August 2010

Are standardized tests biased against students who don’t give a shit?

August 30, 2010

Pardon the curse-word, but I just had to share this wonderful little piece from the Onion. And since I would otherwise get taken to task for “taking myself too seriously” I won’t even make any sort of meta-comments on student motivation or other things that we education-types worry about. What’s the point?  It’s just funny.  [...]

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Teacher-tested climate change lessons

August 26, 2010

I was excited to see this recent posting from my institution, CU Boulder. If you’re a teacher looking to teach climate change in the classroom, a group of scientists, science education researchers, and middle and high-school teachers have developed and refined a set of problem-based lessons: Visit them at LearnMoreAboutClimate.colorado.edu They say: The result is [...]

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All my posts from AAPT (#aaptsm10)

August 23, 2010

For those of you who wanted them all in one place (and I’m one of those people) here are all the posts that I wrote from the recent Physics Teacher AAPT/PERC physics teacher conferences: Facing Facebook:  Social media in and out of the classroom The Magic of the Middle Division: Changing Classroom Norms Students’ understanding [...]

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Facing Facebook: Social media in and out of the classroom

August 21, 2010

Your students are already using tools like Facebook and Twitter. In fact, they’re often using them when you’d rather they’d be doing something else (like paying attention in class). How can we turn the potential obstacles of Web 2.0 and social media into an opportunity for effective teaching and learning? I recently gave an overview [...]

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The Magic of the Middle Division: Changing classroom norms (#aaptsm10)

August 18, 2010

I’m finally getting a chance to finish my blog posts from the summer meeting of AAPT.  There’s just one more talk that I wanted to share with any of you who couldn’t be there – another delightful presentation from Corinne Manogue of Oregon State University.  Corinne is a colleague, we’ve both been working on creating [...]

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Dear Professor, Do you live in a vacuum?

August 8, 2010

A while back I wrote about Nin Andrews wonderful little book “Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum?”  This collection of poems based on real student notes to her physicist husband is a fun read — an interesting peek into the life of students from their point of view.  See my previous post to [...]

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Evolution for Bartenders

August 5, 2010

Got this gem from a recent issue of Science magazine… Here’s a variation on the popular geeks who drink bar-room trivia contests.  This geek wanted to describe the evolution of drinks!  An evolutionary biologist, James Harriman, wondered whether new drinks arise by people adjusting old recipes to fit their tastes, giving rise to new “species” [...]

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Some memorable quotes from the physics teacher conference (#aaptsm10)

August 4, 2010

I’ve been meaning to post these for a while.  I gathered a fun set of quotable quotes while at the American Association of Physics Teachers conference a few weeks ago. “Who remembers our wisdom?” David Pritchard (The answer?  The people who use it.  Physics majors retain their problem solving knowledge more than English majors, three [...]

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Name that sample (win a prize)

August 3, 2010

I really like these continuing contests that ASPEX keeps offering (Name that Sample) where you get to try to guess what their SEM scan is of.  If you guess the what the image below is showing by August 14th, you could win a free netbook.  Put in your guesses on their website, not mine (if [...]

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