Teaching ScienceIdeas and help for trainee Science teachers

A fun little song by They Might be Giants

Science Made Simple is a series of 15 animated short videos produced for a New Zealand TV channel aimed at demystifying commonly used, but little understood, scientific and technological jargon. The series focuses on the sort of words viewers may read in the newspaper, but don’t always understand.

Science Made Simple from Jacob Slack on Vimeo.

Might prove handy as part of a stater/plenary in KS4 Science lessons.

Teachers Media is the new professional development service for everyone working in UK education, brought to you by the team behind Teachers TV.

This site contains a free library of over 3500 high-quality videos to help you and your team develop your professional skills, and support teaching and learning in your school and classroom.

The whole of the now defunct Teachers TV archive is available on the site. You can only view through the site – there’s no embed or download options. I don’t know if this will be added, or is due to rights issues… time will tell.

Visit it now : http://www.teachersmedia.co.uk/

With the demise of the Teachers TV website and the opening up of the archive to other companies to distribute, expect more sites like this to appear in the near future such as the The TES website and SchoolsWorld.tv. There was also Leon Cych’s project for a crowdsourced attempt to archive and #SaveTTV.

Watch this space.

Science on the Simpsons contains a collection of short clips from the Simpsons TV Show. The clips would make great lesson starter clips to introduce topics such as Natural Selection, Newtons Third Law and Angular Momentum. Thanks to Dan Burns for putting the collection together.

The clips are in mpeg format, and it’s recommended that they are downloaded to your computer before you use them. They could be inserted into a PowerPoint file or just played in your regular video player software – media player, vlc etc.

The clips are intended for use by science teachers in the classroom and so the posting and use of theses clips for educational purposes should conform with fair use in terms of copyright.

http://www.lghs.net/ourpages/users/dburns/scienceonsimpsons/clips.html

Thanks to Humphrey Jones via Twitter for the link.

I’ve said this before, but I have a theory you can teach most of the Science curriculum using clips from Mythbusters And here’s another one that would be great in a GCSE physics class.

This is part of the episode “Mythssion Control” and this experiment is called “Crash Force” – if the video vanished from YouTube in the future try searchng for that.

Basically – the scenario is this. If you have two cars driving towards each other at 50mph and they smash into each other, the crash is the equivalent of one car driving into a stationary wall at 100mph. Or is it?

What do the students think?

Play the video until about the 1 minute 50 mark. Then get the students to make their predictions and explain their reasons.

Then play the rest of the video.

Surprised?

If you want – you can also show the first half of the experiment (up to about the 7 minute mark) where they test this in small scale – it might even be something you could try in the classroom first.

This series of videos have been produced by the National STEM Centre and the Institute of Physics. They are mostly aimed at teachers and illustrate how to perform simple demonstrations and use particular pieces of equipment.

Some topics have versions of the video that could be used with students in the classroom. The topics covered in the videos are:

• Demonstrating diffraction using laser light
• Static electricity and charge with an ‘electric sausage’
• Using an electron diffraction tube
• Gravity and the motion of projectiles with the Monkey and Hunter demonstration
• Transmission of electricity along power lines
• Demonstrating thermal conductivity
• Using a Van de Graaff generator
• A simple wave matching

Access the STEM videos here: http://stem.org.uk/cxhd

There are two very useful 15 minute clips on Teachers TV, exploring how more creative learning contexts can be used in primary science lessons. They also seek to show how collaborative work between teachers in school can lead to useful continuing professional development.

The resource aims to demonstrate:

1. The benefits of creative learning contexts
2. How cross-curricular contexts can improve learning
3. How collaborative work between teachers can aid their professional development

To access the videos, click on these links:

KS1/2 Science – As Easy As CPD 1

KS1/2 Science – As Easy As CPD 2

There are many more science resources on Teachers TV. Take a look!

Following on from a post on the Whiteboard Blog a few weeks back about Here Comes Science – the CD of Science songs from the band They Might be Giants, here’s another song from the CD. (via @BadAstronomer).

The song is called “Science is Real” and it would a good introduction to Science, or a good way to start off a discussion on scientific thinking

The CD is available from Amazon.com (and Amazon UK on import)

The Class of 09′s (almost) Organised Display of Diet Coke and Mentos….

The Science Bit can be found here.

Fancy going for the world record? Info here. 504 simultaneous geysers

Here’s a great site for using songs to help the teaching of Science in the classroom. Simple Science has videos for many KS2 topics with songs, and also explanations of some of the concepts.

Videos are hosted on Vimeo, which means they are higher quality than YouTube, and also means they are accessible in schools that have blocked YouTube.

The videos are free on the website, but if you like them, you might want to buy a DVD of the high quality versions.

4F Electricity Song from Simple Science on Vimeo.