Prezi

 

  During our Tech Ed seminars, a few groups presented on how to use Prezi in education.  Prezi is free online presentation software.  Rather than advancing slides like in a powerpoint, the entire presentation is static  as a background and advancing along is done by changing the position and perspective of the viewer.  This means that there is a lot of zooming in and out and spinning.  It's pretty cool to see the different ways that people use it.
  Probably the most interesting part of it is the degree that you can zoom in.  One method, called nesting, is to put a picture deep within another picture so that when you zoom into its location, it wasn't visible before and it seems to appear out of nowhere.
  It's a fairly basic presentation program.  Probably the best way that I can think of to use it in the sciences is to give a bit of perspective on size comparison.  A basic thing to do would be to nest pictures of different size-scales along with things that are about that size next to them.  A really interesting way to do this might be to demonstrate the difference between gravitational force and magnetic force by showing the differences in distance that an common, 100 gram bar magnet would have to be away from 100 grams of iron to generate a pull of 1 Newton.  The actual comparison is difficult because of how different magnetic fields can be between equally massive objects, but you get the idea.

  Though it has a lot of bells and whistles, I am not too confident in the use I could make of it.  A point that was brought up in the presentation was that Prezi does have a fairly steep learning curve.  Additionally, it can be rather difficult to work with.  Despite the cool idea that you can zoom into different things, it appears that it is quite difficult to deviate from the already preset destinations on your grand picture.  This would be rather problematic if you wanted to use art in your lesson and wanted to get a close-up on a particular point of interest.

 

Do you think the optical illusion would go away if we zoomed in?

Conclusions:
  I'm not too confident that Prezi is much more useful that a basic PowerPoint.  Where it would really shine is being able to demonstrate a gradual change in scale which is something really weak in PowerPoint.  There are some problems with having to connect to the internet if you want to do a presentation, especially if your school wifi is really shoddy.  But you can fix that with monthly or yearly subscriptions!  Doesn't really excite me though.
  If you can find ways to use it to enhance the content, more power to you.  It's not really my cup of tea.  

I Flipping Love Physics

  A few weeks back, Jon Palmer, of Flipping Physics, visited our program to give a talk about flipping the classroom.  The concept is to flip the roles of time spent in class with time spent outside.  This means that time outside is spent on watching lectures and in-class time is spent doing bookwork and projects.  His talk was an inspiring look at what kind of product a passionate teacher can make to reach his students.  The videos that he now makes for his own business are clever, amusing, and informative.  This is what he's moved onto after trying to flip his classroom and it melded itself to his own passion for teaching amazing skills and facts to students.
  From his reports, when he took measurements of his classroom scores, he noticed a marked significant difference between the average scores from a traditional classroom to a flipped classroom.   Note that when I say significant that it was a difference that did not go away after removing likely suspects and confounding variables, but he noticed a score difference change on the scale of 84% to 87% going from classical to flipped classrooms.  He also noticed that his students were spending at least half of the amount of time on homework outside of class (including the videos).  Beyond the quantitative results, he noticed that he was able to spend so much more time individually with students and developed a greater awareness of where the students were at.  Any additional knowledge you have about your students helps to tailor the next lessons to exactly what your students need.

  As much fun as it can be to deliver a talk in front of others, I think that providing time for the students to spend working through problems with classmates and the teacher can be the difference between being able to repeat procedures from rote and gaining a grasp of the concepts.  This may be something better suited to the sciences and mathematics, but this is the kind of experience that people get tutors for.  As a teacher, you gain the chance to address actual problems with students rather than diagnosing them from afar from homework alone.
  One thing that I will note is that there isn't just a straight dichotomy between traditional and flipped classrooms.  Some teachers have structured their classroom interactions to minimize the number of lectures so students can have time to work on bookwork and assignments in class. 
  At this point, I won't take a side saying that one is innately better than the other.  Teachers really do benefit from having the physical interaction and confirmation that happens when your audience is right in front of you.  It also feels more personal for the speaker.  There is the added potential issue that unengaged students don't watch the lectures and bury themselves in even more work.  There isn't a perfect system, and it is important to recognize issues and address them maturely as they arise.
  I'll leave on an anecdote from the end of the talk.  Jon was teaching a lesson where he demonstrated what happens when a strong magnetic is dropped down a copper tubing.  This was a demonstration that he had done many times before in years past, but this year he had time to pass the pipe for every student to try it for themselves.  By the end of class, he noticed that the tube had noticeably warmed up.  When he pointed this out to his students, they were able to discussion why this happened and tied in what they had learned weeks back about currents, resistance, electricity, and magnetism.  In this moment, a simple demonstration turned into a deeper lesson that tied all of electricity and magnetism together in a single phenomenon.  This is something that could not have happened if the teacher were only speaking in the front.


Jon Palmer's Sites:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYqACVYl0c0BhlVN6X2HIMg
http://www.flippingphysics.com/