I'm delivering an IWB in Science day in London tomorrow and I have been looking around for any new science websites that I might have missed. So I was really pleased to have stumbled upon Physics Games.net this morning.
Physics Games.net provides nearly 50 different flash-based games, all collected onto the one site. A few of these games, like Magic Pen and Fantastic Contraption, I have seen before on other sites, but it's nice to have one place to bookmark to get them all in the same place. There are quite a few games here I hadn't seen before. Physics teachers should definitely add this site to their favourites.
Most of the games are puzzle-type games that draw on aspect of physics - many would be useful to illustrate forces or gravity.
The site also provides embed codes for the different games so you can embed them into your own school website or VLE. There are some fun games there, and even if you don't end up using them in a lesson, there are some fiendishly addictive puzzle games there. Check it out today.
Here's an excellent animation that shows the history of the Earth, and evolution in all it's glory. I'm a science teacher, so I love stuff like this.
It's produced by John Kyrk and his website is packed with even more great flash animations for teaching GCSE and A Level Biology. Including meiosis and mitosis, cell structure and photosynthesis. Thanks to Clay Burrells blog for the link to this site.
And while on the subject of Evolution, and not really enough to justify a post of it's own, here's some cool Darwin/Obama mashup images from Mikero.com
More on his site, and you can buy Tshirts too! Proceeds go to the National Centre for Science Education in the US.
Thanks to Simon Mills (Twowhizzy) on Twitter for sending this link to me. It's not IWB related as such, but they are really nice Science demos that I just had to share.
WhyNotChemEng is a site for science teachers that is trying to encourage the inclusion of fun, safe and relevant demonstrations to the Key Stage 4 Science curriculum. They have provided a list of their top 10 ways to start lessons with a bang! There's a video of each demonstration, and a downloadable helpsheet that explains how to do it. This includes the Whoosh Bottle, Frothy Foam and Screaming Jelly Babies ;) Take a look here.
While it's nice to be able to show videos and suchlike on the IWB, they shouldn't be used as a replacement for proper demonstrations and experiments if you can do them. Ideally still do them, and then the videos and simulations can be used to supplement the learning or for revision at a later stage. I still don't think you can beat the impact of really seeing an explosion with your own eyes. And as long as you take precautions, and do a risk assessment, then they can be done safely. I would try and do the Thermite Reaction as often as possible when I was teaching.
Even better, why not try some of these demos and make your own videos with a Flip video camera and share them online?
Inspired by something my friend Laura made ages ago in Powerpoint - here's a quick presentation using that shows what happens when you mix Photopeach, a handheld digital microscope and someone with too much time on their hands.
The first presentation shows the images - show it to your class and guess what the different things are.
What is it??? on PhotoPeach
The second presentation has the same images, with the answers added as captions.
Here's a fun activity I used with my Science students the other week when we were looking at Science and ICT. It would fit in nicely into a lesson about adaptations, or variety of life.
With the Build Your Wild Self you can create an online version of yourself - then add animal parts such as antlers, wings, tentacles, different mouthparts and other odd body parts.
What I asked the students to then do was to take a screen grab of their creation and paste it into Word (or you could use the camera tool and grab it into IWB software).
Once in Word, we can start looking at our animal scientifically. I asked them to think about what their animal would eat. Where might it live? Based on its body parts how did it find food? Did it hunt? Think about each of the body parts they had added and describe their purpose.
You could also open this up into a larger creative-writing task and write a story about their animal.
Yesterday, Google announced the launch of Google Earth version 5, the brand new version of the already excellent Earth viewing tool. For those of you that have never played with it, I can highly recommend it. It's free, and you can download it here.
As an application to use on your interactive whiteboard, this really is an essential piece of software to have. Combine it with your desktop capture/camera tool and you can grab images from anywhere in the world and annotate over the top.
The obvious use would be for Geography lessons - it gives you an amazing globe at your fingertips which you can spin, zoom and see pretty much everything on Earth. The search facility lets you find a place almost instantly. You can also add weather information, radar images and recent cloud cover information. One of the new features is an ocean view where you can explore the sea floor and obtain information files about ocean life.
History teachers might want to take tours of Rome, or Athens and see where the monuments are. Many famous buildings are rendered as 3d structures. Street level view even lets you take tours of some of these areas from a visitors eye view - visit the Colosseum from the comfort your classroom!
For Science teachers I love the Sunlight feature, where you can view light/dark areas over time. Drag the slide to change the time and see how the area of light and dark moves. This is really nice for showing how we get night and day (use alongside a demo with a torch and a football/globe)
For some inspiration on how to use this feature here's an excellent idea from Tom Barretts blog. He used his Twitter network to tell his class where they were in the world. The students then had to find where they were using Google Earth and to then use the shadowed layer to find the length of the day at that point. This was a great way of making the search relevant since they were looking for places that real people had suggested.
As well as views of Earth, Google Earth also has a detailed map of Mars which can be explored, as well as a fully featured Sky mode which lets you explore the universe. Again it's fully searchable and perfect for Earth and Space or Our Place in the Universe areas of the curriculum.
Another new feature is Historical View which lets you view past images of an area, if they exist, to see what it would have looked like in the past. This works better in some areas than others and does depend on how many times that area has been photographed. For example the area where I live has been surveyed last year, and in 2005 so I can toggle between seeing how my house looked before and after I moved in ;)
Not that I need to take advantage of a Snow Day to mess about on the internet, but since the UK has ground to a halt because of the weather, I've been surfing.
From the Bad Science forums I found a link to an excellent video of the Tree of Life. This is taken from a BBC show about Charles Darwin broadcast to celebrate his 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species and was produced in association with The Wellcome Trust.
The video of the tree of life is available in YouTube version, but you can also download a copy for your own use. It's licensed under a Creative Commons licence so you can use it in your schools as long as you attribute the source and don't use it commercially.
There is also an interactive Tree of Life which allows you to trace the ancestry of many different creatures and also makes it easy to find the common ancestors between pairs of animals. So if you want to find the common ancestor between Man and Penguin, then you can (something called Amniota, in case you were wondering).
This is a beta version and so will develop over time. Again you can download a standalone version if you want to use it in schools.
Science/Biology teachers who are looking for a resource to use when teaching evolution or diversity of life should definitely check it out. And the creative commons licence means you could even get the students to put it into movie maker (or similar) and record their own narration over the top.
Another example of how useful Twitter can be for keeping abreast of new websites. Theo Kuechel sent me a link to a new video website called The Cassiopeia Project.
The Cassiopeia Project is an attempt to produce and distribute high-definition science videos on a range of science topics. They seem more suited for KS4 or A Level teaching. It's a privately funded project and the videos are available completely free of charge for any educational use. At current count there are over 200 videos available.
As well as being free, the videos can be downloaded, hosted on your own network or VLE and can even be edited to match your own needs. Get students to record their own narrations, add your own subtitles etc. Videos are in Quicktime format.
The videos are available on the Cassiopeia website, and also via iTunes U, so you can download direct from iTunes. If you access them via iTunes U you can also get higher resolution versions, and also access to video transcripts.
It's an impressive resource, and even better for being free and open for remixing and editing.
As a science teacher, I am always on the look out for great interactive resources that work well on an IWB. Today I got a newsletter from Sunflower Learning, a firm that I've known about for ages, but don't believe I've mentioned on this blog yet.
I didn't realise that Sunflower have been making one of their interactive tools available for free each month. You can only use it online, and only for the duration of the month, but it does give you a taste of what the full set of resources are like.
This month, the free resource is a demonstration of Enzyme reactions. You can view the reactants and the products and change the temperature and pH and see what happens. It's quite neat. Enzymes is available until 6th February, so you're in luck if you're teaching this topic before then. Click here to view it.
Sunflower Learning will be at the ASE conference this week, and also at BETT next week if you want to go and see more. Alternatively take a look at their website.
Here's a great site for using songs to help the teaching of Science in the classroom. Simple Science has videos for many KS2 topics with songs, and also explanations of some of the concepts; http://www.simplescience.net/
Videos are hosted on Vimeo, which means they are higher quality than YouTube, and also means they are accessible in schools that have blocked YouTube.
The videos are free on the website, but if you like them, you might want to buy a DVD of the high quality versions.
This week, I have been playing a lot of Spore. Purely for educational reasons I can assure you :) OK, I'm playing it as a game geek - but I think there is some potential there for some use in the classroom.
A long time ago, I remember a colleague of mine using Sim Life in the classroom to introduce the idea of adaptation and survival. It wasn't the most sophisticated game by todays standards, but was kinda fun.
Spore takes all this to a whole new level. The game itself has been sold as an "evolution game" but to be honest it's not really evolution. The fact that you are in control of designing your creature through a lot of the game and can add and remove body parts at will makes it more "Intelligent Design in a Can"
I'm currently in the Space stage of the game, having taken my mini-cellular creature all the way into space. This stage is taking ages to play and there's no way it could be done in the classroom.
The aspect of the game that could be useful in class could be the Creature Creator. You can download a standalone version of this for a £5 or a trial version of this for free.
The creature creator lets you design different animals which you can then put into your world. It would be good to ask pupils to design a herbivore - or the perfect carnivore. Design an animal for a hot climate or a cold climate etc. They could then take a screenshot, paste into a word processor/presentation tool and explain why they designed it the way they did. What features make it a good herbivore/carnivore etc.
I haven't used this in the classroom myself, but I have heard of some teachers who have been trying this out. If you have, please leave a comment.
In the meantime, here's a little widget that shows you all my Spore creations.
A quick post to share another interesting site for Chemistry I picked up from a discussion on the TES forums.
The Periodic Table of Videos has been produced by Nottingham University Chemistry Department. There's a nice 3/4 minute video clip about each element. Some show reactions, others just talk about the elements.
From looking at some of the videos I would guess the most suitable age range for this would be A-level chemists, but some of the clips would be suitable for GCSE too. You may want to check them out before using with your class to see if their going to be suitable.
Other alternatives include Web Elements, and my particular favourite, Theodore Gray's wooden periodic table site, home of the (in)famous Sodium Party where he sourced 3lbs of sodium and proceeded to throw into large buckets of water. If you're ever showing the reaction of Sodium and Water and the students ask you to throw in a bigger bit - then these are the videos to show them!
Another favourite is the Brainiac Alkali Metals video, that apparently has now been debunked as slightly fake. A shame as its very funny. But I'll copy it here anyway because it always raises a chuckle on training sessions.
I haven't got round to writing that many question sets for my Senteo just yet, that's a job for the summer once I've got my other writing jobs done.
But, if you are looking for Senteo questions for Primary Science then can I point you in the direction of Mark Warners excellent Teaching Ideas website.
They don't have their own section, so you will need to look in each science page and pick them out, but there's plenty to choose from. The links to the three pages are below:
I used to use a great piece of free software called Crocodile Elementary, from Crocodile Clips. It seemed to have gone but I think I've found it again. It's been rebranded as Yenka Basic Circuits, and you can download it from the Yenka website here.
For a quick 10 minute preview, that explains some aspects of circuits. Go to Furry Elephant, and choose series or parallel circuits. It literally only allows you 10 minutes though.
I'm doing a Whiteboard in Science training day tomorrow, so here's a quick post to use partly as a brain dump and partly so I can point the trainees towards to cover some of things that I will be mentioning during the day.
Firstly - a summary of useful links from the last day can be found here:
Not a totally whiteboard related post, but in a few weeks time I am going to be trying out the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment with my group of Primary Teachers. We've talked about it quite a bit over the year, but haven't actually tried it out yet.
I was looking into release mechanisms to allow me to set off the reaction from a safe distance. I saw some good ideas at the ASE conference in Jan. One thing that you can buy is the Geyser Tube, which is available from gadget stores such as Firebox for about a fiver.
Put the mentos in the tube, then pull the string and stand back. The pin will pull out and release the mints into the Coke.
Try this as part of a Sc1 investigation - test different brands of cola, types of fizzy drink etc. There's a Mythbusters clip out there that tries to explain what is going on.
If you haven't seen what happens when you do this, then check out the Eepybird website, for the chaps that started the internet phenomenon.
I'm hoping to get some photos and movie footage when we do finally do this. I'll be sure to shareif I do ;)
I haven't posted for a short while, I've been busy with a writing job that's taking a little longer than I expected (Adobe Captivate is fun but time consuming). Normal service will be resumed soon!
I just wanted to mention a new blog I've set up. It's not going to replace this one, just run parallel to it. In addition to my whiteboard training I am also a Science tutor for a teacher-training programme with a group of 20 PGCE trainee primary teachers. I wanted to set up something I could direct them to for help and information about some of the things that come up in the lectures, and also to highlight useful websites. We're nearly at the end of this academic year, but the plan is to get it established for next year's cohort.
If you are a primary teacher with an interest in Science then you might also find this blog interesting. You can find it at www.scittscience.co.uk
Microsoft have finally released the public beta of their World Wide Telescope project, and I just had to write about it. It's a must for any Science teacher, or anyone interested in astronomy.
Basically, its Microsoft's version of Google Earth/Sky and if you've used the Google version in the past then you'll pick this up very easily.
The software provides a virtual planetarium and lets you study the night sky with great detail. Some of the images are astounding. You can also switch the view to study planets and moons such as Jupiter and Io.
When looking at the stars, right clicking will bring up a star identifier which tells you the name of the star (if known) and some information about it. You can even link direct to the relevant wikipedia page.
Maybe a quick activity would be to search for their star sign (I looked up Aries) and find the names of the stars in the constellation. Maybe even find out how far away they are from Earth.
You can also point the camera downwards and study the Earth instead just like Google Earth, although not in as high resolution. A nice feature is the Earth at Night view which shows just where all the populated areas are. Interesting to use for Geography perhaps?
This is highly recommended and would be an excellent piece of software for anyone who has to teach about the Earth and space. Download it from here.
Here are some quick ideas for using an IWB for Biology teaching.
1. Sequence the stages in Mitosis or Meiosis using images or statements
2. Drag and Drop animals and arrows to create Food Chains and Webs
3. Label diagrams of the various body systems using images captured from the Internet or from the gallery.
4. Investigate genetic crossing using drag and drop punnet squares. In Smart you could use the Infinite Cloner on the B and b, or just stack several letters on top of each other so when you drag one down, the rest remain.
5. Use the camera to capture pictures from the internet to illustrate a lesson on the dangers of alcohol and smoking. Or use the Inside Body powerpoint presentations from the ASE site as a source of images.
6. Sort foods into 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' foods, then use as basis for a discussion about whether there is actually any such thing as an unhealthy food.
7. Simulate how to use a quadrat before going out into the field using random dots and a square annotation, or the square spotlight tool.
8. Combine the IWB with a digital microscope to demonstrate and label slides as a whole class.
9. Keyword Plenary – pupils choose keywords from a selection, drag them into the middle of the screen and use them to explain one thing they’ve learned from the lesson.
10. Use a visualiser (Document camera) when carrying out dissections of the heart or flowers to make it easier for the whole class to see what is going on. Use the camera tool to capture images during the various stages of the dissection and add labels to the images. A cheaper alternative would be to use a webcam clamped to a retort stand
Previously only available via Google Earth, which you had to download and run locally, Google have now made Google Sky available online to access anywhere with an internet connection.
Now you can browse the night sky and zoom in on any interesting galaxies or star clusters that you like.
If you haven't tried them, also check out Google Mars and Google Moon for surface maps based on information from various Moon and Mars missions.
Remember you can use the camera function in your interactive whiteboard software to make any screengrabs from any part of the map and bring it into your IWB software to annotate over the top. You can also put these images into your resource library/gallery for later use.
Yenka is a new resource from the people who produced Crocodile Clips. It's based on their Absorb range of online teaching materials that originally were released alongside Crocodile Physics and Chemistry.
I've produced a new Smart Notebook file to help with balancing equations.
The atoms at the top have been infinitely cloned so you can drag down as many as you require to show how many atoms there are on both sides of the equation. The arrow and plus sign can also be cloned.
I'll make versions for other boards soon. I did try making a Lynx version to test the software, but it kept crashing every 2 minutes so I gave up in frustration.
Looking at the site that hosted this animation, I tracked back to the main teaching resources page. It's worth taking a look at that too since there are links to some other interesting Biology animations and movies such as Mitosis and meiosis.
On a related note, Science Video Resources also posted another link to a resource that shows circulation in different vertebrates, that is also quite interesting.
After travelling through space for 2 and a half years, the NASA Messenger probe has now arrived around the planet Mercury and is starting to send back images of the planets surface. The NASA Messenger website looks like the place to be to see these pictures as they are processed.
The site also contains many animations and movies of Mercury that would be great to use in a Science lesson on your Interactive Whiteboard.
My name is Danny Nicholson and I am a freelance educational consultant. My main speciality is the use of Interactive Whiteboards, but I am interested in lots of different bits of tech that are now being used in schools. Email me here
