slidecast/podcast

What a busy day, the AS students made their first slidecast and I’m quite pleased with how smoothly it went to be honest. Slidecasting is a weird and lovely mash up of a powerpoint (blech) and a podcast. I dislike powerpoint this is well documented, but I’m finding slideshare really useful. I’ve been trying to keep up the wiki, doing some of it myself, and forcing students to do the rest. Because you can upload PDF’s to it, I’ve been doing all task sheets through pages, saving them as PDF files and uploading them to slideshare. This means I can embed them in the wiki, so when people are absent or lose their sheets, they have no excuses. It’s both wicked and delicious.

The slidecast was homework – About once a month or so I do an audit with the students, I’ve been working on ‘making notes’ with them (not taking notes) so I make sure they have a full set of those, any additional tasks and we then spend the lesson making revision resources as we go along. The slidecast was aimed to be a useful revision resource that could be embedded in the wiki. The sweet girl who did the voice-over for this came to see me and I loaned her the headphones, mic and laptop (supervised in the office I might add) to get on with the recording. I think for a first time it was excellent, and I’m really pleased with how easy it was to create.

For my BTEC First group we had spent the lesson looking at whether differences or similarities in organisms has a bigger impact in terms of classification. I decided to couple this task with some key skills work and hold a group discussion. The discussion was recorded and the students came up with their own rules for the talk that generally all centred around politeness. They were quite shy but again, I’m really very pleased with how it turned out. You can download it here .

My sense of humour might not be what I thought it was

Mitosis from thesciencefloor on Comiqs

I’m not sure how often I’m supposed to post to this, or even if there is a ’supposed to’, for now I’m going to assume this new blog is my play ground for all the new ttp toys, and mostly, to the delight of the BTEC students, we’ve been playing with comiqs. One group is going to recreate either William Withering or Edward Jenners early forays into medicine. One student is particularly excited by taking photographs on his camera of his friend re-enacting having cowpox pus plastered on his arm. I, personally, am a more than a little grateful that it is a homework task.

 The other group, interestingly, are going to try to represent hormonal control of blood sugar. This isn’t at all an easy task, but already they’ve been coming up with some wonderful ideas. For representing homeostatic balance we’ve discussed the stasis field around the star ship enterprise, a tight rope walker, the scales of justice and rather bizarrely a ballerina hippo….

It can all look as out there as they like, as long as the science is right, I’m one very happy Biology teacher.