I love school *displays unseemly enthusiasm*

This morning has kicked off brilliantly - although I could do with more coffee. My Y10s did an interesting reading exercise about fossils, my Y13s estimated the rotational inertia of each other and used it to explain why we put our arms out when we balance, and my Y12s demonstrated Newton's First Law with an egg. Have some video evidence:

I'll stick this video on the school site too, so the students can access it. They had a lot of fun making it, even though there was a lot of "no, YOU do the voiceover" going on. We didn't have time to add a proper audio track, sadly. Nevermind, it's pretty good for their first ever attempt at using Movie Maker and Audacity on the same day.

Even more ideas!

I spent all day yesterday at the NZASE conference on science in primary education. It was awesome and I had a great time and learned heaps.

One of the best - and most important - things that came out of the day for me was the importance of providing an opportunity at the start of a lesson for kids to either frame their own questions ("I wonder what would happen if I made the diameter of the tube bigger?"), or to discover cognitive conflict ("X says that falling things can't have balanced forces, but that's not true"). This then gives them context for the rest of the lesson - awesome!

I do this sometimes, but not anywhere NEAR as often as I should. The conference really highlighted for me that I should be doing it more.

So... since my Amazing Adventure is on my brain, I have decided that the start segments (with the three teachers) should pose a problem or situation that is a springboard to students thinking and questioning. For example, if the section on Mexico City is on smog, then the teacher introduction will have one teacher coughing and sneezing, and the other two arguing over whether she can fix herself with medicine, or if it's a systemic problem that can't be fixed.

*goes off to plot*

More ways to use flickr

I should have done this ages ago... too many things to do, and the sparkly image stuff kinda gets shoved to the bottom. Nevermind.

For parent-teacher conferences (or report day, as the principal likes to call it), I made name plates for the doors.
Last year we had budget sheets of A4 with our names written on them with a vivid, but I think these are much nicer, more personal, and look classy without taking much time to do.

I used flickr, again, to find the images. This time I got my Y13 physics class to help me (they were totally responsible for the one of Basil Brush doing an experiment while wearing 3D glasses, no matter what they may say to disclaim). I rather like the one we chose for me - apparently, I can be rather shark-like.

Then I used the 'motivator' tool over at Big Huge Lab's Flickr Toys site.

Easy. So, so easy, and the end result was something classy and a little bit nicer than a sheet of A4 with a name scrawled on it.

Another tool at Big Huge Labs makes a calendar for your desktop from a flickr image. Naturally, I made use of that, and I currently have Ian Crawford (from The Cab) gracing my desktop with a nifty little calendar in the bottom right corner. Of course, one of my colleagues saw it and asked if it was Chrissie Hynde.

Student collaboration and participation

I think that the students should record an episode of an amazing adventure each week. I mean, sure, I'm not letting my minions colleagues out of their promise to make idiots of themselves on video with me and record our own series... but I think the students should do it. One group each week gets a free pass on the activities for that location, and instead they have to research that location, write a script, film themselves and edit a short clip to add to our show.

Awesome, huh? Then we could have a disc burned of them all at the end for students who wanted them. I'd suggest we show them in assembly, but I think that would not be motivational.

Writing new schemes is awesome

Yesterday, my minions colleagues and I worked on the new scheme for junior science. There was nothing particularly wrong with the old scheme, it was just... boring. And very, very content-driven. It was all about the content.

So we wanted to do something different. We spent nearly all day working on an integrated scheme, and we've come up with the first stages of something that I think will not only be more interesting and engaging for students, but will also lend itself more readily to inquiry learning, will be rich in ICT opportunities, and will emphasise big concepts and information gathering and processing skills.

So... our eight (one for each term over the two years) big themes/concepts are:

1. Gross! A Y9 unit on just that, things that are gross or funny or icky. In this unit, we'll cover things like microbes and decomposition, the particle nature of matter (and how smell gets to your nose), goo and other sticky, ooky things, and anything else we can think of.

2. It's all about me. Another Y9 unit, this one using the students' own self as a focus. As well as all the adorable human biology and genetics we'll get to do, this is also going to have a social focus. We might consider things like tattoos and the inks used in them, or how to make lip balm.

3. In the home. This Y9 unit is all about what we find around us. I have left this with minion one to be finished, since it was her baby

4. Pretty. Obviously not the final name, this unit is about all the reasons why science makes us catch our breath, and all the ways that science and art collide. We'll look at natural landscape features, astronomy, adaptations in plants and animals, light and sound. It's going to be awesome. Can you tell that this one was my idea?

5. Amazing Race. This one came from my desire that students learn a little bit about the world outside. We have about 15 locations and students complete science activities in groups about each location in order to move along through their race. There will be a prize for the group that gets through the most locations. This will involve things like investigations into acid rain and the effect is has on old buildings (like Hagia Sophia in Turkey), or graphing smog count in Mexico City. Minions one and two and I are going to make a little series of videos to show each week, chronicling our (fictitious) progress through the race.

6. Time. This one looks at geological processes, archaeology, changing scientific models over time, and future predictions.

7. Engineering. We need a catchier title, but the key to this one is the ways that science shapes the world and the world shapes science. We'll look at lots of physics - forces, in particular - but also some genetics and some chemistry. There is lots of scope here!

8. Forensics. We're looking at shaping this one along the same lines as the Amazing Race, so students must take small steps towards solving a crime. We might take a lesson at the start of the unit to make badges or something, just for fun. Forensics is an awesome topic, full of integrated science already. We're going to have so much fun with it.

So. Life is looking good. I'll be uploading the first installment of our Amazing Race (Three Mismatched Teachers Edition) just as soon as we record the first episode.

Dude. Gotta love the satire.

Today's amazing feat of awesome!

Well, I haven't done it yet, but I shall.

Part of today is devoted to planning the Y11 Physics outline. We spend all of this term on Physics and I love it. Love it, I tell you! It's so much fun, at Y11, or should be fun. Y11 is where we learn the basic stuff, the stuff that rules our lives in the real world. Things like how forces act together to give a resultant force. How a body can have several forces acting on it but not be moving (that one blows the kids minds, even though it's something they have known since they were, oh, five, just from experience). How you can predict motion from the things that you know about a system. So. Much. Fun.

I have a whole pile of resources for this topic, and I am determined to use them to good effect. My students are going to inquire and think and learn if it kills them. One of the things that we are going to do is fair tests, and I will make the students do some of this online. I haven't quite decided how, yet, but I'm thinking that they might investigate experiments that other students have done and posted - like on that community on wikipedia that I can't remember the name of right now - and analyse them against a set of criteria for what NCEA defines as a fair test. Interesting? Well, I think it is.

Also on the table is the rewrite of the junior science curriculum. Fully integrated! With cross-curricula links! Nature of Science as a focus! Other stuff! It's going to be so much fun.

Keeping in touch from Whangarei, New Zealand to Norwalk, Conneticut

My quasi-platonic life partner and I IM all the time. We keep up to date with each other's journals. Most importantly, we collaborate on projects that are important to both of us. She's always up for giving me advice on the tortured heartbreak of the angst I'm writing, and I'm always up for correcting her wavering POVs and continuity.

Teacher-only days

I love the collegiality of hanging out with other teachers and talking about teaching and learning and pedagogy. Today I have had an opportunity to talk about my favourite, favourite things - metacognition, praxis and critical thinking. Huzzah!

We're working from the NZ Curriculum, and it is made of awesome.

I really think today is going to be incredibly productive, so far as improving whole-school approaches to the Key Competencies and Inquiry-based Learning goes. Next up, ICT tools for the above, and then we break into our departments to work up a unit of learning.

I'm looking forward to it so much.

The images we associate with science

So, today, as my Y9s finished their collaborative, open-book assessment. One of the first ones to finish helped me make the image to the left - I asked her to help me choose images that captured the idea of science.

We used the Big Huge Lab's flickr site to build the mosaic using images we found on flickr.

Isn't it awesome?

I have to find a way to use this in class, because it is Just. That. Great.

Also, I did have the html that would take you to flickr so you could see who took those amazing photos... but then IE crashed and I lost it. Thanks, Microsoft. So, if you stumble over this, I am so, so, sorry that I cannot correctly attribute the creative genius of the photographers.

Music in class - treats and rewards

I use music as a reward in some of my classes. If the class is working well, I'll hook iTunes into the stereo and off we go. We can mostly agree on reggae, but the kids get weirded out by the more avant garde end of my collection of dub and electronica, and their tolerance for emo music is low at the best of times.

So sometimes I let the kids hook their iPods into the stereo instead. Sometimes that can be really rewarding, but sometimes it makes my skin crawl. Who would have guessed that my Year 9s have a thing for Mama Mia? OMG, Belinda Carlisle just came on. I have to go vomit discreetly into a rubbish bin now.