Fizzics

We had a full day inset on Curriculum for Excellence on Tuesday.  I was dreading the prospect of a full day sitting in our school hall listening to someone from down south lecture us about the changes that are coming.  As it happened, my vision of what our session would involve couldn’t have been further from the reality.   There was no guest speaker and we didn’t have to sit all day in the hall.

What we had instead was a day with quite short whole school presentations/videos by the head teacher followed by more in-depth departmental/faculty breakout sessions where the implication of CfE for our own curricular areas were discussed in detail.  I was quite pleased with this unexpected opportunity to discuss the implementation of CfE within Science, as the ongoing administrative side of department meetings often means we never look much further ahead than the current reporting cycle.

Despite having participated in a week-long curriculum planning event last winter, I have remained sceptical about the draft outcomes for Science due to their woolly wording and lack of clarity.  I think I had a lightbulb moment on Tuesday when, in between all the chatter, I realised that it was the pupils’ experiences that counted, not some summative assessment grade or STACs.  When the penny dropped (collectively, I might add) you could feel the relief around the room and the renewed willingness to engage with the challenge.  Questions raised changed from confrontational sentiments such as “How are you supposed to do that?”, “That’s not covered until Higher!” and “We shouldn’t have to rewrite all this!” to more proactive questions like “How could we make this outcome more practical?” and “Can we throw away the S1 textbooks?”

I feel a lot more comfortable now that we have started the discussion, although I don’t know where it will lead us.

image by antonio1952

I’m nervous about the first day of term (this coming Monday) because I have been asked to give an INSET session on how I make best use of ICT in my classroom. It all came about from an open evening for the school’s Parent Forum AGM, where several members of staff were approached to show their rooms and resources used in day-to-day lessons. The feedback we received was pretty positive and resulted in a request for us to run an ICT session for the entire staff at the next inset day.

My plan right now is to break the sessions (about 30 minutes each) into the following steps;

• show my classroom blog and the different resources I have made available online for pupils - another colleague will also discuss blogs but, having shared our experiences, it is clear that we use them for different things
• short focused introduction to the latest tool I have used, screencasting, taking my colleagues through a quick and simple example using the windows software they already have on their classroom pcs and discussing scenarios where this could be used across the curriculum
• a look at the video project I produced with my S2 class towards the end of last session, highlighting how open-ended activities such as this could fit into the CfE draft outcomes for Science

I had thought about a short introductory session on Glow, now that we are likely to be switched on in the New Year, but my Glow account has just been activated and looks pretty empty at present.

It might sound daft to be so nervous about talking to colleagues about what I do every day. In principle, I think it is good that the school recognises the need to share good practice. The problem here is that I can’t see there being very much interest in it. Feedback already received from colleagues suggests they don’t want to know about things that would mean spending more time doing school stuff. From my own perspective, I would have preferred to have a willing audience, rather than an audience who are there through compulsion.

Have you found yourself in a similar situation in the past? How did you approach the problem and how was your presentation received?

I’ve heard people talking about “dead time” recently. It’s defined as the time between pupils choosing their course options for the next few years and the end of the current school year. The problem is that you end up with kids in your class who are not going to be taking your subject next year (for whatever reason) and whenever you try to motiviate them to work, they remind you that they don’t need/want to do your subject next year, so why bother?

Well, it bothers me. The way I see it, it makes little difference whether a pupil is taking my subject next year or not. Those who are will start their new course in June, those who are not don’t need to be dragged through what is left in the curriculum, all this does is switch them off to the possibility of picking your subject up again in later years.

Last year, I used the “dead time” to work with my low ability S2 class to produce a series of short films, each showing a small group performing an experiment (they all chose an experiment that went bang!) After filming, editing and producing a compilation DVD, they voted on their favourite script, effect, experiment, camera operator, scientist, etc. and awarded prizes at a “Science Oscars” ceremony.

Being the new boy in our department, I have the bottom S2 science set again this year. I’ve taken my inspiration for this year’s “dead time” from a Curriculum for Excellence meeting I attended back in November - a group of physics teachers and university researchers got together to start work on a set of resources supporting the introduction of optoelectronics in the draft science outcomes. We were looking at cross-curricular opportunities, linking physics outcomes on light into the chemistry/biology outcomes, and someone suggested an investigation into the response of plants to different colours of light. So that’s what my S2 class will be doing this year.

We have propagated some geranium cuttings from the school greenhouse and are getting ready to grow them on under single colours of light. I persuaded my PT to part with some cash and I’ve bought a supply of ultra bright blue, yellow and red LEDs. Tomorrow, I’m hoping to show some of the class how to assemble a circuit on prototyping board before we move on to soldering next week.

One of the things I am really looking forward to is the chance to give the class an opportunity to try soldering. Everything we do with circuits in school is based around the ubiquitous crocodile clip, a component designed to allow teachers to move quickly from one circuit to another with little thought for giving pupils the skills they might need if they decide to follow a career in electronics.

When I asked the teams to develop success criteria for their experiment, they told me it was important to know if the plant had grown. They came up with a range of ideas and settled on three different measurements; plant height, leaf size and “greenness”. While my classroom is fully quipped to deal with height and “size” measurements, I’m not so sure about the determination of colour. The kids came to the rescue with a suggestion to make their own “paint chart” to compare the shades of green, so that’s another task for tomorrow. It’s going to be a busy 50 minutes and that’s before I introduce our new wiki for recording our progress!

I’ve noticed a lot of bloggers making comment on Google’s launch of their knowledge service “knol” this week.  There’s a lot of chatter on how move this is an assault on Wikipedia (here, here & here for example) but is it really?    
There are people who love  Wikipedia and there are others who, perhaps rightly, question the accuracy of the information, agenda of the contributors or the authority of the volunteers who do the editing.  With Knol, Google gets away from these arguments by having pages (knols) written by experts in that subject.   
Google has invited people it considers experts to contribute some knols for their beta phase.  These people will receive a 50% cut of advertising revenue from their own pages and a further element of competition exists in that Google anticipates more than one knol on a subject.  It looks as if authors can expect to go head to head with rival experts in terms of page rank, page views and advertising revenue but I’m not sure which of these is the best indicator of quality from our perspective.  Which knol page meets the need that drove us to the web for inforamtion in the first place? 
I have another problem with the knol idea.  In terms of learning it’s a backward step.  A move that I see more as an attack on Encyclopedia Britannica than Wikipedia.  The knol concept takes an expert who delivers content to the reader.  It’s essentially a traditional education model, the very model that Wikipedia is trying to break.  In education-speak, we have knol handing out information to passive learners while Wikipedia encourages active learning and participation - the Holy Grail of current education policy.