silent movie

One of the most boring things I had to deal with last year was teaching carbohydrate structure. I could barely keep my eyes open for it so I pity the poor students with this one. I tried my best, but resigned myself to the fact that it’s boring. I don’t have to do it this year with the new A-level students, but I will have to cover carbohydrates with the BTEC National year two students.

I’ve been reading around the Geoff Petty website in preparation for this thing I’m going to on Tuesday with the post-16 science network and to help me with my scheme of work writing. It’s not something I’ve had a lot of practice with (I sort of did it last year, but not very effectively). That and assignment writing for the BTEC students. Teaching post-16 in a new build as a secondary qualified NQT was a strange career choice all things considered. Ah well, steep learning curve or something….

Anyway, carbohydrates. I had access to an interactive web tutorial and awful looking PDF worksheet (I hate workheets as a general rule – I try to make sure the only ones I usually give out are practical instructions) and we sort of trudged through it and it was OK. Just, boring.

This year I’m abandoning the tutorial and worksheet altogether, I’m going to have some model making, games with molymods and a bit of a mission and medal activity using a silent video.

I’ve made the silent video based around the tutorial I had already, because I didn’t want to over complicate it. For the plenary session of the carbohydrates lesson (I think – that may change). I’m going to get students to plan and record a voice-over that explains the carbohydrate detail in the video. For those who progress very quickly I’m going to get them to design or decide on an opening and closing image as well. I’m probably going to get them to record in class either on their mobiles and bluetooth it to me, or on one of the couple of microphones I’ve got.

The video is made in pulp motion so will be really very quick to add the sound to and time the video to the voice over. If students decide they want music as well then they’ll have to sort out a track and come back to me with it.

Then for the starter of the next lesson, we’ll watch and evaluate each of the videos that they have made. I think it has the potential to be a bit more interesting than a worksheet!

now move the arm a tiny bit, now a tiny bit more, now dismember the frankenstein…

I liked the stop motion animation thing and my very first instinct was to dismiss it because it looks time consuming. Playing with the cut outs did take a while but the results were very cute. iStopMotion is very easy to use, really user friendly and fairly self explanatory. I thought maybe I could set animated dissection tasks for students who were too squeamish to chop up the real things in the lab. The poor sensitive types are at a disadvantage in anatomy because the virtual dissection we have to contend with is pretty lame. I liked that idea and hadn’t really thought past it.

Next year my teaching schedule changes quite a bit, I gain a lot of hours in some areas, and lose a lot in others. One of the groups I lose hours with is the BTEC first students. I will see them for just over two hours a week and teach one unit with them – Science In Medicine. This was causing me some issues because a lot of what they do in this unit follows on from the cell, tissue and organ physiology they start with in the other biology units. How could I teach application of anatomy when they hadn’t learned the anatomy yet?

Then I remembered that a set of criteria focuses on the developmental stages of a medicine, from hypothesis to synthesis to testing, clinical trials, marketing and development. This year we used a case study of the development of Viagra as an example of how a drug is developed. Next year, right at the start of the year, I think we’re going to make an/some animation/s and have a screening event. I can afford to give them a good few weeks to achieve this and as a way of introducing them to their new course I think it will be lovely. It’ll get them focused as a team of students (peer support in vocational courses is brilliant) very quickly, it’ll force them to work on their planning and literacy and will give me the chance to get through a lot of key and study skills with them at the same time as them getting through an assignment. I’m quite excited really!

Fronter

I hated fronter until about a week ago. I couldn’t understand how someone who set out to make a VLE would choose something so ugly and counterintuitive and clunky. The structuring seemed weird, the layout seemed weird, the routes to information seemed convoluted.

I still think all these things this week, except for the hating it part, this week despite all of its flaws this ugly duckling has been a bit of a super star in this awful BTEC mop-up period.

Last weekend I was overwhelmed by marking and faced with a range of students who had all failed and passed different aspects of the BTEC course. I was glaring at the tracking document I’d hashed together on the back of some form or other when it became terribly obvious that not one out of all the BTEC students had the same needs as any other. It was going to be organisational, motivational, teacher in breakdown style chaos.

Except… except it wasn’t thanks to Fronter. I’ve had “fronter training” and shown how to open a new folder, set up a test… I wasn’t impressed with the VLE at all. Not in the least because it looks so vile (and I do think that’s important). I’ve barely touched it since except to save documents when I’ve run out of space on the school laptop.

Last weekend I used pages (reports template) to create quick and simple (good looking) mop up task sheets
. I mention good looking because it’s this sort of thing the students notice. I had one task about cell division, so the header showed dividing cells and the whole thing was colour co-ordinated. It may have taken me an extra five seconds to make that effort but the students noticed, they liked it, and were eager to see how the graphics would look for the diseased tissue task or the body systems task…).

All of these tasks got uploaded to Fronter Hand In Folders, and I then went through limiting access and room times for all of these tasks. Only those who need to see a folder, see a folder.

I showed the students, explained to them that anything outstanding, they would see a folder for, a task and instructions how to do it. I would be there to help with anything. A few of them needed to have fronter passwords re-set so after a slow start the work started coming in. Thick and fast. I’ve had more work submitted to me this week than in any other week of teaching, pretty much ever. The least organised students are submitting work faster than I can mark. If I mark something in progress and provide feedback on how to improve, then within an hour the student has generally corrected it and resubmitted to give an absolute A+ result!

So for all its flaws, this week, I love fronter.

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.