Science Teaching v 2.0

Ewan Macintosh has shown that social software is not just a gimmick that it has a place in mainstream education.

It’s not television, it’s not broadcasting. It’s about harnessing the networks that are out there, virtual or real-world, and creating new models of interaction for an audience that, increasingly, is online rather than on the box.

participation culture needs to underpin our largest educational and technological ventures.

In an older post Thinking out of the (X) Box Ewan discusses some of the possibilities that gaming has to offer with particular reference to creative writing. Derek Robertson Head of the Consolarium, the Scottish Centre for games and learning has been aware of the potential of platforms such as the Nintendo Wii for some time at Learning and Teaching Scotland.

All students are involved with social networking or gaming culture at some level. They interact with each other socially through Bebo or Facebook and they also interact with each other playing “games’ on the variety of platforms available.

I spent a day looking at the educational possibilities presented by the use of a Nintendo Wii in a science classroom. These possibilities fell into a number of categories.

• The technologies used (blue tooth, motion sensors, infrared cameras etc)
• Physics engines and the need to understand basic physics in the real world before the virtual world can appear realistic.
• As a carrot… yes you can come into the lab during lunch and play with the Wii but you have to research and write a report on the technologies involved over the weekend

get your vodpod

Brainstorming indicated links that can be followed up

Apart from the obvious engagement of students (might not do boxing again as the willingness of students to virtually punch each others’ lights out looked as if it might spill over into the real world) there were some exciting developments. One student who clearly has an understanding of the technology beyond that of this humble chemistry teacher is following up a project turning the Wii remote into an interactive whiteboard. An example of gaming stimulating high order learning.

I traveled to Westlake Boys High School on the last Thursday and Friday of the school holidays with a small band of senior students to experience The FIRST New Zealand robotics competition. What a wonderful experience it was.

For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology is a United States based not-for-profit organisation which aims to inspire young people to pursue science, technology and engineering careers.

Smales Farm Technology Office Park and Massey University are developing an educational robotics programme which has been shown to double the likelihood of students choosing a science or technology career.

This was our first experience of robotics and the competition. The students had a great time, learned an amazing amount and are desperate to involve other students and compete again.

There is no doubt that the authentic learning experience FIRST NZ robotics provides has huge potential in a secondary system dominated by assessment and the need to focus student learning towards predetermined outcomes.

Students had to design a robot that could score points in a game and be capable of preventing opponents from scoring. The solution to the problem could take many forms. I was struck by the potential of the activity to foster development of the key competencies in a meaningful situation.

The New Zealand Curriculum identifies five key competencies.

thinking

using language symbols and texts

managing self

relating to others

participating and contributing.

Thinking is about using creative, critical, and metacognitive processes to make sense of of information experiences and ideas.

Students had to use all of these as they tried to make sense of the manual and develop their concept of the ideal robot. They went from zero to hero within the hour as their prototypes moved for the first time. Can’t get the same intensity in a one hour lesson somehow

Using language symbols and texts is about working with and making meaning of the codes in which knowledge is expressed.

Making sense of the drawings, instructional text and technical language was a real challenge especially when imperial units were used!

Managing self is associated with self-motivation, a “can do” attitude and with students seeing themselves as capable learners.

The competition allowed students to show enterprise in their design endeavors. They had to be resourceful as they adapted the materials provided and resilient when prototypes did not perform as anticipated.

Relating to others is about interacting with a diverse range of people in a variety of contexts.

The competition with its ethos of gracious professionalism stimulated interaction. Members of each of the two Green Bay worked cooperatively and shared ideas. In competition they had to work with a different “red team” in each round and so developed relationships with students from other schools. finalists had to chose another team to work with them in a best of three competition.

Negotiation and compromise proved to be surprisingly important where personalities and ideas clashed. One faction in the winning team wanted to add a kind of helicopter arrangement to their vehicle. The “twirly” attachment appeared to serve no useful purpose and was an unnecessary drain on battery power to their vehicle. However it did look good as the robot charged into battle.

The other faction wanted to keep the robot highly functional and saw the “helicopter” as an unhelpful addition.

Unlike the learning prescribed by tightly defined NCEA achievement.standards the outcomes of the competition could be quite unpredictable.

The decorative attachment remained part of the final design after some intense negotiation Where “gracious professionalism” became rather strained. Ultimately the twirly invention proved a match winner as it interfered with the mechanism of robots designed to lift and drop counters for high scores.

and finally participating……enough said

and more action

Pillow lavas form when molten rock comes in contact with cold sea water. Toothpaste shaped tongues of lava are squeezed away from a large feeder tube. We can see this happening around Hawaii today. Kilauea burst into life about 500,000 years ago and has been pumping huge volumes of lava into the ocean ever since. There is evidence to suggest that similar activity was responsible for producing rock structures at Te Henga on Auckland’s west coast. The volcanic region that existed then must have matched the size of the Ruapehu massif which has been around for the last 250,000 years

If you head towards the southern end of Te Henga beach the rocky cliffs are mostly quite spectacular formations of pillow lavas. They originated in the same way Kilauea produces them now.They lie on top of slightly older volcanic conglomerate.

The winter light made it difficult to capture the pillow lavas as clearly as I would have liked.

First came accross a link to vodpod on Sue Waters post ” What widgets should I add to my blog?” on the edublogger.

Edublogs allows you to insert widgets into the sidebar. With vodpod there is no need to tuck your widget away in the sidebar. It can be inserted into the post itself.

Registering with vodpod is straightforward. The usual email, username and password gets you started. The vodpod widgets come with a number of different skins. Copying and pasting codes for the sidebar, horizontal bar, button and video wall allows easy embedding. Unfortunately couldn’t get my preferred skin, the video gallery to embed.

Instead of asking students to do a standard experimental write up I often ask them to do a short video clip describing, discussing or explaining a scientific phenomenon. Students need to practise articulating their ideas before they communicate understanding on paper. They can give feedback as they use the video clips for discussion.

Vodpods are a useful way of collecting the videos together as a presentation to develop their thinking or for revision when preparing for exams. They can also be used to track development in understanding.
get your vodpod
Just for the record,in the sixth form unit on structure and bonding I talked about the conditions under which ionic compounds conduct electricity for about 10 minutes. Students then had to produce a video on the topic by the end of the lesson. After reviewing their work next lesson they filmed a second attempt. There are still inaccuracies but it is the development of ideas that is important.
Web 2.0 tools encourage changes in pedagogy

Sprout is another useful web 2.0 tool. I have seen the logo around quite a bit on presentations but only decided to have a look at its possibilities after reading a technology web 2.0 and general nerdery in the classroom blog

This application will be invaluable in the business world and I guess this is where the people who are developing Sprout see their market. Very professional promotional material can be produced without the involvement of expensive advertising agencies. There are a number of good examples on the Sprout beta site.

Advertisers and educators have similar problems. How do we engage our audience and keep them informed? When we have created a teaching/selling moment then our educational/promotional material has to be focussed and stimulate further interest and questions.

Web 2.0 tools like sprout allow us to build media rich learning and assessment bytes for our students. They can relive the excitement of their classroom experience online at home when they may well be awake and ready to learn.

To try it out I put together some information for chemistry students before they investigated the structure and bonding involved in silicate minerals as they made a work of art in their chem lab.

It was an excuse really to test the the mashup capabilities.

• Played an old and tired looking Powerpoint and captured it as a videoclip with Jing. Loaded it onto sprout and used the resizing tool. (A cheap version of camtasia perhaps, made by the same outfit)
• video of classwork downloaded from You Tube
• Another powerpoint turned into a video clip via jing then loaded into Sprout (this seems to be an effective way of uploading jing tutorials to the blog but more later)

Finally if you are still there Sprout is an invaluable tool for producing e learning resources