Welcome the end of the semester. As I have done in the past, I like to share a few notes or tidbits of things I have learned or noted.
Screencasts = Win
When possible, I let students be re-evaluated on concepts that they had trouble with. Really, why not? The grade for the course is supposed to reflect what they understand. If students can show me that they understand the stuff, I have no problem giving them the appropriate grade.
Before screencasts, I would have students come in my office and work a problem or two on the board in my office. This does work well. You can tell pretty quickly if a student actually understands some material or just memorized something. All you have to do is interject with a quick "but what if..." type question. A student that really understands something can handle these questions.
For a student that hasn't mastered the material, it is usually painfully obvious. I do mean painful. It is a whole bunch on no-fun to watch a student struggle at the board. It would be like having a person try to pass a swimming test and watching them flail about at the surface gulping for air. Although sometimes things work out well. I have had several students come in and just say "you know, I really don't know what I am doing here. I think I will come back later."
Ok, now on to screencasts. I picked up this idea from Andy Rundquist (SuperFly Physics and @arundquist). Andy has a ton of great posts on Standards Based Grading and other useful stuff. There are a ton of great SBG resources, but I will suggest listening to the recorded meeting from the Global Physics Department. Oh, here are two more excellent SBG links: Dan Meyer's comparison of SBG to Angry Birds and Geoff Schmit's presentation on SBG.
For screencasts, instead of having students rush my office after class (which is what they always did), they send a 5 min screencast. How? Why? Where? Here are some details.
- Like Andy, I recommend that the students use Jing. It is free and simple to use and it can upload the videos to screencast.com.
- The videos have to be less than 5 minutes.
- What is the screencast of? It is of the students going over a problem. Most of my students choose to work out a problem, take a picture and then talk about the picture while it is on their screen. You can see what they are pointing at with the mouse and it seems to work well. If the student is working on a VPython program, they can easily go through the code and show it run. You want to see a sample? Here is one I made showing a picture (I put this one on youtube though.)
- I also require students to have at least two other students look at the screencast before they send it to me. This does two things. First, it is a first-pass quality control. Second, it encourages students to discuss the ideas with others instead of just me. Unfortunately, most of the student-to-student feed back is of the form "looks good".
What should I change for the future use of screencasts? I think I need to help the students practice making these early on. Often I take for granted the technological level of students and just assume they will figure this stuff out. Unfortunately, they tend to try to figure out screencasts when it is nearly too late.
Too Much in Lab
This semester, I taught two sections of lab. It seems I can never do the same thing twice in lab. I am always changing the way I do things. One thing I always notice but fail to fix is that I try to do too much. These are the things I would like to focus on:
- Experimental design.
- Practice writing and evaluating lab reports.
- Measurement and uncertainty (and propagation of error).
- Cool data collection - like motion sensors and video analysis.
- Numerical modeling - with VPython of course.
- Oh, and physics.
I have known for a long time that this is too much. Students have too many problems with uncertainty and lab report writing when they don't fully grasp the basic physics concepts. So, this is just not a reasonable list of things for one lab. I think for future labs, I will definitely touch on all these ideas but just focus on maybe two of them.
Simple Labs are OK
I fall into the same traps. I make the labs more complicated each year. Why do I do that? I don't know. There is nothing wrong with simple labs. Students and learn a lot of stuff in a simple lab. Also, they can take these simple labs and make them complicated themselves.
Example: look at collisions. Instead of telling the students what kind of collisions to look at, I just let them do some simple ones (inelastic and completely elastic). They will find cool stuff to do without me telling them.
Play Time in Lab is Important
I picked up this trick from Noah Podolefsky's Global Physics Department talk about PhET (if you don't know about PhET simulations, go there now). He said that one of the important things about the simulations was to just let students play with them first. This works with lab too. Back to the collisions lab, I let students just put the carts on the tracks and collide them in whatever way they liked. For 15 minutes, they just played. This was way more productive than I thought it would be. From now on, the beginning of the lab will be play time.
Student Blogs
For various classes, I encourage (almost required) students to share stuff with the whole world - the whole UNIVERSE even. At least they need to share their lab reports and stuff with other students in the class. Why? Because sharing is caring. Also it builds a learning community. These students do not learn inside a box, they learn in the world.
Well, it turns out that students are very eager to post stuff on FaceBook but not as a blog. It was like pulling teeth to get them to share physics stuff. I understand why they hesitate. They don't feel like physics experts.
I will say though, that this worked quite well for some students. They made a blog, and they liked it. Will they keep it up? Who knows.
Elementary Physics Student Projects
I almost always teach this physics for elementary education majors course. I love the course and I love the curriculum (Physics and Everyday Thinking).
Each semester, I try to push the students a little bit more. One of the things they have trouble with is the idea of telling as teaching. Most of them still believe that if you just tell someone in a better way, they will get it. Sadly, this doesn't work with more complicated ideas such as we see in physics.
For a project this year, I let the students make something that could help other people with one particular concept. The parameters for the "thing" were pretty open, it just had to be shareable online. Some of students made some really nice demo videos. I was impressed. However, many students just made powerpoint presentation videos of just telling stuff.
I tried to get them to try out their videos on other people. Let others see the videos and then ask them some questions about the material to see if it helped. Sadly, I think the projects started too late in the class for most students to go back and try out their stuff.
Next time, maybe I will start early with the projects. If they just produce something that is "telling", I won't score the project very high. They could fix that by showing how other people used it. Really, this is one of those big steps in teaching: coming to that realization that not everything you do gets all the way to the students. If they could figure this out now, in college and before they get to their teaching profession, it would be useful.
