#tesSciGCSE your revision challenge hash-tag!

TES Science is going to help learners doing their GCSE exams by setting one challenge a day until the day of the last Science exam on the 24th May. These challenges will be sent through Twitter using the hash-tag #tesSciGCSE and we are hoping you and your learners will engage with this exciting daily challenge.

Taking part is easy:

1) Follow @tesScience

2) Search for #tesSciGCSE and save that search

3) Read the #tesSciGCSE challenge that will be posted each day

4) Reply to the challenge by tweeting your answer including the text #tesSciGCSE in your tweet

What’s in it for me?

If you are a learner, this is a great opportunity to do some revision wherever you are and any time during the day and you could win a £25 book voucher, if you answer most challenges correctly!

If you are an Educator, you can get involved by letting your learners know about this challenge and offer to moderate one of the days of tweets!

How does it work?

It is pretty simple. The people who are moderating the challenge will check your tweets and favourite the best answers, as well as sending probing questions back to help you learn your topic better. The person that gets favourited most wins the book voucher!

So, who’s in it? The first challenge will be issued on Tuesday 8th May 2012 and we will focus on Yr10 GCSE Science. Spread the word!

Live online revision clubs!

After a long period of hybernation the Croesy Physics online channel is about to become active again with a very exciting project that will see Croesyceiliog Yr13 Physics Students collaborating with learners at John Cabot Academy in Bristol to create and broadcast live online revision clubs!

Helen Rogerson (@hrogerson) is John Cabot’s Head of Physics and she will support her students once a forenight in creating and broadcasting their sessions from Bristol, and I (@asober) will do the same with my students from Cwmbran. We will take it in turn to broadcast on our Croesy Physics Livestream channel and we would love to see many of you watching live and engaging with our students. In fact, there will be a 10 minutes Q&A session at the end of each event for the people who are watching from other schools, or from home. People can ask questions using the Livestream chat on the online channel, or by using the twitter hash tag #croesybot.

Our live revision clubs will be broadcast live every Tuesday between 15.15 and 15.45 and our first event will be on the 15th November with the topic “The Motor Effect”

Each session will also be available on demand after the event and we hope that our service will become a really useful revision tool for our learners as well as for students in other schools across the world!

Please support our efforts by watching, chatting, sharing, tweeting, etc…

For help on setting up a similar activity see these resources I have uploaded on the TES website.

The most outrageous competition in the UK!

In this Blog I invite you to support my video entry to the O2 Learn Competition for three simple reasons:

1) I believe some of the videos that are winning the Fortnightly stages give a poor representation of Education in Britain

2) Many teachers who have submitted a video are cheating by creating false accounts to gain extra votes

3) The winning videos will be considered by the public as the best in British education, so I believe it is important that good examples are presented

So, if you like my video and you want your viewing to count and rate it, please follow the following instructions:

– Go to this website http://www.o2learn.co.uk and register (top right), or login if you are already registered. Remember you will receive an activation email and sometimes it might end up in people’s junk mail, so please check in there too!

– Login (top right) and click on this link http://bit.ly/o2learnvideo to watch my video

– If you like the video, please rate it by clicking on Rate this video below the video screen and give it 5 stars 🙂

Please remember that you need to be logged in for your viewing and rating to count!

As an educator I believe that engaging in these types of competitions is important to give a good representation of good practice in Education to the public. The teaching profession doesn’t always get a very good reputation from the Media and having good videos in the winning entries can help to change people’s views on teachers and Education in Britain. So, please support my entry only if you think it is a good video that would help learners to understand the topic presented!

Another way in which you could help is by spreading the word and passing on the link to this Blog post to your colleagues, friends, pupils, etc… and ask them to follow the instructions to support my entry.

Thank you in advance for your support and let me know if you are entering a video too, so I can support it!

Mind Mapping with Prezi!

At last I have found some time to check Prezi out, and it’s even better when you can use this time to fit it in with your job. As a Field Officer at NGfL Cymru, I am trying to develop resources that give opportunities to learners and educators to explore the latest technology and its applications in sound Learning and Teaching. So, I could not leave Prezi out, especially after all the feedback I had received before I started using it myself! However, I wanted to find a use that was not just different from another way of presenting (which in my opinion is not the point and certainly not what would make Prezi stand above PowerPoint, because we’ll soon have death by Prezi if we are not careful),  but that would have real educational value and that would be an advantage to anyone using Prezi in this way!

To cut a long story short, I was wondering what it would be like to mind map with Prezi, and by mind mapping I mean following the mind mapping rules set up by Tony Buzan (the creator of Mind Mapping himself). One of the greatest advantages of Prezi in drawing mind maps is the ability to embed videos in your Prezi mind maps, something we haven’t seen before (at least I haven’t in other mind mapping software). Also, assigning a path to your mind map allows you to show and share your thought process very clearly. In this way using a Prezi mind maps could become a very effective presentation tool, but also a revision tool for your students who will need less assistance from the author of the mind map, because the sequence of events and areas of focus is decided by the path set by the author themselves! However, if a learner prefers to go at their own pace and stroll around your mind map their way, they can still do this by zooming in and out with the scroll on your mouse. You can also set the Prezi to be public and with the option to be copied by people who bump into them! So, your students could copy your Prezi mind map in their Prezi accounts and edit it to make it more suitable to their learning style, or simply add to it. Why not starting a template Prezi mind map and let the learners complete it? Then, you could share the contributions from different pupils in the class and complete your draft as a collaborative mind map created with each learner’s contributions, which is a very useful and highly effective mind mapping technique!

Click here, or on the image below to see my first Prezi Mind Map on the Kinetic Theory.

Abnormal, not normal, or Xtranormal?

You must have guessed I have a soft spot for comics and Superheroes by now. So, when @russeltarr (look at his excellent website here) twitted a link to a video made by his 14-years old Historians (as he calls them) I got immediately interested in this new video creator with animated characters; xtranormal.com. Believe me, it is really good fun and very easy and quick to use. The below video took me about 15 min to make and it was a simple attempt to create an example for my Yr 10 pupils, so that they could also use this tool to create fun videos about an area of Physics we have studied (if you can’t see the video from this blog click here). Because we have been amused by the Physics of Superheroes in a number of lessons, I though they would like the video I created to understand and remember the difference between Speed and Velocity!

The intent, however, was never to use this video creator as a teaching tool, but rather as a lovely way to get my pupils engaged with Physics and to get them talking about processes by explaining them through unusual situations (a bit like the Marvel Comic on Momentum).

Unfortunately there were two problems I had not anticipated:

1. To publish your videos you must buy credits

2. Our network let us down for the 1000th time and even this really useful tool was blocked

I might be able to get the IT Technician to unblock it, so the kids can at least use the story board and the effects. But I think I will use this great website to create one of those stories where each group writes a line and the next group continues it, so by the end of the lesson we will have a story about Physics that is created by the whole class. It would be even nicer if this  became a quick revision movie about all the topics covered made with the contribution of the whole class! I will let you know how it goes, but if you have some good stories with Xtranormal, please let us know by adding a comment to this blog post.

Are pupils better as viewers, or producers?

You can now watch a preview of our Yr 10 EM Spectrum “TV Show” directly from this blog. The section we are showing below is part of the EM Spectrum News Report. If you want to watch the whole show click here.

Please, also take a look at my previous post about this show for more details.

Croesyceiliog School goes live!

Hello,

You are invited to watch our online show on the E.M. Spectrum on Thursday 17^th December at 20.30. You can access our online channel at:

http://livestream.com/croesyphysics

Our Yr10 Physics students have worked on different activities of their choice to produce a “TV show” to be broadcast on the internet. The show will include various Physics demonstrations and revision activities on the Electromagnetic Spectrum and it should be very suitable for other Yr 10 pupils who are preparing for that topic and for Educators interested in the use of new technologies in Education. So, please forward this email to your pupils, colleagues, friends and relatives who might be interested!

Croesy Physics Channel

Croesy Physics Livestream Channel

I will broadcast live from my home the work of my pupils, which has been pre-recorded in class. My pupils and I are quite excited about this project and they are putting together a nice set of resources. It is the first time we attempt something like this in the Physics Department at Croesyceiliog School and we would really appreciate your participation and feedback on the outcomes!

Please, join us on Thursday 17^th December at 20.30

http://livestream.com/croesyphysics

Thanks,

Alessio Bernardelli (Deputy Team Leader of Science, Croesyceiliog School)

Using Wallwisher to build collaborative notes!

I got this fantastic online resource from Dan Roberts (@chickensaltash on twitter) who blogged about some fantastic work his pupils did with it! Dan’s blog

So, here is how I used it so far! I got my pupils in yr 10 to split into nine groups and develop a 5W activity on energy resources. Each group was assigned one type of energy resource and the power stations assiciated with it. In the 5W activity they had a pentagon shape with an image in the middle and they had to find information to include in each box to answer the 5 questions starting with W, Who, Where, What, When, Why.

 

When they were presenting their work back to the class, I asked each pupil to look at the presentations and post a sticky note on our Wallwisher whenever they spotted an advantage/disadvantage of renewable/non-renewable energy resources, so they were taking shared notes about topics created by other members of the class. I have uploaded the link to the wallwisher I created on our VLE, so they can now use those shared notes for revision!

Here is the link to our Wallwisher on energy resources

Please, comment on this blog and share with us how you use Wallwisher!!!