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Credit: ESO/L Calcado

The story

Another space post from me this week – seems those astronomers are hard at work at the moment.

This story comes via the European southern Observatory (ESO), where astronomers have found a Solar System 127 light years away which is the most similar to our own discovered to date.  They have confirmed the presence of 5 planets that orbit the snappily-named star HD10180, and have evidence of two more.

They have been able to gather a conclusive set of data on the planets which includes their distance to the star and mass.  They calculate mass by looking at how the light from the star is ‘wobbled’ by the effects of the planet’s gravity (presumably the larger the mass of the planet, the greater it’s gravitational pull on the light and the bigger the wobble).  This technique is known as ‘Doppler spectroscopy’.

Teaching ideas:

Aspects of this discovery can be used with classes ranging from KS3-KS5.

With KS3 and GCSE students you can pique their interest be asking them to consider if life might exist on any of these planets.  HD10180 is very similar to our Sun and one of the planets discovered is only slightly bigger than Earth.  Does this mean that aliens could have evolved on this planet, or is there more to it than that?  The answer, of course is that there is a strict set of rules that have to be followed if life is ever going to get a foothold.

Scientists think that the planet has to have a surface temperature that will allow water, an essential solvent, to be in a liquid form.  Life evolved on Earth because it exists at the right distance from the Sun for this to be possible – it is in the so-called ‘Goldilocks zone’.

Teaching resource:

I have expanded on this idea on this PowerPoint presentation.  Students are introduced to the new Solar System and given facts about the Goldilocks zone, data about the Sun, HD10180 and planets in both our System and the newly discovered one.  They are asked to use the data to work out if life could exist on any of the planets, and explain their reasoning.  This could be done as a group activity as it lends itself well to discussion.

They should find out that most of the planets are larger than Earth so probably are gaseous.  The planet that is around the same size is very close to the star, and as it is hotter than the Sun, this would mean that it is far too hot for life to exist on.

The planetary data can also be found on this excel spreadsheet which would be useful for GCSE classes who can use it to see trends and draw graphs.  They can be asked to see if there is any correlation between distance from star and temperature or year length and then work out data on these for the newly-discovered planets’.

This story highlights the amazing discoveries that astronomers are making with technological advances in telescopes – for more examples please take a look at the other posts on astronomy.

Weblinks

Video on the newly discovered Solar System and how it was discovered

Information on Doppler Spectroscopy

Related posts:

1. Most massive (not biggest) star discovered
2. The incredible shrinking Moon
3. A shining use of smart materials

I finally got round to reading my August / Sepetember copy of the GTCS Teaching Scotland Magazine today. I was deligted to see a piture of my good friend Mandeep Atwel on the Microsoft feature on page 23 talking about TakingITGlobal (who she now works full time for).

TakingITGlobal.org is a social network that connects people (aged 13 - 30 and their teachers) to the global issues that affect us all. It enables a collaborative learning community which provides young people with access to global opportunities, cross-cultural connections and meaningful participation in decision-making.

If you have not heard of TakingITGlobal.org there website is worth checking out as it offers awide range of opertunities to support Global Citizenship Education.

You can read an online version of the GTCS article here on the Teaching Scotland website.

We are organising an event for supply teachers in London this week – especially for those starting out in this career this term.

Tuesday, 24th August. 6.30- 8.30pm. Borough Bar, London Bridge.

There will be free drinks, kindly sponsored by Protocol, and talks from a couple of experienced supply teachers about how they found work and impressed the schools.

If you’d like to come, RSVP to our Facebook Group

A social historian looking back on 20th century education in the West might identify two major themes that ebb and flow through the decades. One is authoritarianism vs individuality – a pretty consistent shift from the former to the latter – and the other is an emphasis on teaching facts vs teaching ideas and techniques.

Giving children the tools to find knowledge for themselves has some sound pedagogy; the days of rote learning (and corporal punishment for that matter) are well behind us. But the extreme opposite essentially holds that we don’t need to know facts at all in an age when limitless information is only a click away on Google. The Battle of Bannockburn and the phyla of Nematodes are equally irrelevant to a modern student with Wikipedia to hand, so goes the theory.

It is in this climate that the new Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) was developed since 2002. Consultation and committees have produced something that replaces a specific and important historical battle with

I can discuss the motives of those involved in a significant turning point in the past and assess the consequences it had then and since

and learning about worms with

I can report and comment on current scientific news items to develop my knowledge and understanding of topical science.

The real issue for teachers is that assessing whether students have achieved the required levels of the new curriculum is much harder than some factual test. Does the ability to ‘comment on current scientific news items’ require the incoherence of your average YouTube comment, or the erudition of Stephen Pinker?

And ironically all that delay involved in consulting the community has meant the Secondary school CfE launch comes at a time when the tide is turning back towards learning facts. The Core Knowledge curriculum, adopted by many US states, now looks to be the favoured route for Primary curriculum change in England. Core Knowledge’s popularity stems from its clarity, not modernity – it was devised in the early 1970s, at the height of the relativist revolt against facts. It really does get specific: for year 8, students must know that ‘At room temperature, sound travels through air at about 340 meters per second’ and that the Latin for year is ‘annus’.

Teachers know what they have to teach, and precisely what should be imparted when. While the prescribed books for English may not prove to everyone’s taste, the maths and science content is uncontroversially what students need to know. Far from stifling creativity, the focus of innovation (as with Teachable’s content) is then on the how to teach and engage.

Parents can also follow their child’s progress more easily when topics are prescribed. Plus for a teaching resource library, such as Teachable, it is SO much easier for people to find materials linked to commonly known topics and events than abstract concepts.

Curriculum for Excellence might be the very latest, but in the broad sweep of educational history I suspect it will be seen as the last hurrah for ‘develop curiosity and understanding’ versus teaching identifiable facts.

I was struck a BBC forum this morning asking whether users would be prepared to pay for an online edition of The Times newspaper. Admittedly, there is some bias as readers of the BBC news site are likely to be strongly in favour of free online news.

Still, the naive assumption of 99% of the posts that widespread, high-quality news will still be available if no-one pays is astounding.

Not a single comment here has pointed out that this is not about greed on behalf of News Corp; it’s about survival.

Every mainstream newspaper in the UK is loosing money at an increasing rate. At current projections the Independent, Evening Standard and most local newspapers will be close down by the end of 2010 (even with the cash injected by Lebedev). The Guardian, Times and Telegraph may not last 3 years without a new income stream. That’s because few people click on the online adverts, and all that writing, photographing, editing and web development still costs money.

So if the posts here are to be believed, and users baulk at paying for the online edition the options for getting British news in 5 years time there will be a stark choice:
(a) source news from a haphazard stream of opinionated bloggers
(b) rely on a monopoly output from the BBC (which will likely decrease due to cuts)

There won’t be a newspaper to buy at your local store.

And I feel strongly because the same argument applies to educational content in the longer term. Yes, a group of enthusiastic amateurs have always and will always publish their educational ideas for free, but if teachers want a reliable, high-quality range of resources they have to pay for it online.

Last year I ran a history project with a small group of Year 6 children. This project looked at the Gunpowder Plot and specifically the events following Guy Fawkes’ capture. The idea of this project was to explore how web 2:0 tools could be used in history lessons. I wanted the children to be able to research the events and then use the Internet to present their research in a variety of ways.

One of the most successful parts of the project was the Twitter account of Robert Catesby. Catesby was the mastermind of the plot and the children tweeted his story as he fled from London following the plots discovery. The children researched the events and wrote out their tweets before scheduling them for delivery using hootsuite. The tweets ran from the morning of the 5th November until the final standoff at Holbeche House on the 8th.

The project gained many followers and proved very popular. It was very exciting watching the messages arrive especially as I did not know exactly what the children ahd written or when they had scheduled them to be sent.

I’m hoping to re-run the project this year but would like to make it even bigger and involve other schools. I have just spent the morning writing up the events of the Gunpowder Plot from various sources and would really like others to take on the roles of different plotters so that the full story can be told. I imagine several groups all tweeting as different members of the conspiracy all using a common hashtag so that people can follow the project.

Let me know if you would like to join the project – I imagine it would work better with a small group (ICT club) rather than a whole class.

Any suggestions or comments more than welcome.

At my last school I adapted four Shakespeare plays to be performed by Year 6 as their end-of-year assembly. The challenge of these adaptations was to tell the story in a way that could be understood easily whilst keeping to roughly 40 minutes. The plays we performed were Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Each production had to involve over 100 children. To achieve this we gave each of the Narrator’s lines to a different child. We also added songs and dance routines. The children were also responsible for all technical aspects of the performance.

I have just published the Macbeth adaptation through Lulu. com and made it available to download for free. I’m really hoping that someone will take the time to read the script and hopefully decide that they could use it with their class. I’d really appreciate any comments on the Lulu site as well.

Credit: Recycled island

The story:

Netherlands-based firm WHIM Architecture has announced plans to take all of the plastic waste currently floating around in the Pacific Ocean and turn it into an island the size of Hawaii.

This island will be the ideal destination for eco-tourists looking for a holiday on a fully sustainable, self-sufficient resort.  If they like it they can move in (or on) because this island will contain a city, make all of its own electricity and grow its own food (although this seems to be mainly seaweed based if you take a look at their website).

On a more serious note – the designers have highlighted its importance in being a place for ‘climate refugees’ to live on once climate change has made many areas of Earth inhabitable.

I’m personally not sure what to make of this.  It is in its very early stages – in fact the architects seem to be still figuring out if it would be possible and would it really be an eco-friendly project?

Teaching ideas:

© Copyright Doug Lee

One of the important points embedded into this project is the very real problem of plastic waste in our oceans.

Plastic does not biodegrade.  It just breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces.  The ‘plastic soup’ that is currently floating around in the Pacific covers an area twice as big as the US.

According to the UN Environment Programme, plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals as they mistake the plastic objects as food.  This has a risk to human health as well as the chemicals that fish eat end up on our plate.

The two videos below show the problem of plastic waste in the oceans and could be shown to students.  Hopefully this would motivate them to suggest potential solutions.  For a more organised activity – what about dividing the class up into groups and giving each of them a solution (developing biodegradable plastics, recycling, using alternatives to plastics, reusing plastics etc) which they have to research and present to the rest of the class as the ‘best’ solution.  This could be the basis of a good class debate.  Then the idea of the island could be shown to them – what do they think about this as a way of getting rid of the plastic in the ocean?

Alternatively, the island can be used when teaching about sustainability.  The website is very accessible and easily understood by students.  They can use it to research the ways the island will provide its own energy and food needs and discuss why the island would be classed as sustainable development.

Weblinks

Website about the island
News-story about the plastic soup in the Pacific
Interesting talk on the Great Pacific plastic trash island
Ocean debris turning Hawaiian beach ‘into plastic’  BBC news video

Related posts:

1. Exciting new biotechnology
2. What is the connection between custard and football?