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?
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.
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 had a surprise on the last day of term. I knew it would be hard to have a double period of my vocational electronics class. Soldering can work wonders for focusing the mind and keeping everyone on task but prototyping circuits in reusable breadboards is a different matter. Add a few pupils who have already completed their practical unit and you have the ingredients for a difficult last day before the holidays.
One of the outcomes I had set at the start of the week was for everyone in the class to know how to use a resistor colour code chart to determine the value of a resistor without having to make a measurement. I had pinned a snappy poster on to the classroom wall close to where the resistors are kept and, over the course of the week, I noticed that pupils had become more independent - choosing to refer to the poster instead of asking me to tell them the value of the resistor they had picked from the tray.
At the start of the second period, two boys asked if they could do revision for the NAB they would be sitting after the holidays. Could they also make up some revision questions on a sheet of paper? I was surprised and delighted that they had come up with the idea, these things just don’t happen in this cohort. Their quiz comprised 10 general questions on electronic components and their uses, followed by another 10 questions where the a given colour combination had to be converted into a resistance.
It was easy to ask the first half of the quiz to the class but what about the colour band questions? Well, I loaded up The Gimp for mac (Windows version available here) and created a “blank resistor” template for the boys to modify on the IWB. They quickly drew in the colour bands by hand and saved each as a new page in the Notebook software. Their willingness to produce drawings was unexpected and I captured each one as a gif file to keep for use again. A cartoon I saw yesterday reminded me of Friday’s events and I pulled the images into Keynote and exported the presentation as a Quicktime movie.
Try the quiz yourself. Each resistor appears twice. The first slide shows the bands, the next displays the resistor and it’s value so don’t click through too quickly. You’ll need a colour code chart.
I’m not posting this because of the ICT being used. I’m trying to convey that, when you least expect it, even a bunch of boys treading water until they can apply for apprenticeships can surprise you. Perhaps they thought they were having a “skive” on the last day of term. Whatever their motivation, I saw them take control of their learning, make excellent use of ICT and assess their peer group. All this within two hours of the October fortnight.
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.
I’ve been “tagged” for one of these blog themes that go round from time to time. I usually avoid them, like the emails that say you have to send them on or there will be consequences. This one is a little different though. I have looked at a lot of blog entries with the same title and it is amazing to see what others show to communicate their inspirations in education.
In my tardiness, I have been tagged by both Mrs Moodle and Nick Hood. Here, finally, is my image.
Those of you who know I teach Physics will think it’s an obvious choice of image. What is it that appeals to me here? It’s obviously a geeky image with kids taking apart a piece of electronics (it’s a betamax vcr). What I really like is the fact that it is years since Betamax lost the VCR format wars but this device still has value today.
We throw things out unnecessarily these days. There is a lot of educational value in older equipment, particularly in electronics. Modern equipment is often constructed with a built in obsolescence that prevents repair or makes it uneconomic (so much for sustainability) that often also makes it difficult to see the individual components when we remove the outer cover.
In taking things apart, we offer active and engaging learning. Ask pupils questions as they “dissect” an old vcr, freeview box or electric sander. Better still, get them to film the event and add a commentary afterwards - which part are they removing, what role did it have in the unit ?
I’ve just acquired an old colour portable TV. My next S3 class will be assessed on their video of this “alien’s” autopsy.
I’m meant to tag 5 people now. It’s unlikely I will find five who have not completed this challenge but I shall try tagging
I read that Stewart Mader is starting a series targetted at people currently without a wiki. He’s calling the initiative 21 Days of Wiki Adoption and each day of the event will see a new video added to the series.
I’m going to pay attention to what he says. I should have had a wiki by now. I entered the Rolls-Royce Science Prize last year - read my entry here rolls-royce-science-prize.pdf. My idea was to build a wiki resource with S2 pupils to use in Science class, a wiki written by pupils for other pupils and using audio and video to aid accessibility and promote collaboration among lower ability class sets. Unfortunately, the panel of judges didn’t find sufficient merit in my plan and I had to make do with a small shiny plaque for the school library wall.
I bumped into one of the competition manages at the Scottish Learning Festival in September and he told me that the judges felt there was too much ICT and not enough Science in my submission. There I was thinking that the whole point of the exercise was to improve Science teaching, not do more Science. But what do I know? In the meantime, here I am.
A year has passed and the bottom ability S2 Science set feature on my timetable once more. The course is still not meeting their needs and I am still having to drag them kicking and screaming (them and me both) up to the page in the notes that will feature in their exam at the end of this month.
Both S3 classes had a brief glimpse at their survey results today. These were raw results, not filtered by class, so each bar chart shows 40 respondents rather than the 20 you would expect for a science class.
I realised that I had done something stupid in questions 8 & 9, with results that are sufficiently interesting for me to share them. Question 8 asked pupils to rate themselves using the statement
“I know that electrical energy transformed each second =IV”
From the image below, we see that only 50% of my S3 pupils are confident that they know this.
To help non-physicists see what is interesting, I need to explain that
energy transformed each second = power
current has the symbol I
voltage has the symbol V
Armed with this, have a look at the details for question 9 (below) and the responses I received to the statement
“I can perform calculations involving power, current and voltage.”
These two questions are asking the same thing, yet an extra 35% of the pupils felt that they had achieved the learning outcome.
The reason for the difference lies in the language used to express the question. What does this tell me? I think it tells me two things - three things if I include checking the questions before I set them!
First of all, the learning is not as secure as I would like. While pupils might know the relationship that exists between power, current and voltage, they lack a sufficiently deep understanding to put this relationship into context. The second point is that the language we use to frame a question plays a critical role in determining whether or not pupils can provide an answer. How much of the assessment we put children through is a true assessment of the subject area in question and how much is a test of their ability to unpick the language of assessment to identify find the real question underneath?
One of the two S3 classes has now completed the surveymonkey self-assessment survey on their current unit. I ran the survey as a “kiosk” by setting up a laptop with internet access on a table at the back of the classroom, well away from prying eyes. In a 50 minute lesson, I found I could get 10 pupils to complete the survey. It didn’t take 5 minutes each but I got them all to watch me go through the first two screens of the survey with them on a whiteboard each time they came to class.
I thought I had been smart by setting up two different collectors, one for each class, but it seems that the results are being lumped together as 40 respondents rather than 2 groups of 20. Luckily, I still have the custom data field with the unique identifier to help me sort them back into class sets of data. One of my concerns has been that each class has had a different experience with me and I want to see if this is born in the self-assessment. I’ll share some data over the weekend once the pile of prelim marking is out of the way.
We had a full day inset on 
