Fizzics

I’m a lot happier with the homework situation.  Homework submissions from my Higher Physics class have improved since my last post.  Then, this week, several parents came to our school’s senior parent evening with questions about the new system and how it works.  I suppose it shows that pupils have been talking about it at home.

Some parents were looking for reassurance that their son/daughter wasn’t wasting time sitting at a computer pretending to do homework, while others wanted to know more about iTunes so they could monitor the subscription themselves and know when an exercise is due.  I certainly hadn’t anticipated that parents might be looking for ways to keep up with the work their children were being set.

It’s the last incident that I feel is the most significant though.  I blogged a new exercise late last night just before going to bed.  After lunch, I was informed by a pupil that she had updated her iTunes library over breakfast and had discovered a fault in the latest pdf file, it wouldn’t open.  It turns out she watches the video solutions on the bus to school.  She was right, the file had been corrupted and it’s been replaced.

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?