Slime and fear factor

Slime is one of my favourite things, and I am delighted that I have a unit which requires me to make it this year. Fear Factor is going to be an awesome unit, I can tell already. The cleaners are going to kill me, though, for the amount of paint and glue and gloop we managed to get on the floor yesterday.

Anyway, it turns out that the high grade PVA we get here in NZ is not the same thing as Elmer's glue. Who knew? I am disappointed, because it means that our slime is not quite the same thing as I expected, based on the instructional video I found.

One of the things I like best about teaching science is that, if first we don't succeed, we can just try again. The lab technician and I spent a happy hour making various concoctions - sometimes, I am sure I didn't grow out of making mud pies, I am just more purposeful about it now. Anyway, we came up with two possible recipes:

40mL PVA glue
10 - 15 mL acrylic paint
approx 5g borax

Sprinkle the borax onto the glue and paint mix and mix thoroughly. If it is too sticky, try moving it to another person who has clean hands, or add more borax if that doesn't work

This gives a beautiful, shiny putty that is charmingly elastic and doesn't stick to your hands too much.

We also made a slime that is quite lightweight and frothy.

1/2 cup PVA glue
few drops of food colouring
1/2 cup water
2 heaped Tbs borax

Mix all ingredients in a tip top container. The PVA will curdle and the borax will feel grainy, but just keep mixing until it starts to coalesce. This will make a firm, frothy slime that sticks to your hands rather more than classic slime.

We plan to mix grated polystyrene into the second slime and make sculptures. We expect that they will set nicely if left on a windowsill for a couple of days.

Anyway, the science that we are teaching along with this is all about states of matter and things like that. I hope the students are learning something in addition to the enjoyment of slime. Next week, cornflour slime. I love me some non-newtonian fluids too.

The quick and dirty screencast of junketing learnings

So. Still can't use Jing and am exhausting both my patience and possible reasons. But I did find screencast-o-matic, which is the quick and dirty screencast maker of my dreams.

This is what I made to illustrate my learning from my visit to Andrew Douch last week. It is exceedingly quick and dirty, in the sense that it took maybe 30 minutes from start to finish (including taking the photos, making the powerpoint and learning to drive screencast-o-matic) and the sense that I kind of threw the information into it.



Things I learned from this? Well, screencasting is pretty easy if your standards are not professional. Big check yes here. Am I going to use this again? Yep. I liked making it, it was easy to make and talk through, and simple to upload and share. Am I going to do it again? Yep, though I am getting annoyed with Jing. But I shall triumph eventually.

Playing round with content creation

I have no voice today, so I am at home messing round with animoto and Stupeflix to see which one is going to work best for introducing students to the idea that they can create their own little learning videos.

I made one in each provider, both on the same topic - Air Pollution. We're studying that, briefly, as part of our unit on fuels in Y10 science.

Here is the animoto one:



I like this because:
They have music available to use as soundtracks
Their mixing is pretty funky and I love the visual aesthetic
They make embedding and sharing really, really easy

I don't like it because:
It's limited to 30 seconds only
Images have to be saved to your computer, you can't input urls
If you put in too much stuff, they cut it instead of giving you the option to cut it
Their flash uploader is incompatible with my school laptop settings and the simple uploader is hard to find

Here is the stupeflix one - youll have to follow the link, because, as I say below, embedding is not it's strong point:

Air pollution video

I like this because:
You can download a copy to your computer
You can make the videos as long as you like
The visual is pretty clean and there is plenty of room for text
You can control how long each image set appears for

I don't like it because:
You have to use music from your hard drive for sound tracks - royalty issues, anyone?
Their flash uploader is incompatible with my school laptop and there is NO simple uploader to be found (I'll be telling them about this one directly)
There is no easy option to embed and only a few sharing options are available (I will also be giving them feedback about this)


So, as you can see, it's not easy to choose. I'll have to provide the students with a step-by-step guide anyway, and I'm not sure which would be most painful to write. I think I shall discuss this with my minions and we'll decide which one is going to give us the fewest headaches while providing the coolest learning experience for the students.

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.