Comments

By robert, February 8, 2010 6:03 pm

I’m issued with an email account with Outlook Web Access (OWA) for my school email address (hosted by EMBC).  I don’t actually use it much – I prefer to use my Google Apps Gmail account as a client for my work address in preference to Outlook (which I just can’t make myself like) or the Outlook web interface.

I’d only recently noticed that the interface you get depends on the web browser you use.  If like me you use Firefox as your primary browser at work, a huge chunk of functionality is missing already (gee thanks Microsoft!).  The screen grabs below give an idea of the differences.

Straight away I’m using a clunky interface that looks like something from the Nineties to manage my email.  Compare that to Google mail which looks the same in IE, Firefox or Chrome (and I have all 3 browsers installed on all my laptops!).

I was going to write a comparison of the two platforms but it’s hard to find an aspect that OWA excels at.  Contact management is a joke, the PIM functions make me want to stab myself with a biro in frustration and anyone who has used Google mail knows the advantages of tagging mail versus folders.

Most teachers work as much from home as they do from work, if not more.  I know I do.  I like to have access to my emails from home and when I visit other schools.  All of my email that is, not the last two or three in my inbox.  I never take my laptop home – who’d want to use that piece of junk in preference to my own modern machine – which means I need access to email in the cloud.   Look at the generous mail allocation I get from work versus Google Apps email – I can search through archived emails and contacts with ease using the Google interface, without having to fire up a desktop mail client to achieve the same result.  It might help if EMBC gave you a reasonable amount of space – 100Mb is nothing, I’ve sent more email than that in a day!

(Compare that to the standard space allocation provided with Gmail and you see a world of difference.)

Fortunately Google Mail will retrieve emails from my work address, and send replies that look as though they have come from my work address, so I don’t have to soil my hands with Outlook Web Access (or a desktop client).

Until Microsoft comes up with a better interface that works well with Firefox, and EMBC can give us sufficient storage, I’ll continue to use the Google mail interface as my primary mail client.  What’s your email client of choice and why?

Comments

By robert, February 7, 2010 3:56 pm

I was looking at the Google Analytics report for my science resources site – and I noticed that traffic levels drop slightly on a Friday and then go right down on Saturdays (the red dots).  Thank goodness science teachers take one day a week off.  The same results also suggest that science teachers work hard planning lessons on a Sunday.  What a dedicated bunch of science teachers we have!

Comments

By Rob, February 1, 2010 9:40 pm

Secondary teachers tend to forget what a useful tool video can be in your lessons, even I do sometimes!  I’ve a selection of devices that record video but my students’ favourite device is my Flip camera.

In the past week three different groups have made use of video recording in their lessons.  Two of the groups videoed themselves – in the format of a news report on climate change, and an anti-drugs video.  Unfortunately I’m not able to show these videos outside of school but the third group however decided to video their experiments so that they could watch them again, and show them to pupils who were absent from the lesson.

This is the video they recorded (I just did the editing).

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth a thousand pictures.  Learners who have special needs respond well to this medium, and it can be a tremendous motivator and confidence booster.

Staff in my school have finally become confident at using digital photography, but we spend a fortune printing out photographs to put in folders that no-body looks at.   Staff members who want to keep digital copies of photographs have to pass them to our technician who stores them on an encrypted drive (as per our data protection policy).  It’s taken 10 years to get staff members using email and digital photographs, so videos may require a few more years of training before adoption!

I’d be interested to hear from anyone, especially in the special education field, who uses digital media with their classes for any purpose.  Contact me or leave a comment below.

Comments

By robert, January 31, 2010 9:48 pm

I’m a great believer in using spreadsheets in Science lessons.  They can carry out calculations quickly an accurately (e.g. averaging results), they can graph results (to make it easier for students with poor numeracy skills to interpret data) and they can even colour code results to aid understanding.

Averaging results, sorting results and carrying out calculations.

I’ve used Excel when calculating the speed of students to work out their average speeds and then rank them in order.  In the spreadsheet below I am averaging the reaction times of students.  If you’ve tried getting SEN students to do this with calculators you’ll know what a life saver a spreadsheet can be.

Graphing results

I have excellent graphing software for simple graphs, and I recommend 2Simple’s software for standalone graphing that students of low ability can use independently.  There are occasions however when you need something a little more powerful or flexible, or when you want to embed a graph along side results tables etc.

This graph from an excel sheet has a trend line to help students see a relationship

This graph shows an average of reaction times.  Data entry can be fiddly, but we had numerous errors when students had to convert their times into seconds to average themselves (and I provided extra data to average with the pupils’ own data of varying quality so they always saw the trend I wanted).

Conditional formatting and the IF command

Conditional formatting can be extremely useful to help learners interpret their results.  Results can be colour coded (and errors from averaging empty columns can be hidden). 

In the spreadsheet above the average box changes colour to help pupils interpret the results (red = worse, green = better) using conditional formatting (after comparing the two averages).  The better or worse statements are completed automatically based on the averages calculated as pupils enter their results (using an IF statement).   Cells with errors are formatted (conditional formatting again) to appear as white text on a white box.

I hope these examples have given you an idea of some of the ways that spreadsheets can be used in a science lesson.  Don’t worry it you don’t have access to a suite of computers, many of these activities work just as well with a single spreadsheet hooked up to an interactive whiteboard (IWB).