Here are a couple of videos that we shared at a recent IB Physics workshop.
They could be used to talk about energy changes. Students can be asked to identify as many energy changes as they can.
Triple A Learning IB Blogs
April 27, 2011
Japan Earthquake
I hope that the build up to the exams is going well to all of my readers (that is to those of you sitting the exams in the May session!)
I have not made any posts for a few weeks as I was on my Easter vacation and I was also moving house – which was an amazingly time consuming process. Now school has started, expect my daily posts to resume!
playing for its own sake
http://mandaflewaway.tumblr.com/post/2057242738 Go to this blog and make some music. If you like it, consider how you might use it with your students.
For the fun and the effect of this activity, all your students need to have access to the internet. They have to do the music-making themselves. If you have them writing reflective blogs, for instance, you might give them this link and let them play around with it on their own time, following with some questions on whether or not they considered themselves to involved in artistic creation (and why, or why not?).
April 26, 2011
Saving Dying Languages
This is a good, interactive site for information on ‘language extinction’ and what can be done to prevent it:
Jing
Ever found yourself having to teach the same thing over and over? How about error bars and standard deviation? I am forever forgetting how to do error bars through Excel.
Can I suggest Jing? Its a free screen capture application that gives you 5 minutes of video capture for any video you chose to make. I recently used it to make a video narrating how to calculate SD from a data set on Excel and then construct a graph incorporating error bars that were customized for the individual data groups.
“water”
Pose the following question to your students – “what’s the one crisis that besets the developing world and is the hardest for you to comprehend?”
What do you think will be their response?
April 25, 2011
A nice applet for the Greenhouse Effect
Several of the examiner’s reports have mentioned how poorly students do on questions relating to global warming and the greenhouse effect. There is no doubt that these questions can tempt students into giving vague answers (probably a rephrasing of something they remember from “An Inconvenient Truth“). The concept of greenhouse gas molecules absorbing and re-emitting IR radiation is simple enough but I think students have a difficult time visualizing the process. There is an applet from the King’s Centre for Visualization in Science that is really helpful and the entire site is worth looking at for nice applets and animations of various concepts in physics.
The applets that are most useful for helping students understand the greenhouse effect is in the section entitled Global Climate Change and they are genuinely helpful to the students. Good luck trying them out!
April 22, 2011
Say cheese: Structural Unemployment
Structural unemployment is a key concept in Section 3.5, Unemployment and Inflation. While the recent recession has focused interest on cyclical or demand deficient unemployment, rapid technology change and the impact of globalization may affect more over the longer term. While fiscal and monetary policies can assist the economy return to fuller employment, structural unemployment poses a more profound challenge.
This article by The Economist, A portrait of structural change, explores the ramifications of technological change to professional photographers. In place of the pro, amateurs have emerged who use advances in technology to produce images good enough to be sold on stock photos sites for far less than what a professional would charge. At the same time, advertising budgets have been reduced. Professional faces a grime future as they may have to seek a new career direction. Ironically many may have to turn to teaching those very amateurs who have undercut and replaced them.
A Thousand Brains
Brain research is at the center of our understanding of the biological level of analysis and students find the various ways the brain has been studied fascinating. Broca’s hypothesis that damage to the brain was the cause of aphasia was only confirmed when a lesion on the surface of the left frontal lobe was discovered during the patient’s post-mortem autopsy. Modern methods have provided further insights into brain function and include the Electroencephalogram, Computed tomography, Magnetic resonance imaging and Positron emission tomography. These methods employ sophisticated technology to understand the living brain.
This article highlights that fact that post-mortem studies of the brain are not a thing of the past. Jacopo Annese, a neurologist at the University of California San Diego brain bank, is seeking people who can supply a detailed life history before they die and then their brain afterwards. Annese hopes to understand how personality, memories, emotions and other traits are reflected within the brain’s chemical and electrical signaling systems. The process involves freezing the brain and then cutting it into 2,600 to 2,700 slices, each 70 microns wide, or about the width of a human hair. Each piece is then scanned on a microscopic level and the images then re-assembled into three-dimensional models that can be viewed wholly, or in dissected portions. As another researcher explains:
