Gwyneth's Blog (9)

I'm just playing with a site for making widgets. I think it's pretty interesting, but last night when I went to bed I dreamed about it, imagining that I had made a widget that was actually a mini twist-a-plot book, and you clicked and made decisions all the way through, and I had conditional programming in it. Conditional programming. I haven't thought of that in years.



So, I'm wondering what my kids could do with it. We could maybe make widgets of their work in science, and… Continue

Title aside, I'm just wrapping up administrivia for the teaching year. I am awash in a sea of paper. It's all over my desk, littering my other desk, stacked on my equipment table, scattered over the lab benches, stuffed into envelopes and piled high in file boxes. I feel like we should have a pulp and paper mill at the back of the playing fields, just to keep the school supplied with forms and test papers and timetables and calendar dates and process reminders and leaving forms and testimonial… Continue

I have the pdf open and I'm wading through it and thinking about the presentation on my experience in using web2.0 technologies in the classroom. It's really interesting, and I am totally getting my geek on just thinking about all the cool stuff. I am just getting resources together right now - and am about to investigate a site that says it records your bibliography online so you don't have to do it the hard way. Sounds great to me.



I also have a classroom full of emo kids,… Continue

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So, am I the only teacher who suffers from some peculiar kind of dissonance in keeping all the parts of my life separate? I can't imagine so.



I was thinking about this as I decided that I needed an online way to keep track of my novel outline - something visual that I have have open and refer to as I write. Of course, I'm writing my novel for NaNoWriMo, because even novel writing is best done through social networking. So this… Continue

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dg65p5tg_0ch7q94hp



This is the presentation that my Y13s made on wave-particle duality. It was a great collaborative effort and we all had a good time. Yay! for my students.



Of course, they are now doing their student appraisals of my teaching, so I will probably have to rescind all interesting learning opportunities and make them doing boring textbook work in… Continue

First period, Y13 Physics. I gave them a presentation template in googledocs, with the main summary headings so they wouldn't go too far off topic. Then, I got them to research and find answers and summarise them and enter their results into the presentation. We had three laptops in the room between six of us, so some people were using the internet while others used books or summarised the ideas that the people using the internet were coming up with. Sadly, no one else had a gmail account, so… Continue

As I wind down through the last unit in each of the three senior subjects I teach, my students are trying to make sense of new concepts and half-heartedly revise their existing knowledge. Everything gets squeezed down to whether or not questions like that are asked in the examinations, and, if not, they're not interested. Additionally, spring winds its flirtatious tendrils into their hormones and I get to see enough mating behaviour to make me a little nauseous.



Also winding down is… Continue

One of the biggest problems that most students face in physics is writing describe and explain questions. They might understand the concept and be able to apply the formulae and use mathematical methods to solve problems, yet be unable to translate that understanding to written answers.



There is no easy solution. The reasons students struggle with them range from basic problems with writing to problems with ordering their ideas, to those that can't identify the key thoughts they need… Continue