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Dave Edwards in Edinburgh

Hertzsprung-Russell diagram forum tutorial

Tuesday 11 June 2013 at 15:18
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Edited by Dave Edwards, Tuesday 11 June 2013 at 15:19

For S282 Astronomy I had the task of running a whole-module week-long tutorial in a forum on the subject of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. I had actually done this a couple of times before, so I relied heavily on experience.

I like these week-long tutorials. I enjoy the conversational aspect, and the ability to spend time giving effective and accurate responses to question.

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is simply a graph of the intrinsic brightness against surface temperature for stars. It turns out that stars actually plot in certain well defined patches on the graph and these areas correspond to stars at particular stages in their life span.

It is a very important diagram in astronomy. Students need to be able to reproduce it in the exam, and they need to know the evolutionary paths of stars of various masses around the diagram.

So I aimed to get students discussing important points of the diagram, contributing their own sketches of the diagram, and marking on an evolutionary track for their favourite star.

Also I get students to create their own H-R diagram using a spreadsheet and a set of data from

http://www.astronexus.com/node/34

(I used the magnitude 7.5 limit - there are lots of stars in this).

Gaining familiarity with using spreadsheets is one of the objectives of the module, so this activity fits in very well. this also gives the students an opportunity to help each other with Excel or Open Office or Star Office (or whatever version they are using).

As usual, the session went well and a few students clearly made progress with their spreadsheet skills.

Tags: h-r, astronomy, s282, excel, spreadsheet, hertzsprung-russell
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Dave Edwards in Edinburgh

Elluminate for Astronomy exam resit tutorial

Monday 8 April 2013 at 10:15
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Edited by Dave Edwards, Monday 8 April 2013 at 10:16

I have been asked to provide two one-hour long Elluminate sessions for students resitting their S282 'Astronomy' exam.

I will follow my original proposal for the task. This was a skill based first session:

Revision skills
Exam technique
Maths skills
And a summary of key physical principles.

My intention was to build a discussion oriented session. As students may not have started revision I do not think quizzes are appropriate. However, some of the examples will lend themselves to asking students to spend a few minutes looking for information or solving problems.

I drafted an outline plan on a sheet of paper. then I started to work on PowerPoint, reusing an introductory screen on using Elluminate.

I used a pdf copy of a module book to extract one page and annotate that with my Tablet PC to illustrate the idea of using diagrams and annotating the module book. this was difficult to do - I had trouble extracting a copy of the page from the huge book. I found a copy of the appropriate chapter only, and managed to delete the other pages.

I also wanted to illustrate the use of spray diagrams. I used a chapter summary section to prepare a hand written spray diagram. I then scanned this in, rotated it and inserted it into the PowerPoint. The quality was poor. I tried to improve the legibility of the diagram but did not manage to find an appropriate tool. It would be too time-consuming to prepare the diagram electronically, so I decided to accept the slide as it stood.

I used an extract from an old exam question to create an exercise on writing. Simlarly for a maths skills example I used an old TMA question part, and the excellent example answer I had supplied to students.

To help me discuss the the revision period I took a hand-drawn diagram from an S282 handout I have often provided to students.

Then I prepared a list of key ideas (extending over four slides)by skimming through the book.

While working through the preparation I kept in mind the need to have dark colours and large text and images so maximise legibility in Elluminate.

I also adapted the first screen to place on the Elluminate site, in the hope that I can encourage students to use their mircophone.


All this work took about six hours.

[1 April 2013]
Tags: spray, elluminate, astronomy, exam, s282, revision, pdf, powerpoint, diagram, annotate
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Dave Edwards in Edinburgh

SXP288 Elluminate for NMR: Chemical structures

Monday 8 April 2013 at 10:05
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To support the students' work on nuclear magnetic resonance in SXP288 (Practical science: physics and astronomy) we need to run two Elluminate sessions fairly close together.  I decided to offer these fairly early as the information I had from students indicated they were making rapid progress through the NMR topic.  I used two Doodle polls to let students indicate their preferred days of the week.

The first session covers valency and covalent bonds, functional groups, structural formulae, naming conventions and isomers for some simple organic molecules.  The module team provide a short PowerPoint presentation based around fifteen slides including a few test questions at the end requiring students to identify structures and to draw structural formulae.

I reviewed the PowerPoint I used last year and made a few minor changes. This file ran to twenty slides. I had already included additional slides reviewing the naming conventions and I also split the test questions over more slides to improve clarity. I also stretched some of the images to improve the readability in Elluminate.

I prepared a pdf file from the PowerPoint slides, and used PDF Annotator (along with my Tablet PC) to hand write my speaking notes onto the slides. I also included all the annotations I planned to provide with Elluminate via the Tablet PC.

After printing this out I ran through the presentation myself.  I still felt that students would find applying the naming rules difficult during the test questions unless they had easy access to the appropriate material. Therefore I extracted a few key slides into a separate PowerPoint, and exported this to a pdf file. This was then posted on the tutor group forum along with a suggestion for students to print it out ready for the session.

I posted this file and discussed it within Elluminate with my colleague Sye Murray.

Al this activity took nearly a day.
Tags: resonance, elluminate, physics, astronomy, formula, pdf, powerpoint, organic, nuclear, chemistry, readability, tablet, structural, doodle, sxp288, poll, magnetic, annotator, nmr, practial
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Dave Edwards in Edinburgh

S282 'Astronomy' Elluminate session Lessons

Monday 8 April 2013 at 10:01
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The conclusions I have drawn from running the session are:

  • It is practical to run an Elluminate activity using DVD resources and breakout room discussion.
  • Interaction with students always takes much longer than I expect!
  • Even when specifically asked to do a little bit of preparation to allow the tutorial to proceed some students did not do that.


I asked for student feedback on my tutor group forum. They reported that the work on the solar images and features was useful, and that it would have been useful to have longer in the breakout room for their discussion (which they liked).  They also suggested that it would be better to provide 'answer' slides for my review after the break out time, and not to wait so long for people to get organised accessing the DVD images.

I will take a harder line next time!

Tags: breakout, astronomy, s282, discussion, dvd, feedback, conclusion, preparation, interaction, slide
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Dave Edwards in Edinburgh

S282 'Astronomy' Elluminate session in practice

Monday 8 April 2013 at 09:57
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Edited by Dave Edwards, Wednesday 10 April 2013 at 22:03
In spite of the advance request to these S282 astronomy students for them to have the DVD images available for the session about four of the twenty participants did not.

At the start of the images activity we asked students to open up the images on their machines, and to provide a tick on Elluminate when they had done that. It took a few minutes for this to be completed, and it was not entirely clear if some students had achieved this or not. Some of these students seemed to be finding using Elluminate difficult.

To cater for these students we put them together in one breakout room and Anne provided the images via Elluminate's application sharing feature. However this left Anne trapped n the breakout room, and the amount of discussion between these students was low.

I went though the other break out rooms to check that they had understood the task and that they were engaging with it and with each other. This seemed to be the case.

We had allowed 10 minutes for the individual breakout room discussions, but for me to get around the four rooms took all of this time.

We also had planned two breakout room activities in this part of the tutorial - however it was clear that we were running rather behind schedule. We opted to skip the second activity and move straight to the TMA discussion.  A break out activity had been planned here as well. This was also skipped in favour of asking students to type responses directly onto the appropriate whiteboard. This worked well.

At the end of the session we posted copies of the PowerPoint material to our Tutor Group Forums.
Tags: breakout, elluminate, astronomy, s282, dvd, quiz, powerpoint
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Dave Edwards in Edinburgh

S282 'Astronomy' Elluminate session planning for 05/03/2013

Friday 5 April 2013 at 12:36
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6 March 2013

This was a joint session with Anne Campbell and her group, for the second level OU module S282 "Astronomy".

I wanted to make use of Elluminate's capability to host discussions between students (breakout rooms). The particular topic I chose was based on comparing images at various wavelength of the Sun. The aim would be to help students understand solar activity by identifying the different manifestation of the activity at different wavelengths.

The content was based on existing material - images supplied to students on the module DVD, and a TMA question from 2009. Using these materials helped me be confident that the topic was appropriate to the module.

I had also previously used the materials in a face-to-face tutorial session.

I drafted some notes on the topic. Anne seemed a bit cautious about how successfully we might be able to present this activity and manage discussion across several breakout rooms.

My approach was based on asking students to access the images independently during the session from the module DVD - either through the interface they should have installed at the start of the module, or by navigating to the appropriate folder and viewing them in their browser.

They would then go into small groups in breakout rooms to identify features amongst themselves.

To introduce the activity I set up two simple Elluminate quizzes.

The basic structure of the tutorial was constructed in the form a PowerPoint slide show, to be loaded on to the Elluminate whiteboards

Anne added introductory material to the session to introduce the group to the use of Elluminate.

We also provided material on answering TMA questions for the tail end of the session.

The final planning work was an email to the students: "During the tutorial we plan to use some S282 DVD images - in particular the Image Archive on the Active Sun and on the Quiet Sun. Would you load this up to your computer before the start of the tutorial, please?"

 

 

Tags: breakout, astronomy, tma, s282, dvd, image, quiz, powerpoint, elliminate
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