Field Trip to a Cemetery

flickr photo by Vanessa (EY) http://flickr.com/photos/vanchett/371032362 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

Today I had the pleasure of accompanying our Y10 students on a field trip to Sheffield General Cemetery as the source they were to use for their GCSE History Controlled Assessment. The historical connection and information which can be unearthed and synthesised from a cemetery is obvious, but I was also struck by the potential for a cross-curricular study. There are a number of subject disciplines which could gain value from an exploration of the site:

Science – a number of perspectives offer themselves up here. An exploration of causes of death and links with health, sanitation and epidemics. DIsuse over the years means many parts of the site have reverted to nature and are therefore ripe for habitat studies. The rocks used for tombstones offer geological information – are they local and if not, from where did they originate.

Maths/IT – a graveyard clearly offers a wealth of data and only when that has been collected, analysed and interpreted can they be used to tell a story. What data should we collect, how should they be gathered, stored and shared? In what ways might they be filtered or sorted, then analysed and how should the outcomes be presented?

English – an atmospheric place like a graveyard offers plenty of potential for creative writing, especially if the story of the cemetery and its life are taken into account. In addition, many of the tombstones and memorials are decorated with poetry in recognition of their lives, or to offer up prayers. These could be compared, contrasted and interpreted, perhaps then serving as stimuli for further wiring.

RS – many of the on tombstones, memorials and buildings are replete with symbolism. This particular  cemetery was originally conceived to serve the needs of non-conformists, but later admitted Anglicans, so may offer potential in discussing the differences?

Geography – spread over a wide area, the cemetery constitutes a large site, divided into different regions. This provides opportunities for mapping and, given the topography of the site, exploring contours, land usage, and microclimates. Data gathering, as mentioned elsewhere is also possible.

Art – A particularly moody place, the cemetery also offers a variety of locations like woodland and parkland, plus the chapels and buildings available for interpretation through drawing, painting and photography.

Learning technologies – with plenty of data to gather, a multitude of possibilities opens up. This can be as straightforward as recording information into a database/spreadsheet, which could of course be a collaborative file with small groups of students crowd-sourcing the data for the whole class. Rich media can be used to gather information in the form of photographs or video/audio commentary, or indeed building on the atmosphere of the location for more creative endeavours, like video storytelling or making movie shorts. Mobile devices with gps capability offer the opportunity for gathering location-based data, perhaps helping retain the context of the data gathered for the other sections already mentioned.

Other than history and possibly science, it might be difficult to argue the case for arranging a trip just for the brief examples I provided above. When combined together for a cross-curricular theme however, surely it would be well worth the effort and disruption to other lessons for the potential gains?

Snakey oscillations?

Our Physics technician, Simon, produced this video during his hols.

Apparently it took an absolute age and the patience of a saint to get to this standard, but what a resource?! As soon as a I saw it, my mind started buzzing with ways I might use it in the classroom.

To prompt questioning

In the first instance, I think it’s sufficiently intriguing to catch a student’s eye and suspect they’d watch it more than once. I’d also contend it would prompt questions and leave them thinking “Why is it doing that?” or “How was that done?” So the first thing I’d probably do is to ask them what questions do you have? (If you’ve not seen 101 Questions by Dan Meyer, it’s well worth checking out and if this video hadn’t been just over the 1 minute limit, I’d certainly have posted it there). If you’re simply using it as a lesson starter, that might be as far as you get, but there’s clearly potential for more.

To encourage close observation

There’s scope here for students of all ages and capabilties to participate at their own level. Precisely how detailed do observations need to be to capture the complexity of the motion. Maybe observations could be crowd-sourced from the class, either using good old paper sticky notes, or an electronic version like Padlet. The notes might then be arranged in different ways: a timeline of events, thematically etc. Could the students then describe what they saw in sufficient detail for someone who hadn’t seen the video to be able to picture the event?

Hypothesising

Given the questions they’ve already asked and the observations they’ve made, are they better placed to offer hypotheses which begin to explain what they’re seeing? What is causing the effects? Then of course, how might they test their hypotheses?

Taking measurements

What measurement might they want to take to try to make sense of what is happening? And how would they do that from a video which is on screen. These are clearly the kinds of practical skills upon which students are assessed, but rather than the traditional pendulum experiment where we might provide them with the instructions how to set things up, what measurements to take and how to take them, here’s a real phenomenon, based on the same theory, but which challenges them to come up with a novel method for taking the measurements … and in attempting to ensure accuracy, what problems do they face? Of course that can be followed by displaying and/or processing the results in whatever way is deemed appropriate.

Replicating

So having interrogated the phenomenon in the detail they now have, how would they set up their own version? Or a better or different one? There’s now the option to delve into the practical aspects in much more detail, but be warned, Simon assured me that the adjustments that were needed to the length of the pendulums to produce such subtle changes in periods of oscillation were incredibly fine, which is where the patience came in. Perhaps with older students there’s an alternative approach? With measurements of the difference in time periods between different golf balls, by using the equation for a simple pendulum, can they establish what the difference in lengths must be? Maybe then they might be able to set up their pendulum snake from theory alone? Those interested in coding or with sufficient design skills might be able to produce an animated representation.

Maybe the effort and time Simon put in could be repaid several-fold?

Three little questions

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo by Cali4beach: http://flickr.com/photos/cali4beach/8104593909/

Whilst I was responding to being ‘tagged’ in the 11 Questions meme by Nick Jackson, I started wondering how this principle of spreading questions and answers might be used in our classrooms. We’ve always solicited answers from students, whether whole-class, group or individual, and sought to employ good questioning techniques to encourage higher-order thinking in so doing. Increasingly, we’re beginning to recognise that it’s even more powerful if we empower students to ask their own questions, so we seek opportunities to do just that.

How about then, rather than 11 Questions which might become rather unwieldy, a 3 Question challenge? This could be on a topic you’re about to study, so the activity could reveal the current breadth of the students’ knowledge and understanding. Or it could be done at the close of a module as a simple assessment of how much the class has picked up. Maybe it could be an activity done at the start of the year to help to get to know a new class of students, or help them to learn about each other.

In practice, each student would ask three questions which would be distributed to three classmates, chosen by some fair system. This could be distributed via a blog if you have one, Google docs or email, or if you have access to none of these, pen and paper could also do the job. Each of the three recipients then has to answer the three questions in such a way that the sender can see the responses. After that first round, the initiator should then have three answers (which may of course be the same!) to each of their three questions. Since they’ve also acted as a recipient, they’ll also have seen and (hopefully) answered nine questions in total from three other people … again some of these may have been duplicates. By then drawing together and summarising the questions and answers of the whole class, it should be possible to get a good overview of areas which are strong and others which might need revisiting or addressing.

It sounds complex, but worth a try perhaps?

Coding by stealth

If you’re one of the increasing number of connected educators, you can hardly fail to have felt the pressure to improve our students’ understanding of the world of computing, computer science or coding. There’s a big push here in the UK, but also more widely around the world. From non-profits like Code Club and Code.org to large organisations like the BBC and Mozilla, the resources they’re deploying to encourage young people into coding and computing are expanding daily.

Given that background, it can be a bit daunting for those of us with little experience or knowledge in these areas to know where to start. However when you begin to ‘lift the hood/bonnet’ on certain applications with which we’re already familiar, there are lots of little tweaks and tricks which become possible with only a rudimentary appreciation of code.

YouTube Embed code options

Let’s take an example. I often embed Youtube videos within our school learning platform, or indeed on my blogs – if you do too, you’ll be aware that we’re already into the world of coding, even if it’s only copying and pasting an embed code from one place to another. Whilst in the ‘Embed’ context-sensitive panel under a YouTube video, I often change the video size to one more suitable for small form-factor devices like smart phones. And here’s a first coding learning opportunity; as you change the video size, the embed code changes to reflect that. So how about having students embed YouTube (or Vimeo) videos into a site¹ so they have the opportunity to make that kind of change and watch what happens to the code … or even tweak the code manually and see what happens to the video. Let them explore what the code element ‘frameborder=”0”’ means by changing the figure and see what happens.

But it was whilst doing this that I spotted another option underneath the video sizing tool I’d not noticed before. “Enable privacy enhanced mode” which had a help link next to it for me to follow. In there it explained about the privacy enhanced mode … but more about the embed options too. So to make a video play automatically for example, you just add an extra bit of code (“&autoplay=1”) into the embed code. Or to start a video at a certain time, just add another code segment. Here then we can have students ‘hack’ code to make something different happen. Hacking extant code is a great place to start learning, rather than trying to code something from scratch – you get instant feedback on whether what you did is right. From here they could go on to search for other code snippets which can be used to change the way videos are displayed or played – maybe have them explore how to caption YouTube videos and think about why that might be important for some people.

And all that from a site which many students access every day as consumers, but one which used in a slightly different way, might just get them thinking a little more about the coding that makes it work.

(¹Set one up using Weebly or Google sites, perhaps themed for your subject and have them add videos which illustrate one aspect of your course – a great way to gather resources for a topic with the minimum of effort surely?)