WebSights features announcements and reviews of select sites of interest to physics teachers. 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 Great Moments in Science website contains an archive of about ten yearsÕ worth of weekly, brief one page long researched popular science essays (including many on theoretical and practical physics topics), accompanied by one minute long streamed audio recordings of the essays read aloud by the author, Dr. Karl [Kruszelnicki] of the Australian Broadcast Corporation. What makes these essays particularly compelling is their utility for instruction—unlike many longer and also high quality radio science programs with transcripts available on the web (E.g. Science Friday from NPR or Quirks and Quarks from the CBC), these are short pithy pieces that are approachable as assignments to lower and middle grade school conceptual physics students as assignments for short written analyses of Òscience articles.Ó They are also approachable by English as a Second Language (ESL) students for practicing their English language skills while learning conceptual science or physics.
Brought to
my attention by Martti Sloan, Kulosaari
Secondary School Physics, Helsinki, Finland.
American Institute of Physics 2008-9 Nationwide Survey of HS Physics Teachers released <http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/hsteachers.pdf>
The AIP Statistical Research Center publishes regular reports on HS physics, including recent reports on HS physics availability, courses and enrollments and textbooks. Brief highlights of the Physics Teacher Survey sampling about 3,600 high schools and 2,500 teachers include:
- there were about 27,000 US high school physics teachers teaching over 1.3 million physics students during 2008-9, and both these numbers have been growing for over sixteen years
- although the number of high school physics teachers has been growing since 2003, the number of physics students has grown even faster, so both class sizes and numbers of physics classes have grown
-
the proportion of women
teaching physics has grown to almost a third of high school physics teachers,
showing more than twenty years of growth
-
median age of physics
teachers is leveling off at forty-six years, about a quarter are AAPT members,
and almost 60% are now physics specialists teaching mainly physics as their
teaching subject
-
over a third hold
majors in physics or physics education, and another eleven percent hold minors
Rising Above the Gathering Storm Revisited released by National Academy of Science http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12999
This freely available new NAS report revisits the original report of five years ago and provides a disturbing appraisal of five years of lost ground in the US in terms of innovation, competitiveness and the standard of living. Report discussion include little or no improvement in mathematics and science education in US public school systems, while at the same time many other nations have been progressing markedly.
Accessible Elements: Teaching Science Online and at a Distance by D. Kennepohl & L. Shaw (Eds) freely downloadable from <http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120162>
A book discussing science distance education science courses offered by colleges and universities in Canada, Australia, Israel, Bangladesh and the Southern Pacific. The most interesting part to me of this work was the discussion on science laboratory practices, which included discussions and examples of virtual labs, online labs, remote controlled labs, regional/on-campus and residential labs, and laboratory kits mailed to students. Chapter Seven in particular describes the evolution (since 1992) of the current $200 physics labs kits (distributed by mail) used by Athabasca University in their three semester introductory non-calculus physics course sequence for non-majors. These kits include much apparatus such as stopwatches, lots of Vernier Scientific technology probeware and Graphical Analysis software used with student supplied computers, and inexpensive multimeters, which are used in an applied, informal investigatory collection of lab activities (the author explicitly cite the Rutgers Etkina ISLE curriculum). Kit photos and brief descriptions of the labs are available from the individual course websites accessed from http://www2.athabascau.ca/course/ug_subject/np.php under lab component. The authors spend some time discussing kit logistics and associated administration.
The Engineer Guy http://www.engineerguy.com/ by Bill Hammock of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This site claims to host ÒThe most irreverent & playful engineering videos ever made!Ó and one video in particular was pointed out to me <http://www.engineerguy.com/videos/video-pop-can.htm> analyzing the leverage used lifting the non-removable Aluminum pop-can tab (the trick is not to fight the pressure in the can, but try to use it to assist first venting the can with a second class lever then change to a first class lever after venting). Over a dozen other short (mostly about three minute) videos discuss engineering and design underlying coffee percolator bubble pumps, whiffletrees, Geiger counters, matches, light bulbs, chairs, cell phones and concrete. A nice compendium of engineering and physics concepts cleverly used in everyday technology, humorously presented.
Brought to
my attention by Kevin OÕDonnell, Nuclear Medicine Engineering group, Toshiba
Corporation