Thank you to some of the students in 11.1X who stayed behind after their lesson yesterday to chat to me about teaching and learning in your Physics lessons this year. I always welcome the opportunity to improve the way that we do things in our lessons and direct feedback from all of you is invaluable for this process.
I’d like to open up the discussion to all of you and therefore I’ve written down the main points that we covered yesterday below. During our next Physics lessons I’ll give you the opportunity to comment anonymously on teaching and learning in their Physics using the same method that we used last year.
You send us too many e-mails
· Fair comment!
· In future I will try to “bundle” work by syllabus objective in much the same way as I sent out the e-learning when the school was closed. Hopefully this will make it easier for you all to process the e-mails.
Posterous sends me too many e-mails
· You can turn these off. Watch “Step 14: Turn off those damn irritating e-mail notifications” on http://maddogscience.posterous.com/18-steps-to-blogging-bliss
I would like a copy of the complete Physics Specification
· No problem – attached!
When I open my Posterous blog some of the flash files open and start playing music which I can’t turn off
· Sorry! That flash file was…
Wind Energy Story.swf
I had no idea it would be so irritating! Go to Objective 4.16 on your blog and delete it!
It’s really hard to edit the posts in Posterous and make them look nice – the online editor is difficult to use
· I agree that sometimes the posts come out looking very strange
· My own personal dislike is that sometimes Posterous removes the subscripts and superscripts that are essential for Physics (as in Fc and m3)
· My suggested solution to your formatting woes is to copy the resources into a new Word document for each objective and do your work there
· It’s super easy to send your work to Posterous from Word: make sure you’ve got the “e-mail as attachment” button turned on in the Quick Access tool bar
and then it’s just one click!
This will open up a new e-mail in Outlook with the Word doc as an attachment.
· Posterous will embed your Word doc into a Scribbid Reader which I can then view on fullscreen when I’m marking your work.
I want to have an offline copy of the work that we do – I find it difficult to revise from my online work
· Working in Word can help out with this one too: if you’ve been working in Word then you’ll automatically have an offline copy of all of your work. You could even print this out to use for revision notes if you wanted too.
· However, because you’ve also sent the Word docs to Posterous I can still provide immediate feedback on your work – clearly this online system has been invaluable during the recent enforced school closure.
I want to do more questions on paper - we have to write on paper in our exams so I’d like to practice it in our lessons too
· Good point which I do appreciate
· I always give out a paper copy of the past paper questions at the end of the topic which you can write on but maybe I need to give them out earlier in the topic or supplement these with other paper based questions
· I’ll try to do this in future; you can help remind me!
I want to take down notes that you write on the board as this helps me to learn the work. If you just e-mail me the notes then I don’t learn them
· We have a limited amount of time in lessons and I want to use the most effective techniques in our lessons to help you learn. All of the research done into this area indicates that active learning activities such as group discussions, problem solving activities, self-assessment, etc coupled with receiving quality feedback on your work will improve your learning; passively copying does not improve your learning so we won’t do it in our Physics lessons.
· Sorry if you don’t agree with this but don’t just take my word for it, have a look at some of the evidence: one of the best speakers I’ve seen recently who makes this point very strongly is Dr Eric Mazur, the Dean of Applied Physics at Harvard University in “Confessions of a Converted Lecturer” . It’s quite long but it is funny! My favourite quote is at 26m28s. Watch it!
· My own personal action point after watching Dr Mazur’s video again is that I must spend less of our lesson time speaking! Again, I’ll try to do this in future; you can help remind me!
Thanks again to the students from 11.1X for initiating this important dialogue.
