Linking in the MIT Physics Video Presentations

As you might have guessed, my "errant" student, mentioned in the previous blog, didn't email me back.  Given the amount of arm twisting I had to do last year to get assignments turned in, my prediction would have been "no reply".

In this blog, I'll finish off describing how I have linked the MIT content into my course and also explain why I did it the way I did.  If you do a Google search on (MIT open courseware physics) you will get in excess of 200 hits. 

My initial thoughts were that I would link to the "YouTube" version, certainly the students would relate to that.  However, what I found is that while the video was there, it still needed to be selected out of a group along the right side of the screen.  Of course I could drill down further, and get the URL to the specific lecture I wanted, but I didn't find the material at this site to be organized in the topic order that reflects the order concepts are typically taught in most physics courses.  I also found I  had to watch much of the video to identify the topics that were covered in the video and I needed to know those topics to link it correctly into my course as an enrichment activity.

I found it much more convenient to go directly to the MIT web site for the course I wanted.  At that site, the content was laid out in a way that made it easy to identify what the lecture was about, and then to slot it in as an appropriate link in my course (graphic of the MIT site below).

Doing it this way, when I click on one of the above links, I am able to give my students several choices in how they might view the lecture (shown below).

My course is based on the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC) and the free online HippoCampus content.  Because this MIT web site had the traditional naming of the topics, as well as the traditional ordering, it made it easy to link specific videos into my course at appropriate locations. 

My course as originally supplied, has its own set of videos, as well as examples, and practice problems.  After the material has been presented, students take a Self Check Quiz over what they learned, I use the Self Check Quiz solely as a practice area.  But following the Self Check Quiz is the real Quiz that becomes part of their grade.  I wanted my students to do the Self Check right after they had gone through the original material.  But then I felt that after the Self Check would be a good time to give them the opportunity to also see a second, but somewhat different presentation of the same material.  If they choose to watch the MIT lecture, my expectation is that this would help them on the Quiz. Below is a graphic of the slotting into my course:

Before leaving this topic, I also want to add a more general link to the MIT content.  Here they give more details of what all is on their site that pertains to physics.  I've circled in green the course title of the material I'm linking in as enhancement/supplemental materials to my AP Physics C - Mechanics course.

 

The MIT materials, as you should expect, is written, selected, and presented at a level that targets the average MIT student.  That makes it a notch above what an average AP level course would be taught at, and that's OK.  We still have students in our classes that can benefit from this as an enrichment/supplemental activity.

Linking the MIT Physics Lectures into My Online AP Physics Course

One of the changes I'm making in my online AP Physics C course this year, in keeping with my previous blog suggesting that you should try to improve your teaching and/or course each year, is to create links in my course to other related quality content on the Internet.  As a physics student at the college level in the 1960s, I remember seeing a 16 mm film from the The Feynman Lectures on Physics series.  I expect it would have been presented to us in an evening enrichment session rather than used directly in our physics classroom; we didn't spend our physics classes watching movies. 

I had never seen anybody that could talk about physics the way Richard Feynman could. I thoroughly enjoyed watching his films and seeing the additional insights that Feynman could pull out of the topic; insights that I was not getting as I attended class, read the textbook, and did my homework.  His lectures were both helpful and entertaining, and I in no way am I indicating that my college instructors weren't doing an excellent job.  There aren't going to be more than a handful of people in the entire USA that can present the material like Richard Feynman did.

A few years back, MIT adopted the policy that they would make all of their course content freely available on the Internet.  I had made excursions out to their site over the past few years, but I never found quite what I wanted.  Last spring their site came up in a search I was doing and their site seemed better organized than it had been on my previous visits.  So in April I sent an email to my students that there was an MIT lecture on Ampere's Law on the Internet.  Ampere's Law is a rather abstract topic, and I thought the video lecture would be helpful to my students, so I added it and treated it as an enrichment activity.

This year I'm linking the MIT lectures directly into my online Illinois Virtual School AP Physics C course, and now I'll explain why. I had one recalcitrant student from the Chicago area, that I had a heck of a time getting any homework out of and getting him to attend the online screen shares.  Every week for most of the semester I had been sending updates to the student, the parent, and the school indicating that the student had an F going in the class.  I had been told by the student's local school that the student had all kinds of ability, that he was planning on attending MIT, and that he had already been accepted at MIT.  I couldn't have gotten into MIT, but that didn't diminish my willingness to give the F if I didn't receive the work

It turns out that just I was emailing the link to the MIT lecture on Ampere's Law to my students, this student was visiting the MIT campus.  Below is part of the Email exchange I had with this student after I sent the link to the MIT web site.  My April 25 email struck a chord with him!

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From: [Student's name removed]

Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2009 10:17 AM

To: Tom Anderson

Subject: Re: The MIT Open Course Web site

Hi Mr. Anderson,

You can actually download all the physics lectures through iTunes for free and use it either on the computer or an iPod (and don't have to rely on You Tube). I actually downloaded these already too.

Sincerely,

[Student's name removed]

On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Tom Anderson  wrote:

Hi Folks,

As I've been searching for some other materials on the Internet this morning, I tracked back further on the MIT web site where I had found the video on Ampere's Law that I sent earlier today.

I have found the videos presented by MIT correspond almost chapter by chapter with what we have studied this year.

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In the next blog I will give the web site that I have been using to get to the MIT Physics lectures, and also talk about how I'm linking them into my online course.  I will also email the student above and see how it is going for him at MIT, I can't guarantee that I will get a response, but I will let you know in the next blog if I get a response.

Changes I'm making to AP Physics C this year.

In the last blog, I talked about the idea of the "10% Solution", referring to the idea that to improve your teaching/courses you should try to change about 10% of what you do each year. I remember reading about an employer who said he gets applications where the person says "I have have 20 years of experience", and it would have been more correctly stated if they had said "I have 1 year of experience, and I have experienced it 20 times". The 10% solution can prevent this.

This year in my AP Physics C class, I'm changing (or adding) three main components. The first of these is feedback on quiz questions. The original course did not have feedback on the questions in the quizzes. When a student finished a multiple choice quiz question, he would know the answer was for example "A", but had no other feedback supplied. I had always told my students that if they had questions in the online quizzes that they couldn't figure out after they had seen the correct answer to the multiple choice question, they should email me and I would provide additional explanation. Unfortunately, the reality was that there were not many of the students who would take the time to do that.

Since I had worked all of the problem myself when I first taught the course, I had solutions. The problem was that they were in my three ring binder, and that didn't help the students much. In replying to a student's email request regarding a particular question, in the past I would write up that particular solution and send it back as an email reply. This year, I am scanning all of my solutions for each individual quiz into a pdf file, and then I use a screen capture utility where I pull off one solution at a time, and paste that solution into the "feedback" box provided in the online quizzing program. It's not fancy, but it sure takes a lot less time than typing the math out for each solution to each question, or responding to requests by students on a question by question basis. Pasted below, as an example, is what I have captured and pasted into the "feedback" area for an individual quiz question.

I do think that making this change in my course will help my students. Using this method I can supply "feedback" like this for a 15 question quiz in about 30 minutes. If I were to try to type up the solutions, it would probably take about three hours. I'm planning to do this for all of the Quizzes and Self-Check Quizzes in my course over the duration of the school year.

Below is an unsolicited email I got back from a student after he hit the first quiz where I had made this change, there had been a Self-Check Quiz ahead of this that the student had taken that didn't have the change made in it yet, so it was clear to the student that something had changed.

From: [Student Name] [mailto:name@sbcglobal.net]
Sent: Friday, September 18, 2009 7:51 AM
To: Anderson, Thomas
Subject: [Student Name]-Quizzes

Hi,

Thank-you for posting the questions and answers to the first quiz, but I was wondering whether you could do the same thing with all the other quizzes, so that I know where I went wrong.

Thanks,

[Student Name]

In the next blog, I'll move on to the other changes I'm making in my AP Physics C course this year.

The 10% Solution

Ah! A summer off!

I know that there are a lot of people in the private sector that envy us teachers during June, July, and August; not so much during the rest of the year. The great teachers I know are usually individuals who are interested in so many varied things, that if they didn't have three months in the summer to explore them they would go crazy.

Believe it or not, a welcome summer vacation activity for me is to attend a week long AP conference. Two years ago I was able to attend a week long AP Calculus AB conference in Connecticut and a week after that attend a week long AP Physics C conference in Denver. I enjoyed meeting with and observing some very good teachers 25 to 30 years younger than myself, teachers that were both knowledgeable in their subject matter and enthusiastic about teaching.

As we start the new school year, if you are a teacher, I hope you are thinking about what you will do differently this year to improve on the good job you did last year. A few years back I had the opportunity to be part of a team of mathematics teachers, working on behalf of the University of Northern Iowa, that were involved with a grant to provide professional development to the math teachers that teach on our military bases around the world. About seventy-five teachers that teach for the Department of Defense would come to the Iowa campus for a week in the summer, and the UNI staff would work with them during that week. Then at one point during the school year we would travel to their schools to team teach and work with as many of them as we could in their own classroom on the military bases. In my case the bases I visited were in Germany and Japan.

Throughout that process Jack Wilkinson, who directed the project for UNI, stressed a concept he called the "10% Solution". The "10% Solution" refers to trying every year to change 10% of what you do in the classroom to improve your teaching and the classroom experience. While I think I probably had done that during most of my years of face-to-face teaching, I never had heard it expressed as elegantly as it was with the simple phrase "The 10% Solution".

In two weeks, I'll post a blog talking about the changes I'm making in my online courses for the 2009-2010 school year.

iLabs - Remotely Controlled Science Labs from Northwestern and MIT

Those of you who teach an AP science course online know the frustration of trying to meet the College Board's lab requirement that the labs for your course must be "wet labs" as opposed to "dry labs". "Dry labs" is a term used for labs such as those that would be a simulation done on a computer, often done over the Internet. During the year I included in the blog some of my favorite online simulation, these were activities that I felt were very beneficial for helping students understand the material they were studying.

HELLO NORTHWESTERN AND MIT! Northwestern and MIT have an NSF grant to produce nine Internet based labs where students work with REAL EQUIPMENT, but they do so remotely over the Internet. This year I had the opportunity to be one of the early teacher testers of the first lab they have brought up. This first lab uses a radioactive Strontium-90 sample located in Australia, and students can take measurements of the amount of radiation given off from this sample at various distances from the sample. Try doing that as a wet lab in your high school classroom and you won't be teaching long!

The science behind the lab focuses on how rapidly the level of radiation from a point source falls off with distance. To increase the student level of interest, they pose the questions "Am I frying my brain with my cell phone?" Then the fall off with distance of the radioactive radiation from a Strontium-90 source is used to model the rate that electromagnetic radiation from a point source would fall off at.

When I submitted my course syllabus for AP Physics C, it was initially rejected because I was making use of "virtual labs - simulations" for some of the labs that went with various units. I wrote the lab portion of my curriculum over to only using "wet labs" in order to satisfy the AP Audit committee. In the original rejection the College Board had written:

"The panel that reviewed the submitted labs found examples of virtual schools' labs that provide a college-level lab experience for their students. However, there is insufficient evidence in your course's case that the learning experiences provided by your virtual labs meet the goals identified in the National Research Council’s America’s Lab Report."

I asked the Audit Committee to please share with me some examples of the virtual schools' labs that did meet their requirement. Despite numerous emails, phone calls, and discussions with College Board representatives at national conventions, I never did get from AP Central a single example of a virtual lab that meets their requirements.

Below I'm going to paste write ups from three of my Illinois Virtual HS students in Calculus II that did the radiation iLab experiment. The first post is from Jacob, a senior at a high school in Illinois who took AP Calc AB as a Junior. The second post is from Max, a sixth grader in Illinois. I meet Max a year ago when he was in 5th grade, he took AP Calculus AB from me as a 5th grader and scored a 5 on the AP exam. The third post (it is still coming in) is from Joe, a high school senior who is an Illinois resident but spent the past two years in Vietnam because his parents were working there. Joe is flying across the Pacific to day as I post this, he is on his way back from Vietnam (as I expect his write up is).

I will be watching to see if the College Board is prepared to say that labs using real equipment from Northwestern and MIT, taken by students like these, won't meet their lab requirements. I think it's time we look for ways to provide a meaningful education to these students, and I invite the College Board to join me, my students, Illinois Virtual High School, Northwestern, and MIT in that venture.

The home page for the iLabs project is at http://ilabcentral.org/ .

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From Jacob - 12th grader in Illinois taking Calculus II

Radiation from Cell Phones

Recently I was part of a lab that was taking a look at the effects of cell phone radiation on the body. Specifically, our lab focused on the effect distance has on radiation. We were allowed control over a Geiger counter that was monitoring a sample of radioactive strontium-90. We could change the distance between the sample and the counter. I used distances of 15 millimeters, 25 millimeters, 35 millimeters, and 45 millimeters. I did ten trials, where the counter would take a reading at each distance and then report the totals to me. I then charted all of these values compared with the distances, and I got this:

(Click on any of the graphs to get enlarged copies.)

As you can see for each trial, there seems to be a general rule. Next, I took the average of all the values of each distance and came up with a single chart of the averages.

The next step was to try and find an equation that matched this curve. For our lab, we tried a linear function, an exponential function, and a power function. We then compared these graphs to the average to see which function best fit the rule.

Each function was given an R^2 value. This value measures how closely the estimated function fits the given information. The closer R^2 is to 1, then the closer that function fits. The function that had the R^2 value closest to 1 for my graph was the power function, with a function value of y = 26818 x^(-1.4841). What this means is that as the distance increases, the value of y, or the particle count, will continue to decrease at a predictable rate. With this information, we can make the following statements in addition to the facts already established about cell phones and radiation:

· The more distance between a cell phone and a cell tower, the more radiation emitted between the phone and the tower.

· After the initial connection is made between the cell tower and the phone, the amount of radiation being emitted is decreased.

· The closer the phone is to the person while this connection is being established, the more exposure that person will receive.

· Wireless headsets are another source of radiation, but wired headsets do not emit radiation of any kind.

After analyzing these statements, the following precautions can be taken to ensure safety:

1. When first placing a call, do not hold the phone directly up to your head. Instead, wait until the phone begins to ring to hold it up to your ear.
2. Do not use wireless headsets. While the amount of radiation being emitted is extremely minimal, it is still safer to use either a wired headset or no headset at all.
3. Place calls in urban areas. With the closer proximity to cell towers, the phone has to put out less radiation to establish a connection.
4. Texting or other forms of short messaging is safer than making calls. Simply sending a message requires less radiation than establishing a connection for a phone call.

Hopefully this post will be helpful in promoting proper cell phone usage.

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From Max - 6th grader from Illinois taking Calculus II

Radiation from Cell Phones

Cell phones do emit radiation. The gadget uses electro-magnetic microwaves to communicate with the cell phone tower. If you want to reduce the risk of cell phones, there are a couple of things you can do. You could use speaker phone instead of talking directly into the phone. In our experiment it was shown that the radiation level from a radioactive sample is modeled by d^(-k) where d is distance and k is 2. This was done by measuring the radioactivity from a Strontium-90 source at different distances using a Geiger counter. I then plotted the data and added best-fit curves. Here is a plot of my data.

Another way is to text people instead of calling them. This helps because the phone is much farther away from your head. Also, the time where there is the most radiation is at the beginning of a call. At this time, you could avoid keeping your head close to the phone. Or, you could wear a lead suit, but then you will die of over-heating.

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From Joe, an Illinois resident who completed his Junior and Senior year in high school as a home schooled student in Vietnam.

Radiation from Cell Phones 

Research shows, by the end of 2009, half the world’s population will be using cell phones (Source A). This extraordinary statistic means it is now more important than ever for users to be informed of the safety risks extensive cell phone use can bring, and even more importantly how these risks can be lessened or avoided.

While the risks involved with using a cell phone are extremely small in the first place, there are health issues that can be caused by the radiation from the cell phone which include tumors and growths (Source B). However these issues have only been found in those who use their cell phones extensively, such as heavy use for ten or more years. While the average user generally doesn’t have much to worry about, it is important to be informed.

Radiation from a cell phone, firstly, is not what most people associate it with. Radiation is “the process in which energy is emitted as particles or waves” (Source C) There are two types of radiation, ionizing and non-ionizing respectively. Ionizing radiation is the dangerous type of radiation that comes from sources such as plutonium. Non-ionizing radiation includes radio waves, visible light, and cell phone transmissions. However it Non-ionizing radiation can still have long term negative effects, and therefore as with all radiation it should be avoided when possible.

I conducted a study on a Strontium-90 sample, which is radioactive, to get a better understanding of how radiation works and to see how radiation exposure can be reduced.

Since distance is the best way to lessen the exposure of any radiation, the tests I conducted are strictly of that nature. I set up an experiment to test the radiation levels of the Strontium-90 sample at 15, 25, 35, 45, 55, 65, 75, and 85 millimeters away using a Geiger counter. I ran each of these tests for five seconds. The graph below is the data I collected from this experiment.

As you can see from the graph, as the distance increases the amount of “hits” or simply put the amount of radiation decreased. Anyone who has taken math through Algebra might recognize this plot as a power decay graph. And they would be right. As it turns out as the distance you put between you and the radiation source increases the amount of radiation you receive is a power decay graph. This is shown in the graph below.

So in light of these findings there a few steps you can take to decrease the amount of radiation you receive when you use your cell phone.

1. The amount of radiation emitted by your phone is greatest when you first make a call (this is because the cell phone works at maximum power when first used in order that it may connect to the tower, once connected it will decrease the radiation emission depending on how far you are away from the tower in order to conserve its battery) therefore one way to decrease the amount of radiation your head receives is to remove the phone from your head until it is connected.
2. Use text messaging. When sending a text there is no need to put the phone to your head, and it also does not work as hard to send the message out, as it only needs a short burst of radiation to send the message.
3. Use a speaker phone or hands free, this again removes the phone from your head, greatly reducing the amount of radiation you receive.
4. Last but not least, use your phone in moderation. When you don’t have to use your phone for long periods of time, then don’t.

As stated earlier, the amount of radiation you receive when using a cell phone is minimal and does not do much short term damage. The only problems occur when you use your cell phone heavily for long duration of time, such as ten years. In conclusion, cell phones are safe, and just as anything else in life, need to be used in moderation.

Source A: http://www.mobiledia.com/news/43104.html

Source B: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/the-well-podcast-answers-to-your-cellphone-questions/

Source C: http://dictionary.reference.com