Mystery boxes

After reading this post on Tales From a Secondary Science Teacher I decided to make my own boxes.

I ordered 5 small 'project' boxes from maplin (Total cost about £12.50) and set about placing items into them.

I have decided to make a note of the contents of my boxes because I think that as an extension to the 'guessing' part of the activity the students could devise a way to test their predictions. Part of this could be to construct a copy box to see if it behaves in the same way. So, a pile of 'test' items could be provided for students to compare against.

Raspberry pi -school project

I just ordered my RasPi yesterday. I am nerdishly excited about getting my hands on a fag packet-sized computer.

I have a few projects in mind for it; media server (though I don't actually need another one!), data logging is my other thought.

I'm looking into connecting it to a range of sensors; temperature, pH etc. I think it would be pretty cool to build up a data logging system that could be monitored remotely. -Just for nerds' sake.

I'll update this post with any findings I make.

If you read this and have anything to share, please do reply!

I went SOLO (How Low?)

Here I am, fresh back from 7A2's introduction to SOLO.
My initial feeling is that it went well. The discussion between the kids was right on topic, deciding which level something was on an exemplar.

I used Tait Coles' structure with a few tweaks (and shoe-horned in as many cool web apps as I could, just to try them out as it was being filmed).

By the end the students could create a piece of work that was relational level and provide feedback for each other as to what would make it extended abstract.

When I've reviewed the video I'll have a much better idea of how it went but for now, I'm very happy with my end of term experiment.

Plus points:

• On task kids
• Easy to understand structure
• Good standard of work and of discussion

To improve:

• Because of the shoe-horning tech. they didn't have as much time towards the end as I'd have liked. I had intended to use the triptico hexagons again to refresh the links between concepts

Update: I saw some of the girls from 7A2 in the yard at lunch time and asked what they thought of the lesson..
"As it was almost our last lesson this year I was disappointed you made us do work"
"I thought it was weird because you were talking about deep all the time"

I asked did you understand what you were doing
"Yes"
"Yes, most of the time"

SOLO

I've read about it. If you're a blog-reading teacher then you've probably read about it too.

I'm going to try it.

Top set year 7. End of term. AST filming it. What could go wrong?

Topic is space.
I'll introduce the idea of SOLO then we'll use it in the manner outlined by Tait Coles on his blog.
Including the hexagons app by Triptico.

Hopefully I'll have something positive to report.

Watch this space...

Old New Blog

I've decided  to join the herd (baah!) (that was to annoy noun aficionados) and write up my musings about teaching here.
I have my other blog at wordpress about other matters.