Meet Your Brain: Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
Professor Bruce Hood explores the human brain in this series of lectures from the Royal Institution in London. The trailer is below and in time all the lectures should appear on the RI Channel Website here (Vimeo channel here).
If you can access BBC iPlayer, you can keep up with the lectures here.
The theme of the 2010 Lecture series by Mark Miodownik was “Size Matters”, again relevant to the IB Biology course and available to watch in full from the RI Channel website.
UNICEF Photos of the Year 2011
Each year, UNICEF and GEO Magazine host a photography competition which aims to highlight the living conditions of children around the world. As teachers and students in the privileged setting of international schools and the IB World, we can be isolated from the realities of the lives of those around us. In many cases our schools and communities are oases of luxury, with poverty outside the school gates.
This photo, “Waste Export to Africa” by Kai Löffelbein, was this year’s winner. It links closely to my last post about the story of electronics. Do we ever really think about the final destination of our high-impact goods? In many places children are forced to work on piles of smashed-up and dangerous electronic goods, trying to recover precious metals and components.
"Waste Export to Africa" by Kai Löffelbein. Hosted at the Guardian (click for gallery)
For more photos of children’s situations around the world, visit the UNICEF Photo Essays page. They might inspire you to take your own photos or kick start some action in your own school. They also have a photo of the week page.
Hunting for the Higgs
Do you know what’s going on at the Large Hadron Collider right now? Let’s have a look in their canteen…
Or perhaps we’d better check out the news…
Find out more about the search for the Higgs boson (and what it all means) on this week’s Guardian Science Podcast.
Here’s an explanation of the Higgs field:
And this is where the Higgs field and the boson fit into the Standard Model:
World’s Fastest Cell Race
World Cell Race 2011 - click to go to the website.
Here’s a bit of fun, with an underlying serious purpose (the video is sped-up over 24 hours):
Find out more about the World Cell Race at the Nature News Blog or the World Cell Race website.
Video: Word Citation Tool to make life easier
On the final day of MoVember (please donate), here is a short Movember-themed tutorial video on how to make the citation manager in Word work for you. There are more tutorial and lab videos on my YouTube Channel.
Jetman Races Jets in the Alps
Yves ‘Jetman’ Rossy, the first man to cross the English Channel with a jetpack, races his jetpack and flies in formation with two jet planes over the Swiss alps. A neat little video and an excuse to test the VodPod Button to embed a Guardian video to WordPress.com. Read the main story on the Guardian website.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Here’s another wingsuit video in Norway:
Using YouTube to make quick lab videos
I made these lab videos easily using my iPhone (other smartphones will do the same), and sending the video directly to YouTube. YouTube’s editing tools make it easy to annotate the video, so pop-ups appear to explain what is happening and highlighting areas for students’ focus. This is ideal where you want to record, upload and annotate videos quickly and easily.
There are four great things about producing videos this way:
- With GoogleApps, all students and teachers have a YouTube account, which they can sync with their phone or have ready on their laptop. They could also record the video from their laptop webcam.
- If videos are pretty straightforward there is no need to spend time importing into iMovie or MovieMaker, editing and then uploading to YouTube.
- You can make quick edits and corrections to annotations on the ‘live’ video. You don’t need to re-upload the video.
- YouTube also has an online video editor for making more complete edits and putting clips together.
This next one was made very quickly and uses the YouTube video editor tools to mash two short clips together. By this point I’d got hold of a retort stand and created a super-adjustable iPhone camera triunipod – patent pending and soon to be available at an exaggerated cost from the Apple store ;>
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Applications beyond lab videos:
Students could make their own explainers or video clips for class, such as lab report methods, annotated sports performance clips or notes on a speech or presentation they (or a peer) have given. Teachers can use it (like I have above) to make vodcasts for students who can then repeat or look back at work in class. In this example, students have carried out these reactions in class, but I will be away the following class. This gives them an opportunity to see the reactions again with some annotations to help them through the theory work.
Limitations
- Having a lot of students online uploading at the same time can impact bandwidth.
- Students may need help in setting up their school YouTube accounts and assigning permissions and privacy settings – you would need to be aware of appropriate student-created content.
- Although quick and easy to use, it is unlikely to look polished enough for a publications class or professional piece of work. It will be fine for simple tasks focusing on content or explanation.
If you want even more power to edit on the phone, I like this free app called Splice. It has enough features to get you putting clips and photos together, with transitions and themes, and will upload directly to YouTube (though it can take a while to render).
One Meeelion Views on i-Biology.net – Whoo!
Thanks for the support of the site!
Link to my Movember profile.
It’s exciting to see how i-Biology has grown over the past few years, and to get feedback from students and teachers who are using the resources here from all over the world. As always, constructive comments are welcome and if you spot any errors or have suggestions for resources, please let me know.
If you want to show more support, please make a donation to either my Movember account or Biology4Good. Every little helps! All donations go to the charities.
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EDIT – Thanks to Danny Nicholson at the WhiteBoard Blog for the reminder that today is the 20th anniversary of the death of Freddie Mercury. Now there’s a man who could rock a moustache.
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