Halfway through the first week back and a lot has happened.
I’m in the process of organising a geology excursion to Hallett Cove Conservation Park. If you haven’t been there, go on a sunny day as it is stunning. Anyway I’m organising the excursion for all the year 9 students and their teachers. It will run without paper and pen task. Instructions will be in the form of a video on the school iPods. Tasks include explaining to teachers, making short videos, using iPad apps, producing art work and generally having a relaxing educational day. I’ve organised excursions that run with iPods before, but this one is huge and has three separate days to cover all the classes.
Tuesday we had a livelink with Professor Brian Cox. Needed some time at school in the holidays to make sure it would all work. The technology didn’t let me down. So about thirty students got to hear him answering questions from students – didn’t manage to get any of my students to put forward a question (perhaps because they didn’t really know who he was). Sonja did most of the supervision as I had a group of year 12s to do exam revision with (a pity as they would have enjoyed the link).
Tuesday night I went to see Professor Cox at the Entertainment Center. Great talk, well organised, good use of video and stills to pace the presentation and I came away feeling that I had learned something that I could pass on to my students. So well worth going. Kirk and Sonja were also there from the Science Faculty. In fact it seemed as though the place was full of Science teachers for a full on (he didn’t cut us any slack on the Physics) two and a half hours. I now have a better grasp of where the multiple universes come from and some ideas about how to present some of the interesting but difficult concepts that come up from time to time.
Today was a very productive day for all my classes :-). Rhoni Mc took my Year 10s through the basics of preparing an infographic through Piktograph. I’d already shown them my attempt for the evolution of rats and most of them signed up with the intent of using the site to produce the visual presentation for their tale of the evolution of a favourite animal – we have snakes, foxes, sloths, komodo dragons and so on. Next up my year 9s enjoyed the short activity about fruit batteries while they were introduced to the idea of chemical reactions that give out energy. Fierce competition ensued and one group scored 0.9 volts which is quite good. Last lesson they were looking at endothermic reactions and we looked at coldpacks, photography and they carried out an endothermic reaction (citric acid and bicarb soda) where the lowest temperature was -12 degrees C. That beat my previous record by 2 degrees. The year 8s started geology and homework is to make a rock collection. Today we looked at the formation of Earth, where do rocks come from? They wrote a starting essay about rocks (I’ll use this to compare with a final essay they write when they have completed their learning on this topic to measure their learning). I also use the essay to teach essay construction skills through a graphic planner.