winning ways... with whiteboards
There's all sorts of turgid, dreary and downright dull websites out there, but don't worry because we've engaged the ICT guru Roger Frost to avoid these like the plague.
He's come up with science sites that will zing lessons into life when applied to your whiteboard. Here's a round up of his recommendations in the Planet Science Newsletters (available for free in all good inboxes!), and we'll add into this page whenever he finds another winner.
If you have winners of your own to recommend please do not hesitate to tell the Planet Science Editor and they'll be checked out and added to this page.
Take it away Roger!
Natural selection – a peppered moth simulator
ExploreLearning: Mouse Breeding Gizmo
A journey through the Solar System
Periodic table – Nucleus and Electrons
Going organic – homologous series
Natural selection– a peppered moth simulator
How can a whole population of moths change from dark to light? To find out, you play the part of a bird in a game that has you chasing moths all over the whiteboard. When the forest is bright and unpolluted, you find the black moths as the white moths get to live. But when it’s polluted, the dark moths flutter by unnoticed and get to breed. If natural selection, or life, really is a game, this very clever activity makes the point well. It’s fast requiring a little skill and a lot of deodorant.
Here’s where you’ll find it:
http://www.echalk.co.uk/Science/Biology/
PepperedMoth/Peppered_MothWEB.swf
Or, go to Biology resources at
http://www.echalk.co.uk/Science/biology.htm
And Click on Peppered moth natural selection simulation.
Goal Shots
Spare a moment for 'distance time graphs'. They often cause puzzlement but here's a tutorial that uses football to explain it, and brilliantly too. Using film clips, graphs and questioning, 'Goal Shots' is a great piece of on-screen, whole class teaching material. It shows players on a pitch and plots their movements on a graph.
Step-by-step it goes through what a straight line graph means and what a slope means. Easy to teach with, easy to find on web, this smart piece of presentation really kicks.
You can find 'Goal Shots' on the Science Year CD 'Only Connect' or click straight through here:
http://www.sycd.co.uk/only_connect/
front-page/graph-shots.htm
Crocodile Clips
When you need to explain circuits to the class, this whiteboard tool gives you all the batteries and bulbs you’d need to build a circuit. But more than that, there’s a whole toolbar with motor, buzzer and variable resistor to drag on screen, wire up and get working. As well as being able to kick a practical into action, you could use this to discuss how to wire up complicated circuits – and be reassured that every bulb, wire and battery is fresh, working and free.
Here’s an easy piece of software that’s perfect for a whiteboard, despite being written years before they were invented. The tiny price is the minutes it takes to register, download a zipped file and work it without installing. The result is an unusual bargain.
Crocodile Clips Elementary: http://www.crocodile-clips.com/s3_4.htm
ExploreLearning: Mouse Breeding Gizmo
Breed a dark mouse with a white mouse and you can be sure of a surprising result. In this simulation two pure breeds turn out black mice every time. Click as much as you like, there’s no changing a dominant trait. Breed the offspring and you’ll now see that a quarter turn out white.
If that’s puzzling here’s a no-nonsense tool to explain it. You drag the mice to what I’d call their bedroom, do experiments, peek at genotypes and unravel this puzzle on screen. It’s easy to use too - the mice breed with a click and without needing money, beer or inducement.
Sign up for a trial - it’s instant - or use this link for a 5 minute quickie
http://www.explorelearning.com/index.cfm?
method=cResource.dspView&ResourceID=382
Physics Online
Leaping from high into the sky is an impressive way to learn. According to ‘Terminal velocity’, a sharp looking teaching tool, you don’t keep speeding up. Instead you hurtle towards the earth at a steady velocity – an idea which is perhaps reassuring. Back in the classroom you could find this ‘model’ spot-on, not least because it plots velocity during a fall, and shows how a parachute affects the situation. Other tricks which make this site particularly suitable for whiteboard use include a plot of acceleration as you view a drop and a control for the size of the parachute.
The quality is sky high so one can forgive the fact that it’s not free to use forever…
To have a go, sign up for a free trial, then search for ‘terminal’ at
Physics Online http://www.physics-online.com/
Plant cell and animal cells
http://www.forgefx.com/casestudies/
prenticehall/ph/cells/cells.htm
Do you use your whiteboard for good or do you use it for awesome? If you’re looking for a visual to explain what’s inside a cell, these 3D diagrams of the cell come close to awesome. They’re simplicity to use, as all you do is work down a list of cell components to see the nucleus, cytoplasm, ribosomes and chloroplasts rendered with unusual clarity. Nearby is an animal cell which, if you run this link a couple of times, you can put beside the plant cell for comparison.
A journey through the Solar System
http://www.thegrid.org.uk/learning/science/
madscientist/resources/space/solar_system/solar_journey/
Cyberspace, aka the internet, was invented several billion years after the real ‘space’ and as any surfer knows, it’s a remarkably good copy of the real thing. For example, both kinds of space are vast, neither environment supports a useful life, and you could spend a lifetime touring either of them and still have little to show for it.
This website takes the analogy further with a scale model of the Solar System. It’s a web page - a very, very long web page – with the Sun at the top, Pluto at the bottom and other planets in between. You can click to hop from planet to planet – or you can scroll down and take the long scenic route down the whiteboard. Download its spinning planet movies and use them to make a great PowerPoint.
Meiosis and Mitosis
You can be sure that the wonderful ways that cells divide and share out the genes will puzzle students for generations to come. But this neat ‘explaining’ tool might help. You start with a cell and physically divide up the chromatids and chromosomes into two sets for mitosis, or in the case of meiosis, into four. What’s strangely neat is that there’s no animation – which, frankly, often confuses the issue. Instead you drag things into place as you explain the idea. You’ll be surprised how simple it is.
While we’re on the topic, see ‘zoom into a cell’ which offers a microscope where you can zoom right in and see the nucleus, then the chromosomes and the genes. At top magnification you can even see the writing on your DNA. (It reads TA-TA)
Cell division: and chromosomes
http://www.biologyinmotion.com/cell_division
Zoom into a cell: School Science
http://www.schoolscience.co.uk/flash/dna.htm
Organs of the body
In years past we would have students colour in parts of the body, cut them out and glue them together in their books. What fun it was before the days of computers! Today, with no need for glue, you can project the body on the board and drag and drop the bits into place.
‘The Body’ is currently the best of modern cut out activities that now feature 3D organs to position. In several return visits you might also look at muscles, nerves and the skeleton.
Lest the pupils feel left out, offer them this alternative body ‘cut out’. Covering similar ground, this second example takes shape as a Word file with a body picture to put together. Again it needs no colouring, no scissors and it uses so much less time for the same result.
The Body - BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body
The Body cut-out – Roger Frost www.rogerfrost.com/body
A Heart that Beats
Whatever happens to the curriculum, you can be sure the heart topic is going to live on forever.
To make teaching it easy, here is a fabulous widget to show the heart cycle. You can see how the atria and ventricles take turns to pump blood, and you can trace the blood flow through the heart and see the order in which the valves work. You’ll also quickly find a button that pauses the heart cycle at any point. That’s pretty much all that anyone needs.
This free animation plays in a small window – but if you get the file out of the Internet browser memory (‘cache’) - it will fill the whiteboard screen and look glorious. (Look in Temporary Internet Files, or get an expert to help, because the result is a treat).
For the rest of the picture, look at Sunflower’s ‘Circulation’, although this one will cost. There is a speed controllable version of the heart and there is an unusual animation showing arteries, capillaries and veins.
Free beating heart from ‘School Science’ http://www.schoolscience.co.uk/content/
4/biology/abpi/heart/heart4.html
Not free ‘Circulation’ software from ‘Sunflower’ www.sunflowerlearning.com
Solar System
Given the number of resources about planets that are around, anyone might think we’ve a problem teaching about them. But as this ‘interactive’ proves, there is plenty of space for one that shows the planets’ orbits and rotation with pizzazz.
This does more than just look good. It lets you experiment with a planet’s orbit, its surface, atmosphere and distance from the sun to see how ‘planet ten’ and any lifeforms survive. So it’s something to use as a lesson starter, middle, finish or all three. Planet 10 hails from Science Year, before the days of whiteboards, and merits a top place with those other resources.
Planet 10 from Science Year:
http://www.solarsystem.org.uk/planet10
And for non-whiteboard users: www.planet-science.com/planet10/
Periodic table – Nucleus and Electrons
After seeing a few periodic tables on the ‘net’, you might wonder how great it would be if the wall could come alive too. Well this great example does just that…
Click the helium symbol and see two electrons move in an orbit, click lithium and another electron appears in a new orbit, keep going up to krypton by which time you see the well defined orbits. Prefer to see the nucleus? Switch to see it and see how this builds up too. For advanced work, s,p and d-orbitals also change alongside a line spectrum.
Here’s a periodic table possibly cleverer than Mendeleev!
See David's Whizzy Periodic Table free at: http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/applets/a2.html
How to Draw (diagrams!)
With all the digital technology around us - photos, film and 3D - I once wondered whether apparatus diagrams would one day go the way of the dodo. Well, they may not be disappearing but they are changing… and here's a great tool to do them on a whiteboard.
Click on the picture of a beaker and click in a drawing space and there's your beaker drawn in traditional style. Drag before you drop to scale it.
Yes the diagram lives on, as surely as headings and dates are underlined in millions of exercise books.
Sandy Wilkinson's DiagramMaker
Projectile Motion
For the first time since this search for interactive whiteboard tools began, I have been inundated by a letter. Its question may puzzle animal lovers: it asks for a risk assessment of the "Shoot the Monkey" experiment, where you fire your rifle at a monkey dropping from a tree. The aim we believe is to hit it.
This online gem should answer the question… somewhere this life skill can be practised in safety. You adjust things and fire (a ball) as the monkey drops so this is as safe as it gets.
Timing is of the essence as you are limited to 5 minutes. Register for a trial and you can shoot yourself happy.
Shoot the Monkey Gizmo by ExploreLearning
Digital Oscilloscope
Mention waves to a non-physicist and it could conjure up dreams of summer days spent floating on a lilo. But give this neat tool to physicist and they will find an extraordinarily convenient way to take a sound and show its waveform.
With buttons to adjust gain and sweep and another to do a frequency analysis it is a pretty useful ‘scope. For more fun applications you can croon into a microphone, or adjust Windows' sound control panel and play an mp3 of a Hawaiian tropical tune. So adjust your shades, sip a cocktail and enjoy the waves.
Download this tool and run it in seconds. Its greyed-out buttons suggest this was for an older PC, but click on them all the same.
Digital Oscilloscope uses a PC sound card for input
While we’re here waving, see also ‘P’ and ‘S’ waves
Going organic – homologous series
When we did organic chemistry at school we’d often hear that it was just something we had to learn. Only when we delved deeper did we find a magical subject that was as rich in patterns as the rest of chemistry. What would have helped were interactive ways to visualise structures, animate mechanisms and highlight those patterns. For example, here’s a widget to help you make a point about homologous series: you add CH2 to go from meth- to eth- and so on. Nearby is an model of the structure you can accurately measure (tip: right click). It uses a plug-in (called MDL Chime as explained on site) so you’d best install this for the full flavour. Nearby are other pre-release widgets to showcase software that goes on-sale in 2006.
Advanced Chemistry Teaching Tools – Organic Chemistry go to mini-preview
Chime plug-in – register
An Optics Bench
Of all the heady physics topics I’d rate lenses as the most agreeable. That the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection strikes me as wonderfully fair. That it underpins stuff about lenses and mirrors is shown rather dandily by this free ‘Java’ tool.
Though this is not so pretty just click ‘lens’, then click the black space and you will see a good-enough lens outlined. Drag the markers and its focal length changes. Drag the markers over each other and the lens turns concave – or whatever it’s called in new money. Now you have the idea you can add a beam of parallel rays. Add an object and match it for size and distance with the beam and see why the topic rocks.
If you have Crocodile Physics software look within for a more cute version.
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