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.
This follows on from yesterdays posting – just a couple of ideas for labs work you could carry out when teaching this topic. I should stress that this is only a list of ideas / suggestions and that if you intend using any of these ideas to assess for IA, please ensure that they are given to the students in the appropriate format.
Atomic structure is quite a difficult part of the course to carry out lab work, let alone assess IA. However, you may decide to use some time looking at the emission spectra of various elements.
However, to do this you do not need to get hold of some emission tubes. Your physics department may be able to help – but be careful, in my old school we used to have a good number of emission tubes but it also involved live wires and 1000 volts!
Yesterdays posting dealt with the use of spreadsheets in IA to draw graphs. I provided you with a link to a document that you could use to teach students how to draw ‘good’ graphs. If you remember, this could also be linked in with the second ICT aim in IA, ie, the use of software fro graph plotting.
Today’s posting is really an extension of this.
How many times have you asked students to write up a lab report that needs a graph to be drawn and ended up marking one of those poorly drawn excel graphs?
You know the ones I mean, the graphs with no grid lines on the x axis and that silly comment box ‘series 1′! We have all been there I am sure.
There are a number of good ICT exercises to be found on the OCC.
However, the following exercise has recently been brought to my attention and I think it is particularly good.
So, as a new teacher to IB you are slowly getting your head around teaching topic 1, plus you have started dipping into internal assessment.
There are in fact a number of earlier postings in this blog relating to marking students lab work using the IA criteria – just search for IA or Design or DCP, etc.
So, you have taught your classes everything they need to know about moles and molarities.
You have run over the IA criteria with them and have talked in depth about data presentation and errors. What next?
So, you, are a new teacher and need to teach IB for the first time.
What do you teach first? For many teachers (probably all teachers) you will beginning with one of three topics….
Selecting ethnography is one of the greatest joys and greatest challenges for those of us teaching introductory anthropology. Of course, just when we think we have it mastered, a new genre enters the scene.
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