Fizzics

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?

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 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.