Light bulb update

Here's an update on my last post for Y13 Physics class about SHM teaching - what I planned to try to get the students to understand better.

The restoring force was fairly easy to comprehend and helped them understand, so they now know that the force will always oppose any motion away from the equilibrium. The suggestion from Maria (Thanks 🙂) reminded me of a very useful tool and we now have it saved as a bookmark for regular use in all topics.

Working on Phasors now.

Y 11 Practical activities - some thoughts and concerns.

The class is getting bigger and is at 30 students now. Getting a practical activity done with this group seems to be a challenge. We do not want any health & safety hazards when we are working with chemicals.

It does not get easier after the lunch break and so I should keep the practical activities to the morning lessons.  Some of the students turn up late after lunch and the  groups have to be reorganised according to the change in numbers.
What I am planning to do is:

• have a fixed number in each group
• have gear organised for a certain number of groups
• do a practice run with the experiment before introducing any strong chemicals.

Will try and get a practical activity in the next week and see how it goes. 

Light bulb idea

Today in the Y13 Physics class we were discussing Simple Harmonic Motion and I was explaining to the group about the direction of force and how it is always opposing the motion. There were too many variables: distance from equilibrium, direction of motion, velocity etc. This proved very confusing and some students got it but a few were still confused when asked the same questions using different scenarios. It was getting exhausting for them trying to understand, and me to explain. This was stuck in my head - I neeed to get them to understand this...but how....


Thinking about it now - I feel that if I had used the term "restoring force" that would make it easier to understand/explain. This is because by definition restoring means bring back, replace, etc.  People learn in different ways. Will see how we go in the next class, but seems like this should definitely work.

 

Technology in the future

"All this technology is making us antisocial"

At first glance it looks like we are becoming less social as we are glued to our devices - whether they are laptops, tablets, mobile phones or other smaller wearable devices'

   

However I disagree with the premise that we are becoming antisocial due to this technology.
Why?
By definition "social"means 'relating to society or its organisation'.  We are actually able to keep in touch MORE than was possible ever before. It is easier to get in touch and stay in touch anytime anywhere. And that makes us more social not less; neither does it make us antisocial.

PD - Help with our Inquiry

Today we had an after school PD session, and the main purpose of this session was to help us with our Inquiry.

While many different formats were discussed I really liked the "visual" one promoted by another visual person. It looks like this

Another tool I would like to use is the labels. This will help me organise all the relevant blog posts together. Some suggestions are :

Should be able to formalise my inquiry soon now that I have some useful tools in place.  

Google for Education Certification Exam Level 1 (Week 9)

Today was the big day. All our learning and creating and sharing was being assessed, and at the end of it we were expected to get a Level 1 badge. However I cannot show you what it looks like because
of this:

The excuses are:

• umm...
• it was...

No not really - I just needed more time. It took me longer than usual to get started. The questions were not too hard, I might say some were easy and I really enjoyed it. Perhaps I took too long enjoying the exam and eventually ran out of time. I got 20 multiple choice Q's and 11 scenarios and am guessing that the others got something similar. When the timer alert was on the "last 10 minutes" I still had 5 scenarios to work through. That alert sort of "woke me" up and the tasks were done faster. Clearly not fast enough as I was working on scenario 9/11 when the exam self terminated since it was 3 hours since I started. It does not help to note that only one person in the group got through today.

Note to self - 

• Google "Hangouts" and "Meet" are different and not interchangeable. 
• Youtube "watch later"  and "playlist" are also different.

What next: we have to wait 14 days to repeat the attempt so I will register some time after a week so that we can give it another go. 

Sites Review Wk 8

This week we have had exams at school, and still going on - the next one starting in about 20 mins at 9 am. At the DFI we are reviewing our sites today. I shared my sites on chrome cast, starting with the one I made in 2011 and have been using it till the end of 2016. The new site is not as full but is much easier to navigate - I could see that myself even before we got some feedback. For the current site I got some ideas and some feedback: Instead of linking the year plan google doc, I could embed that in my site, ditto for the show me,  explain everything or other (A physicist shoots himself to prove a point ) videos of the various calculations etc.


We are preparing for the google level 1 test and the skills required for that are the ones we use everyday. Use the school account to register, more details here. Register at least 48 hours before so that the login details are sent in time. Have multiple devices to switch between screens, and use an incognito window. If you need to practice then there's help available here.

Working on "new" sites is so much easier than the classic sites. Of course the flip side is the limitations you have in terms of what pre determined options are available.

 

Here's the landing page for all my important sites, created using the new sites. What I did was just take screenshots of the individual sites/blog etc and converted these to buttons and added the links.

Plan is to link the sites of everyone in the DFI group.

Embedding is a breeze on the new sites. We can embed docs, maps, you tube videos, or videos from the drive. The docs are live and no one can edit these online. A new utility which was released last night is embed url; this is still in the initial stages so not yet fully functional.

Here is the link of my new site. 

With this done I believe that I am almost ready for the Google Certified Educator Level 1 Exam :-)