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Preparing for the S207 revision day is a big challenge. The module covers such a huge range of physics, so students can ask questions about almost anything.

Last year there were three tutors along, and we relied heavily on Alan Cayless's experience and organisational skills. This year it will be just me and Robert Gibson running the event.

Robert and I exchanged one or two emails about the event, but we did not mange to get into regular contact, so I set out to prepare a plan for the day. I worked around building a PowerPoint presentation holding a set of revision questions and answers, and a very brief review of key topics for each book.

I sent this email to Robert about my thinking:

I have also worked through the "S207 Revision Examples". This is pretty good for the core of our session. I am thinking of turning it into a PowerPoint-plus-whiteboard activity. I would want to emphasise thinking physically about each problem first. For each book we could have a slide of some key physics issues. Then a Question slide. I would ask the students (as a group) to explain the issues and the physics solution method, then let them work it out in small groups. Then a slide of the 'official answer' (or our own version on the whiteboard).

I soon followed that up with an another idea:

 

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.