Science Teaching v 2.0

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

I have already put a quiz together and thought I would try out other features of the tool.

I took a class of fifth form students along to the computer room without preparing them for the activities I had designed.

• I asked them to register with Mystudiyo giving minimal instructions. students seem to be very familiar with the process (name then email addres)
• Gave them the name of my quiz (reactions of metals) and asked them to do it. The whole process took about 20 mins and they were all happily engaged.
• I set up a quiz that allowed collaboration
• Asked students to design questions based on the topic they were studying (microrganisms but genetics if they wanted)
• There was limited time left so only indicated that it would be good if they googled pictures then embedded.
• The questions they came up with were quite interesting in that they went well beyond the scope covered in class
• I initially thought I would need to give more prescriptive instructions but then decided it was better to have a bank of questions that covered a wider range.

The class enjoyed both activities and I will routinely use Mystudiyo to build up banks of questions perhaps to use in a school quiz.
Making their own questions challenged them to think about work covered in class and was just as valuable as attempting the quizzes.

The quiz has some obvious limitations. In a number of instances students simply didn’t have enough time and cobbled something together to complete the exercise. (they won a Mars bar if they completed both exercises……never underestimate the power of a bribe)

I’m not usually a fan of multiple choice testing but fun quizzes that allow feedback, engage students and let them practice skills are useful. I came accross MyStudio on Edublogger.

There are a number of features I like about this tool

• Easily embed text, images, audio and video
• Ability to create ‘non-collaborative’ quizzes or “collaborative” quizzes (allows others to add further questions to your quiz)
• Quizzes are easy to embed into blog posts

There are a number of disadvantages that cause problems for science quizzes:

• You cannot format text in the answer boxes so chemical formulae cannot be used directly
• the 60 character limit constricts the types of answers that are possible.

I particularly like the ease with which video can be uploaded in a quiz. Clips of chemical reactions can help visual learners by reducing the dependence on text or static images. Using video clips produced by the students encourages engagement.

The process of producing a quiz illustrates neatly how the use web 2.0 technologies is changing traditional pedagogy. A number of simple media tools are involved to author material that would have required the assistance of a publisher a few years ago.

• Using a digital camera to take movie clips (preferably done by a student while the teacher is drinking coffee and supervising)
• Using widows movie maker to edit the files before uploading to You Tube You Tube
• using Jing for a screenshot from a powerpoint presentation
• embedding the video files in a MyStudio quiz

I am currently trialling the quiz with students on my school blog for homework and classroom use.

Hope to start using Asus Eee’s in the not to distant future as a cheap web browser to allow students to be “connected” at school as well as home. The whole web 2.0 thing grinds to a halt while students have to “power down” in the usual disconnected high school classroom (no I don’t want another pod of computers in a room I have to take my students to)