I set a laptop up in a remote location in school together with a USB telephone handset (which Skype detected with no problems).  This laptop was logged onto Skype and the screen positioned (and lighting checked) so that I would be able to see the person using the handset on the video stream.  Students had a very brief lesson in Skype (how to dial and hang-up was all they required) and sent to the computer to call back.  Students took it in turn to call back to the classroom and their video was displayed on the whiteboard.  I used a headset microphone and acted as intermediate between the rest of the class (who were asking questions) and the caller.

What surprised me was the level of engagement, and even my most reluctant speakers were willing to have a go at phoning back to the classroom.  Students who passed by were keen to join in and several asked if we could use Skype in their lesson.  The technology worked well and we enjoyed clear and lag-free conversations about a number of topics.

I plan to use Skype again next week to work on our telephone skills (this was a careers lesson).   Other ideas to try soon in other lessons include telephone hot seating (students take on a role and we take turns to phone them up and ask a question), telephone interviews and ‘ask an expert’.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone else who has used Skype in this way.

My KS4 students have been looking at trends in the periodic table.  I thought that a visualiser would be perfect for showing the reactions of the alkali metals, and for recording them to show absent students.  I tried to get the camera head into a suitable position but where it wouldn’t be at risk of jumping potassium which was easier said than done (I didn’t want to risk damaging it).  Let’s say I wasn’t very impressed.

This is typical of the still images I collected

This is typical of the video I recorded (I’ve removed the sound since it was captured using the microphone on my laptop and wasn’t much use).

I wasn’t impressed with the quality of the recorded video, and having the flexible neck on the camera didn’t allow the range of usable viewing angles that you would imagine.  My advice?  I’ve seen fellow bloggers talk about building a low cost visualiser (e.g. GlenGilchrist).  My advice is build your own – the quality of video from a home built visualiser will at worse be equal to the quality of the video I captured and would likely be much better.  As well as saving money you are more likely to be adventurous with a camera costing under £50.

BTW I’ll stick to recording my demonstrations with my Flipcam and mini-tripod!

My advice – if you have PGCE students get them on the case.  PGCE students have to show capability in ICT skills and what better way to learn than by mastering data logging equipment and rolling out activities to the rest of the department.

Data loggers are excellent tools for SEN students – hopefully the ideas below will encourage you to dig yours out and get them up and running again!

Using data loggers as a digital measuring device

At the simplest level just using a data logger as a digital thermometer works.  It is easy to read and using like this is a good way to introduce the technology to students.

Using data loggers on the IWB to show live data

Most data logging equipment can be connected to a PC and used to show live data from an experiment on the IWB.  You could even get students to take regular readings from this live data, building up skills like timing and recording results, whilst keeping the activity simple.  This is especially useful where there could be health & safety implications from the experiment.

The image shows the data captured from an experiment investigating the insulating properties of dog fur!  This graph was displayed at the end of the experiment, with live data being displayed on the screen as the experiment was underway.

Data loggers also allow many students with poor numeracy skills to visualise the results and answer questions like ‘did the temperature go up or down?’ which they might not have been able to do from a table of numbers.

Using data loggers to capture data and create a graph of results.

For students who lack the necessary coordination or organisational skills to collect results over a period of time, why not give them a data logger and get the hardware to do the work for them.  Students are released from the requirement to collect readings at fixed intervals, they don’t have to struggle to read the thermometer and the data is even graphed at the end by the data logging software.  More advanced students can even export their data into Excel.

This graph shows the temperatures collected during the dog hair insulation experiment (unfortunately I didn’t start the data logging collecting data until we had finished using the live display on the IWB).   Again this allows students with poor numeracy to visualise the results, and to make comparisons between the different data sets collected (e.g. which temperature dropped the fastest? the most? the slowest?)

Do you use data logging hardware/software with SEN students.  Leave me a comment and share your ideas with others.

From launching the app with the ‘My Exams’ icon, you come the my exams page where you enter the dates and subjects of any exams coming up.  You can also post how you feel about the exam (e.g. I am confident, I am busy revising) and also post a message about your exam to your Facebook page.  Once you have entered your exams, you are given a list of exams in date order, with a countdown for each.  Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much more to this section – I would have liked to see the ‘to do’ list as a separate tab in the application, perhaps collating the lists from all exams.

The app also has a section for useful and quite detailed study tips, like the importance of having a plan.  Whilst the app will only appeal to those students that are already preparing for exams (with an Apple device), it is another tool in their arsenal to help them succeed.  Search the Apple App store for ‘Exam Countdown’ – it’s a free download.

Now if only there was an app for willpower…

I tend to listen to podcasts on my drive to school and when I’m walking the dog – and I’ve picked up ideas for experiments and lessons as well as broadening my scientific knowledge.  My favourite science podcast is ‘The Naked Scientists’ and I’d recommend if you only listen to one podcast you listen to theirs.

I’ve listed below some of the podcasts I find/have found useful – let me know if you know of any good ones I’ve missed out.

The Naked Scientists (Podcast link/iTunes link)

BBC Science in Action (Podcast link/iTunes link)

Science Weekly from the Guardian (Podcast link/iTunes link)

Lab Out Loud (Podcast link/iTunes link)

Dr Karl and the Naked Scientist (Podcast link/iTunes link)

Scientific American (Podcast link/iTunes link)

Nature (Podcast link/iTunes link)

The Tech Teachers (Podcast link/iTunes link)

I’ve listed below some of the more useful science websites I’ve found – if you know of any I’ve missed off, do add them in the comments below.

Some of the websites will offer you RSS feeds (with a little orange symbol) which means you can read updates from these sites without having to visit them – you just need an RSS reader.  Google Reader is my RSS feed reader of choice – you simply ask Reader to follow the sites you are interested in and you can read the updates for all the websites you subscribe to within one tool (from any computer).  Look here for helpful videos.

You can click here and see the articles I’ve read  and thought were worth sharing (and you can even subscribe to this list in Google Reader!).

Feel free to leave a comment or use the ‘Contact Me’ option if you have any questions.

TES online

The Science forum on the TES (Times Educational Supplement) has plenty of enthusiastic teachers who are willing to answer queries, share good practice and act as a sounding board for your ideas.  The board is organised as a series of topics, and you can either start a new topic or respond to an existing topic.  The board can be used anonymously so you don’t have to reveal your identity if you are afraid to show your ignorance.

Twitter

Twitter is a website that lets you post short messages (140 characters or less).  People follow you and you follow other people – you can direct questions to individuals by putting @theirtwitterID at the start of a message.  To make twitter easier to use, you can use a third party program like Tweetdeck (which can also post Facebook and other updates for you too!).

Follow me on twitter and say hello – I’m cleverfiend (because fiendishlyclever was too long to be my user ID)

To speed things up I’ve created lists of the science teachers I follow on Twitter (note that the teachers may talk/twitter about other topics as well as science).  You can simply follow my lists and therefore follow the same professionals that I do.

Science teachers in the UK

Science teachers outside the UK

A word of warning about Twitter.  You hear some teachers raving about twitter saying its the best thing since sliced bread and how their PLN (personal learning network) helps them develop as a teacher.  I find it’s like shouting in the wind.  The signal to noise ratio is extremely low, and many of the teachers on twitter (including many of the ones I follow) are only there because they like to hear the sound of their own voice rather than to engage in meaningful dialogue.  I do stick with it though because it has proved to be useful on several occasions.

There are many other educators on Twitter as well as science teachers.  Once you find someone you like have a look at the people they follow and follow some of them yourself.   You can search Twitter for the #ASEchat tag – these are all posts (Tweets) by science educators using the Association of Science Education hashtag (#ASEChat).

Others

There are fan pages on Facebook but I’ve yet to find anything of value for CPD.  You can also engage in discussion with individuals through their blogs by leaving comments.  I know online communities have been set up in the past using the Ning platform but the people who run these tend to be ‘tech hippies’ jumping on every bandwagon that comes along rather than an overworked science teacher!

Let me know if you find a good online community that I haven’t mentioned – I would love to hear about it.

Using Delicious(.com) to search for useful teaching resources.

Delicious is a social bookmarking site owned by Yahoo!  You can save, share and discover bookmarks with other people.  Because the opportunities to interact using this service are quite limited, it is often allowed in schools where other social sites are filtered out. Delicious is extremely useful for teachers and can be used in two main ways.

Saving and organising your bookmarks.

When planning lessons from home, if I find a resource that will be useful to me in future I save it to delicious (sometimes with a note of explanation).  This means I can access my list of bookmarks from home and school.  I now also have an online backup of my bookmarks in case my laptop dies.  When you save your bookmarks you can choose if you want them to be private or public.  Public bookmarks are very useful because you can share them with colleagues and even students.  All I have to do is give students the web address to my delicious page  (delicious.com/fiendishlyclever) and they can look through my bookmarks to find the site they want.  More tech savvy teachers can embed this list on the school VLE as a way of sharing links very simply with students.

Searching for new resources and information

People only bookmark sites that are worth revisiting.  Searching the collected bookmarks of users from across the world should return better and more useful sites than just searching Google.  Simply visit the delicious.com main page and use the search box at the top.  Search results (example below) also show how many people have bookmarked each site and key words (tags) added to the bookmark when it was saved.  The search will also return any sites that match the search query in your personal collection.  (There is a save button next to each bookmark so you can save it to your personal list if you find the site useful)

Whilst many teachers do use Delicious to save and share links, many forget that it has tremendous value as a search tool.

A while ago I blogged that I used Windows Live Mesh (beta) for syncing files between home and work.  I’d recently got fed up of the huge wait on boot up while live mesh indexed files on my hard drive and I decided to try some alternatives.  These are my thoughts on the software products I tried:

So which did I choose?  There was little difference in transfer speed and overall functionality between products.  Live Mesh took an age to start up (whether from boot or resuming from hibernation) but the other two pieces of software made little noticeable difference to start up times.

At the moment I’m using Jungledisk (I’m on an old plan and only pay the storage fees, not the monthly fee) and I feel safer knowing my documents are securely encrypted in the cloud.  The only catch is the lack of conflict resolution which has to be checked manually at regular intervals.

There are many cloud-based file sync products out there, and I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has tried one of the products above or one similar (e.g. sugarsync) for use by teachers.

Update:  I’ve moved to Dropbox because of the relaunch of Microsoft Live Mesh (with corresponding moving goal posts), and I kept getting file conflicts in Jungledisk.  I found Dropbox was extremely reliable and I’ve got my storage limit up to 6Gb with referrals.  Dropbox also links with other services like PixelPipe, providing alternative ways of getting content into your Dropbox.  Remember to follow my referral link to DropBox if you haven’t got an account already – you get extra storage space!

I wondered if it would be possible to access this resource from anywhere on the internet (as the networked drive is always powered on).  The answer was yes, and this is how you do it over an encrypted ssh tunnel (it was quite simple once I had the right software).  It does rely on you having a device running openssh (you can add this to older versions of the Linkstation, or on a separate machine).  I haven’t exposed my network storage box directly to the internet because anyone could stream my music for free.

• Make sure you know the ip address of the Buffalo linkstation on the local network (e.g. 192.168.1.3) and that streaming works fine from iTunes on your local network.
• You need a copy of Putty (I won’t explain how to configure ssh and putty to work together).  There are some pointers on my blog post here.  Set up putty to forward port 3689 to your NAS box as shown below:

• Download Songbird and install.

• Download the daap plugin for Songbird (you will have to edit the install.rdf file to stop it saying that it can’t be run with the current version.  Simply rename the installation package to a zip file, open the file and edit max version to 1.5, then save and rename the plugin package back to an xpi file)

• Start up Putty and then Songbird.  From the File menu on Songbird add a new daap source at 127.0.0.1

• After downloading a list of songs available, your library should be ready for streaming over the internet

Please feel free to comment/contact me if you have any questions. Tutorials for setting up SSH to connect to your own network are available all over the internet – please don’t contact me about SSH if you haven’t read a tutorial first!