youtube

Progress is slow

Have been playing with electrostatics quite a bit lately, partly to try and establish how to guarantee that the demos will work as expected (see previous blog).
When it works well it is actually very impressive, but taking a video of this gives the impression that it is always this straightforward, which is not at all helpful to new teachers who will expect everything to work perfectly first time, and may be silly enough to not have gone through it themselves beforehand.

On the I.T. front, I stuck a few aul’ videos onto youtube and googlevideo. They certainly allow for better quality viewing than downloading straight from thephysicsteacher site, and also allow for feedback which will hopefully prove useful.
The disadvantage is that they are almost definitely blocked in most schools, so can only be viewed at home.
Youtube has a time limit of 10 minutes, which is a pity because apart from short demonstrations, many of the video clips I have are twice as long. Googlevideo is not as popular and I have also had quite a few problems uploading. This sure is one big pain in the rear end.

Teaching ’bout evolution of the eye

Was at a very interesting lecture at the ISTA AGM in UCC over the weekend, where Dr Jeremy Pritchard gave a lecture entitled ‘The evolution of evolution’. He spoke about how the eye was a difficult subject for Darwin to explain.
While the audience was mostly Biology teachers, I got to thinking about how I could introduce evolution into my own teaching.
We do a little bit on short-sightedness and long-sightedness in the Leaving Cert Physics course (under the heading of Lenses), and this would be an ideal spot to open up a discussion.

Dissecting a cow’s eye used to be allowed, but no longer is, but there is a link to a nice video of it, plus some other useful links here although it can take a while to download.

There is also a movie clip of how the eye itself could have evolved here, and an animated version here

Every so often I notice that the school library receives a copy of a journal/magazine entitled (I think) creation science, or something similar. I must look into it to see why we get this.

The Applied Maths class and the religion class got together a couple of weeks ago to discuss/debate many of the issues that bring Science and Religion together and also which bring them into conflict. It went very well; hopefully we can build upon it and do something similar in the future.

video.stumbleupon.com

I came across this site quite some time ago, but it must have been in its early stages because I didn’t appreciate its potential at the time.
www.video.stumbleupon.com is an ideal starting point for videos on any given category, and it cross-references all the major video sites, such as google, youtube, metacafe etc.
I have just spent the last 6 hours browsing through its science category. Very impressive. It offers a lot of potential for science teachers, and indeed teachers in general.

I have just spent the entire evening browsing through the science/tech category and it is indeed very impressive.
There is usually a reference somewhere along the bottom to the original video, and sometimes a direct link to it.

these videos can then be saved for you within the site itself (assuming you have registered), or can simply be added to your favourites folder.

Alternatively you can download them directly to your desktop with a suitable video downloader program. This may mean that you have to view them within youtube or videogoogle because many of the video downloader programs recognise these but not the stumbleupon.com site.

As with my last post, this may offer a possible alternative to the mainstream video sites which are banned in schools, although there’s no guarantee that this site won’t itself be banned.

Anyway . . .
On a more immediate front, young Harper in form 5 has been bugging me about why light can travel through glass, but not concrete, and because there aren’t enough people who ask questions in this world I need to put some resources together, if only to point him in the right direction.
It’s late.
Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow . . .