Yet more surprises marking exams … a question on friction … a number of answers began with

F = μ N

followed on the next line with

N = 6.02 x 1023 … Read more »

I’m in the middle of marking exams for a course and have had a few suprises.
It’s pretty common for students to interpret or tackle a question in a way you hadn’t foreseen, and this is fine, you err on the side of the student. What I’ve just realised is that you shouldn’t offer life tips as part of the question as the context can got spectacularly awry: Read more »

I recently acquired four physics textbooks and was shocked to discover that they cover exactly the same material in exactly the same way. Sure the diagrams are different and the problems are different, but not that different. Looking for something more original I started searching for stuff online…
Here’s two sites I’ve found that have collections of free textbooks: Read more »

Well, tried to use powerpoint 2007 to prepare some lectures today only to find a nasty surprise … ink support has taken a giant step backwards and is just about unusable. It seems that the intrepid programmers at Microsoft are colossally shortsighted and only see ink as useful for temporary annotations: you cannot select the ink by dragging a selection rectangle or using select-all, you’re reduced to clicking on each stroke. Ink can’t be grouped with non ink objects but must be treated separately… amazing how much this makes ink useless. Read more »

I’ve been using mindmaps as the main medium to present ideas in lectures for a couple of weeks. It’s an experiment and I’m still smoothing out some rough patches (If you’re one of my students reading this - yes you’re guinea pigs ;). The software I’m using MindManager Pro mainly because it is the only mindmapping software I have found that interacts nicely with a tablet and allows you to just write (instead of type) the content. Read more »

Check out this great set of video clips and explanations for classical mechanics:
http://www.physclips.unsw.edu.au/

I’ve been playing around in lectures borrowing ideas from Eric Mazur and really enjoying it. I inherited a bunch of clickers to use in lectures but unfortunately they require MS powerpoint to work and the software version I have doesn’t seem to be compatible with the latest powerpoint, sigh. Never mind, exit clickers… Read more »

Michael pointed out an interesting use of subversion in teaching. The technique lends itself nicely to monitor and give feedback on students writing a thesis too. Read more »