Physics Questions

Here is the link for the Circuit Packet Review

This is a short video I made answering a few questions about gravity.

Ending a semester

Here we are on the cusp of final exams. The students like that I am half crazy in class but don't like the homework or tests, imagine that?

As I thik about next semester, I will be working with our district tech people to get my students onto Google docs. I will start with a physics vocabulary list that they will develop in teams and then progress from there. I will have a group project that for which the presenter would be great. It will be an interesting thing to try. The key will be to balance the technology with the learning. Without good learning, the technology is just a toy. If we can use the technology to enhance the learning and expand the classroom, that will be brilliant. When, and if, this happens hopefully the students will feel better about the tests and homework.

Here is a link to a google doc that I would like to use to keep a vocabulary list for my physics classes.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=txiAeu0XRdwpg6pdaRBgSpw&output=html

Live Blogging

Last week, I tried a live blog in my classroom using todaysmeet.com. The idea was fairly simple and the outcome was surprisingly good. I had a serious of questions that I had created on a PowerPoint and the students worked in partners to answer the questions. They entered their answers via the website and we were able to immediately see what each group was thinking.

Overall, the students enjoyed the experience - more for it's novelty than anything else. I thought that the discussions were positive and students worked well by talking with their partner before answering. This is a strategy that I would like to try again in the future. The critical piece is to have a good set of questions - questions that require a high level of thinking and that do not have obvious answers.

Technology Integration

It seems that my latest frustration is how to find the time to effectively integrate more useful technology into my classes. It is easy to pull up spiffy things on the Internet, it is more difficult to make meaningful use of technology. I think about different ideas and don't implement most of them.

The ones that I am currently interested in pursuing...

1. Moodle - an online learning management system seems like a great way to save time on grading as well as incorporate some of the best collaborative features on the internet.
2. Liveblogging - I am going to try this this week to see how it works.
3. Programming - I teach physics and have felt for a long time that if the students could write an algorithm to solve a general problem that they would truly understand the problem. I would like to check out vpython, phun and scratch. I think phun and scratch offer different things than Vpython.

Learning 2.0

I am currently working through a web based course designed to teach about Web 2.0 tools. It is because of this course that this blog exists. For my particular content area, I am not sure that blogging will be a very useful tool. It certainly could be used as a method to disseminate information, links, videos and things for my classes but beyond that I am not sure that it is the best format for discussing ideas in physics (at least at the high school level).

The discussion area could be useful to talk about particularly difficult problems or ideas but we have other online tools that we already use and this will be an additional task rather than an additional tool.