Sorry for my recent lack of blog posts – we have just had an inspection and focus has been elsewhere…… That said, I hope that normal business will now apply once again!
I always keep an eye on Geoff Neuss’ blog for ‘Inthinking‘ – it makes good reading. One of his recentish postings was made with regards to the curriculum review of Chemistry.
Here is a nice simulation on the scale of the universe. it could be used in Astrophysics or as an introduction to the IB course. It addresses topic 1.1, The Realm of Physics
Triple A Learning is running two Business and Management workshops in February 2012. We have a new Triple A Learning Business workshop beginning on 20th February and lasting 3 weeks:
Business & Management: Teaching Accounting and Finance – this workshop has been designed to support teachers in the classroom delivering the topic. This workshop is mentored by Paul Hoang, a highly experienced classroom practitioner and author of the excellent and very popular International Baccalaureate Business and Management textbook.
Triple A Learning is running four Economics workshops in February 2012. We have a new Triple A Learning Economics workshop beginning on 27th February and lasting 3 weeks:
Teaching International Economics, which has been designed to support teachers in the classroom delivering the topic.
Elizabeth Loftus gained world-wide renown for her experiments showing that memory is not an accurate record, and is subject to various biases. Her studies revealed that witness reports of the same incident varied according to the wording used by the questioner and, as a result, the way witnesses are dealt with throughout the legal system has changed. Loftus later went on to show that it is possible to implant a whole false memory, as demonstrated by the ‘Lost in the Mall’ and ‘Bugs Bunny’ studies.
This episode of Mind Changers: Elizabeth Loftus has an excellent radio podcast on her contributions to our understanding of the CLOA.
While every teachers wishes that all the students in the class had the same theory level, this situation is more the exception than the norm. The students in class have often very different levels of knowledge and skills in music theory. This creates a challenge to teachers in terms of organizing the class materials. Some teachers solve this problem by offering extra tutoring or referring students that need extra help to private tutors. However, in some schools, due to the financial situation of the students, this option is not available. Here is the link to one web site that could help in these cas:
Price discrimination is a far more common practice than most students are aware of and they find the standard example of movie tickets quite compelling. This report, Why heavy people should pay more to fly, raises the issue of whether airlines should charge passengers on the basis of weight and should provoke a interesting discussion of the merits of such a decision.
We all teach this near the beginning of IB Physics and my experience is that most students get the basics in their first term. There are always a few that continue to struggle error analysis though. I am sure many of you use a diagram similar to the one below.
Students find this diagram easy to understand and can usually interpret what it means correctly but have problems applying that knowledge in a real world situation. One experiment to help with this is to do the classic throwing darts at the dart board experiment but measure deviation only in one dimension. I use a square cork board with a piece of paper over top that has vertical ruled lines 1 cm apart. The centre line is the “correct value” and students throw darts and measure the spread quantitatively. To make things simple we zero decimal places.
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