New Tools

This week I learned about the great free tools that are online and are easy to use.  I am creating my own website, and it has been fairly simple.  I used PB Works, and this tool will be great for me as a teacher.  I can post assignments and my class outline for students and parents to have access to.  I have only just scratched the surface and am sure there is much more I can do with this tool. 

I also learned how to use the photo editing website, Picnik.  This website was great and again very easy to use.  I think the lesson I learned most this week was just how many great, free, and easy tools there are out there for me to use and can be very useful to me in my classroom!

Here's my PB Works website!

Physics Video

This video is a compilation of short videos showing physical phenomenon that could be analyzed individually using Logger Pro, a great program for high school students!  They can break the video down frame by frame to get the data about the objects.  There is a ton of physics in these seemingly mundane clips!

Story Board

Part one and two of our story board.

Classroom Videos

I have spent a lot of time using Logger Pro, a great program for science classrooms for data acquisition and analysis.  Some of the most interesting projects I did with this program were video analysis.  Many aspects of a problem that were not feasible to calculate or understand before are easy with this technology.  Mary and I decided that we would gather videos that we could use in our class to analyze in Logger Pro.  We will string these videos together with introduction narration (and some pretty amazing physics songs) and then introductory questions after the video of what we would like our students to do with the raw data.  This seemed like the most useful project we could think of that would help us start collecting the materials we need for our own classrooms.  

This project will cover many standards because each video is of a different phenomenon and could be used to explain many different concepts, and including at least parts from all of the physics standards (some may be very small parts).

here's the link to the website:

http://www.uen.org/cc/uen/core/pub/displayCoreCourse.action?ccId=3640

RSS feeds

I didn't know what RSS feeds were before, but they are extremely helpful.  My e-mail account came with an RSS feed to Apple news.  I found this to be annoying (because I wasn't interested) and didn't know what it was or why it would update with new stories frequently.  Learning about what it actually is I have been able to subscribe to feeds that I'm actually interested in!  By subscribing to content specific feeds, I don't need to spend a long time looking for new updates or information related to my class.  I just have to go to one place and any new information will be there for me to use!