Personal Blogs

For some reason I have a face-to-face tutorial to run on Book 5 of S104: Life. This does not really make a lot of sense to me, but that is the way it is! Perhaps next year I can manage to move the tutorial date to cover a topic that interests me more?

For this topic I usually run a pipe-cleaner model of mitosis - but having just moved house I cannot find the kit.

On a recent presentation I worked up an activity using a molecule kit to build amino acids.  However I have a feeling that there was a problem with the notes I created. So I need to work through the activity to check the notes.

This check was useful revision for me, and I made a minor update to the Tutor Notes for the activity..

I realised it would be useful to have a copy of the Book 4 summary table on functional groups, so I created a Word document with the table on a single page.  This could be a handout or be projected in the room.

I also have a kit of labels for an established S104 activity on molecules, organelles and cells, which I will use.

If there is time I could also run a standard activity on food chains.

That will be plenty of interesting material for 90 minutes.

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:

This was a Scotland-wide day school on S104's energy and light material. I ran this jointly with Laura Alexander.

We both had similar ideas for the tutorial. The only difference was our ideas on the experiment part. Laura was thinking of doing the bouncing ping-pong ball work. However my group had already done that experiment, so we chose to do a laser diffraction experiment instead. This was similar to the work for activity 9.1 and 9.2, but the students actually got the opportunity to do all the work themselves. The aim was to use the known laser light wavelengths to work out the grating spacings.

We worked in groups of two or three. The students had to work out was they needed to do, plan the work, think about uncertainties, make the records and do all the analysis including drawing the graph with the best-fit line.

I provided two HeNe lasers and a red and green laser pen. I carried out the experiment at home beforehand, and prepared a spreadsheet of results and graphs. This gave the spacing as 3.33 microns (equivalent to 300 lines per mm).

A number of people got to exactly the same result. Everyone got reasonably close to my value.

So the structure was SI units, energy dominoes, laser diffraction experiment, then either maths work (Laura) or spectroscopy demonstration. The spectroscopy demonstration included the solar, fluorescent tube, HeNe laser output and the HeNe laser tube non-laser output spectra.

The bulk of the day was devoted to the experiment. This would benefit from some additional demonstration time at the beginning, as people were slow to appreciate what they needed to do.

After a bit of reflection I decided to add a few quiz questions to the session.

This did actually help in the session, because the students were very reluctant to speak (though occasionally they did speak). I was very pleased I made this change, because it forced some interactivity.

The session ran to 1 hour 20 minutes. I liked the fact that I managed to review some of the astronomy whilst discussing revision and study skills.

I spotted a couple of minor issues with slides and corrected them afterwards (a version of the file is here . The spray diagram example needs to be replaced next time with either an electronic version or (probably better) a hand drawn diagram with much thicker lines.

There was some technical difficulty for me at the start of the session. I had planned to use my Tablet PC to write on the whiteboard during the session. I also wanted the benefit of my large monitor. However this took me down a path of screen resolution and orientation problems, culminating in the microphone button (conveniently located at the bottom of the Elluminate window) being off the bottom of my screen. I had to settle for just using the monitor.

[4 April 2013]

The students attending the Elluminate session for SXP288 declined to speak in (or before) the session. This meant that the session was fairly hard to run. I asked a number of questions during the explanatory stage of the session and they responded (slowly) via the text chat or by using the typing tool on the whiteboard.

When we got to the test questions at the end they all participated by using the the text chat, or the typing tool, or other drawing tools on the whiteboard.

The test questions were generally handled well.

The session took about 75 minutes.

After the session I posted a pdf version of the annotated whiteboards on out tutor group forum and made the recorded Elluminate session viewable.

I also asked for feedback as the second Elluminate session was due in a few days. One student stated that I had hit the nail on the head - an excellent refresher on organic chemistry, building on S104 "Exploring Science" with useful handouts. The level and length were fine.

So the feedback was gratifying. I seemed to have achieved exactly what I set out to do. However the lack of discussion during the session is still a concern to me. I must be able to do better than this.

[19 March 2013]

I decided to deal with magnetic induction first. during the planning, I working through an explanation of the topic based on Faraday's law. But then I decided instead to use last year's TMA question about the transformer. I found that I could include Faraday's law nicely within this.

In practise, this provided a useful opportunity to discuss the merits of  "remembering nothing - so there is less to forget in the exam"! The transformer equation is simply obtained directly from Faraday's law.

The lens calculation proved effective during the tutorial. Students were unclear about how to address even this simple two lens system. We discussed real and virtual images and the 'real is posiive' sign convention. I explained that the lenses are simply handled individually, in turn, working out image and then object distances.

The laser diffraction experiment went down very well. A student commented afterwards that he would have been disappointed if we had not done something like this - and he mentioned the value of our bouncing ball demonstration and discussion at the first tutorial.

The experiment task was to work out the ratio of the wavelengths of the red and green light from a laser pointer, using the grating equation. We also estimated the uncertainty. In fact we got exactly the ratio that is obtained from the wavelengths marked on the laser.  This supported the uncertainty calculation of +/-0.01

Overall this seemed to be an enjoyable session, with a strong emphasis  on using physical principles.  I could repeat this next year.

After the session I had an email from a non-attender asking for information from the tutorial. I placed versions of the transformer and lens questions on the tutor group forum, with some tips to help guide the reader.However, there was no student discussion of this material and when I spoke to the student a couple of weeks later he had clearly not used the material.

[6 March 2013]

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!

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?"