learned from the TES is that Doug is not alone in having few good words to say about the TALMOS VLE. Can I redirect those with a curious mind to the following threads: “poor version of powerpoint“, “does anyone have anything good to say about TALMOS“, “please say something positive” I am sure that you will find more if you dig deeper but the point has been made.

Bottom line? Well, TALMOS may wish they had never called Doug’s school. How long before a standard Google search for TALMOS produces a marketing manager’s worst nightmare. Next time you take issue with a blogger, try getting in touch direct, possibly with a comment on the relevent blog entry, to find out what issues they are having. Maybe that blogger can help you to make your product better.

I had a moment last week when I realised that I could model exactly how a problem-solving strategy would look to pupils as they stared down at the jotter in front of them. I was trying to show my new Higher Physics class how to find resultant displacements and forces by adding vectors. This is the first time I have taught the higher course and, while I would probably resort to trigonometry myself, I had to demonstrate the scale drawing method as it can prove useful when several vectors are involved.

I wanted to show pupils, step-by-step, how to measure angles and draw the lines representing the vectors to an appropriate scale. I tried begging an old blackboard protractor from the maths department but there didn’t seem to be any going spare. In desperation, I turned to the SMARTBoard software on my mac, even though the room I was using at the time had no IWB installed†. I found a brilliant protractor and ruler that I could easily move around the screen.

The best thing was that the protractor and ruler are such a good match to the physical equipment the pupils have to use when it is their turn to tackle the problem sheet. Actually that wasn’t the best thing. The total best thing was doing a scale diagram with these tools live in front of the class and coming within 0.4° of the angle they obtained using trigonometry

†This is probably a gross breach of the EULA. Sorry about that. Yes, really.