Fizzics

I wouldn’t have bothered but Tom Barrett started it!  I moved into a new room this week, here are photos of my old and new classrooms.

I took my Higher Physics class to a strange venue for their lesson today.  We have been looking at apparent weight and had been trying to jump off desks while holding a spring balance to see the change in weight displayed while falling towards the ground.  

Textbooks and teachers often use the example of a lift moving between floors/starting to move upwards/starting to move downwards but it’s rarely more than a thought experiment really since they can’t be followed up with a tangible, practical illustration.

Since our school has been made more accessible by the recent addition of a lift at reception, I spoke to our Head Teacher and, with a bemused look, she agreed that I could use the lift for a whole period to do experiments.  

We worked in pairs, taking turns at moving up and down between floors, looking for any signs of movement on the spring balance.  We successfully confirmed our “thought experiment” and some sharp pupils spotted evidence for Newton’s 2nd Law and shared their findings with the rest of us.  Pupils finding links to other aspects of the course without prompting was the icing on the cake!

image: “elevator” by Beard PaPa @ Flickr

I stole this title from a post earlier today by Tom Barrett.  Tom has set out his stall, having identified the technology he will be using with his class over the new school year.

What about me?  All I know right now is that I need to up my game in terms of classroom technology this year.  Unlike Tom, we’ve been back to school for 2 weeks now.  I’m moving into a new classroom next week (photos to follow) and will have an interactive whiteboard for the very first time.  One of the challenges I will face is how to integrate this new tool into my predominantly senior school timetable without patronising the 16+ age group.  No doubt I will be drawing heavily on the IWB tips that Tom and others have compiled.

Add to that the new Intermediate 1 Electronics course, where I am having to get up to speed with packages such as Crocodile Technology 3D to teach circuit design & simulation before letting this class loose on their SQA projects.  

That’s a steep enough ICT learning curve for this term.

I’ve been trying to clear out the hard drive on my laptop. I cleared it back in May but it seems to have filled up again. Lots of video podcasts have been transferred over to the science folder on the school server, photos transferred on to a portable hard drive, hundreds of old email attachments have been binned and I have been ruthless in reviewing my iTunes subscriptions.

Then I found something half an hour ago. It’s a folder that takes up a whopping 15GB on my mac. Inside, there is an iMove file for a video I started with a S2 science class back in April. I was half way through the editing process when we changed timetable and I must have forgotten to finish the editing job for them after they moved on into S3. It was a great plan to have non-stop practical work, building light-proof plant propagators, assembling different coloured light sources (see the blue light source below) and all to see if plants responded differently to red, yellow and blue light. I liked it because it allowed me to combine biology and physics – we don’t get to do that very often!

What should I do? Finish the editing or just leave it on a hard drive somewhere? It’s going to be hard to find the enthusiasm when the pupils involved are no longer in my classroom.