Motivation: This is Water

I now have about month of summer between me and what was without question the most challenging year of my teaching career. To put it bluntly: this year was emotionally exhausting, physically draining, and forced me to drastically lower the bar for what a successful, productive teaching day looked like. So, I'm writing this post at least in part to try to take a step back and wrap my head around what went on this year, and hopefully raise that ...

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Physics Class Website Template

The class website described here is one example of a successful site that seeks to maximize student access to useful resources while minimizing updates to the site itself. This website can be easily transferred to a site for use with another class, either by requesting a duplicate copy of the template site, or by applying any individual technique to a site that's already built. This is the second year that I've made heavy use of ...

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YouTube Frame by Frame

I've been looking for a while for a way to watch YouTube videos frame by frame - to encourage rough quantitative analysis of videos directly online without loading them into a video analysis program like Logger Pro. I've had some success with encouraging students to measure position by putting a ruler directly on their screen - but until a few days ago it was quite difficult to get useful clock reading measurements from the YouTube player. This ...

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Practicing Struggle at Home and in Class

Encouraging students to practice struggling has the potential to promote perseverance that can carry over into life pursuits unrelated to physics class. But the context in which this struggle takes place will influence whether students associate it with success or repeated failure, and this can have great implications for how they approach new challenges in the future. Since I first began teaching, I've tried to make "practicing struggle" an ...

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VideoLabs as Instructional Videos

Today I made a submission to an instructional video contest/program called EDU Guru, sponsored by YouTube, Google, and KhanAcademy (sorry... not gonna link those). Being somewhat of an instructional video skeptic, I tried to use this as an opportunity to illustrate the value of a genre of instructional video that would be less at odds with inquiry instruction. The video I submitted is here: There's also a companion video which shows the ...

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Instructional Resources in Programming

Khan Academy's new computer science platform is a refreshing deviation from the lecture-based curriculum resources previously offered by Khan, and has the potential to further encourage the exploration of programming as a tool for teaching creative problem solving. Khan Academy just unleashed a new computer science platform. As somewhat of a KA skeptic, I have to admit that I was doubtful when I got the news, but on first glance it seems like this ...

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Physics First

Any conversation about Physics First will tend to revolve around a few distinct motives, priorities, and assumptions. In order to communicate successfully about the benefits or limitations of inverting to a Physics First sequence, it's crucial to explicitly identify what we're bringing to the table in these conversations. I recently watched online a recording of a fantastic talk given at the recent AAPT conference by Dr. Philip Sadler, this ...

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