TPT WebSights column draft for March, 2009:

WebSights features announcements and reviews of select sites of interest to physics teachers. All sites are copyright by their authors. This column is available as a web page at http://PhysicsEd.BuffaloState.Edu/pubs/WebSights/.

If you have successfully used a physics website that you feel is outstanding and appropriate for WebSights, please email me the URL and describe how you use it to teach or learn physics. macisadl@buffalostate.edu.

The Summer 2009 Physics Teacher Professional Workshop announcements commence

The Cornell Center for Nanoscale Systems Institute for Physics Teachers (CIPT) summer courses for HS teachers in Ithaca, NY have been announced for July 2009. The intro course is a week long, pays a stipend and includes graduate credit. Applications and further information can be had at http://www.cns.cornell.edu/cipt/. Michigan State University's August 2009 Physics of Atomic Nuclei (PAN) program for high / middle science teachers in East Lansing, Michigan has been announced and is also taking applications. The week-long program includes professional development, local costs, materials and room and board, with credit available. See http://www.nscl.msu.edu/teachersstudents/programs/pan/

Free Online Physics Videos:

"Frames of Reference" by the Physical Science Study Commission (PSSC) -- the famous and still engaging 1960 classic is now available at http://www.archive.org/details/frames_of_reference

This film presents Galilean relativity, fictitious forces and rotating frames of inertia via clever photography and moving sets as shot at University of Toronto Physics by Professors Hume and Ivey. The film is also commercially available (at better resolution) on DVD from Ztek at http://www.ztek.com, as are many other classic physics films.

The same archive currently includes an amusing (much less instructionally useful) 1959 film shot at the MIT Magnet Laboratory starring Dr. Francis Bitter. Today many of Bitter's experiments and demonstrations can be done (cautiously) with inexpensive car jump start power supplies. See:

http://www.archive.org/details/magnet_laboratory_1959

http://www.harborfreight.com/ and search on "jump"

The Periodic Table of Videos: http://periodicvideos.com/ A collection of short (about five min) videos describing each element in the periodic table. Quite entertaining, with great personalities doing the videos.

Selected Introductory Physics (and Astronomy) Lectures from Yale are now online at http://oyc.yale.edu/ -- see especially Professor R. Shankar's twenty five lectures on calculus based physics. This editor admits he's still partial to the calculus-based physics lectures by MIT's Professor Walter Lewin at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/ -- Lewin has permanent reserved space on my iPod.

Contributed by Frank Noschese, John Jay HS Physics and Pat Viele, Cornell Physics and Astronomy Librarian.

HS Physics Units and Lesson Plans development at the PhysicsFront

The authors of the very impressive http://www.thephysicsfront.org have been updating content for K-12 physics courses, particularly under the "topics and units" menu. Caroline Hall and Cathy Ezrailson have hand-picked and assembled standards-based units with turn-key lessons, tutorials, simulations, demos, labs, assessments that are good science, easily set up in the classroom, safe for adolescence and based on best-practice pedagogy. Topics and Materials exist for Physical Sciences K-8, Physics First, Conceptual Physics, Algebra-Based Physics and AP/Calculus-based physics.

Contributed by PTEC's Caroline Hall.

Correction: The Jan 2009 WebSights column misdentified Howard Spergel of as working at Cornell Physics; Howard Spergel is a physics teacher at Midwood HS Physics in Brooklyn, NY, and a Cornell alum. He recommends the CIPT summer HS physics teaching program at http://www.cns.cornell.edu/cipt/.