KSTF Summer Meeting 2008

I just got back from the KSTF Summer Meeting with all the fellows, and while it was amazing for many different reasons, ultimately what matters is how this will affect my classroom. There are three major things that I’m taking away from this meeting, two of which came unexpectedly after all the official sessions were over, after the post meeting games were played and I decided by chance to go to the bar.

Take away piece #1 from April Luehman’s session on Blogging for the Classroom
I’m starting class blogs.
Yes. Blogs – plural. One for each, and inspired by April’s model, I’d like to have the onus of authorship distributed to the students. “We are co-constructing a physics textbook for the world” as April likes to say. So every day a different student will be responsible for blogging the day’s notes, and jotting down some notes as to what we did. Then students will be required to participate through commenting at least 2x a month either by asking or answering a question. Parents will have access to this but not authorship rights. And all comments have to be approved by me, the admin, before they actually get posted to reduce spam.

Prior to students blogging, they’ll need to sign a safety and civility contract - cause we don’t want them posting last names, or non-relevant material. I’ve stolen April’s contract to base mine off of.

I requested a site through April, which will be free which includes unlimited storage space and access to surveys (which is usually NOT free), so I can do online homework. She hasn’t sent me the approval yet, but I’m excited to get started setting that up.

We need to be teaching the next generation responsible online conduct, and so what better way than … in school! Likewise, this model of blog use is very postmodern in that the students are both the teachers and the learners, and the motivation for learning physics comes through personal relationships.

Other examples of class blogs: Accelerated 8th Grade Blog, PIB Physical Science

Take away piece #2 from Glen Botha of San Francisco
I’m adopting Glen’s electricity project
Glen said that he bought something called the Kilowatt on ebay for $20.00 which you can put around the electric cord of any appliance and it will tell you how much current is flowing through it. He was then able to determine at his own apartment that he pays $7 a month for his tevo, and that its standby mode doesn’t really change the rate of electricity use.

He listed every single appliance in his house, its wattage and an approximation of how many hours it’s on per day or per month, and then calculated what his electric bill should have been, and then compared it to what his electric bill actually was.

Then. He made his students go through that process: list every appliance, its wattage and hours of use, and predict your electric bill and then compare to the actual bill.

He did the same for his gas bill, which was $10-12 every month, even for months during which he was gone all month. His bill never changed! So he called them up to ask why that was, and they said it was probably he pilot light. So he researched pilot lights and found out that the amount of therms required to run a pilot light amounted to approximately $11/month. He had found it! They suggested he have someone come turn off the pilot light since in SF, CA they never need heat (it’s not connected to their hot water). The guy came over and instead suggested he cancel is heat – and so that is what he did.

Through doing this project with his class, Glen’s students discovered that for some households their xBox360 cost them more than their refrigerator per month. He said one student started limiting his play to a couple hours a week, motivated not by his mother, or that it’s not good for him, but because his family was really poor and it cost them some quantifiable amount of money to play. He found out that some students who were paying $400/month in electric bills were eligible for a more cheaper rate and was able to lower it to $80/month. He did have to get parents to sign a waiver to release their electric bill and he only had one parent object, so he gave the student his own apartment to analyze.

Take away piece #3 also from Glen Botha of San Francisco
I’d like to further develop Glen’s idea of informing consumers.

What if… What IF! Oi! What if it was commonplace to the informative technology currently found in hybrids in other types of regular fuel cars? People would be able to see that they get significantly better gas mileage at 65 mph than 80 mph. People would see that accelerating rapidly wastes gas, and we could probably reduce gas consumption by a measurable amount simply by making that information immediately available to people.

Likewise, why is my electric meter on the outside of my house in a unit of measure that is not easily interpreted by the layperson? What if instead we put electric meters on the inside of houses and have them read out in dollars per minute or per hour – something that means more to the average person. And they’d be able to see rate of their consumption change by exactly some dollar amount when they shut off a light or unplugged their tevo or turned on their toaster.

Does this device exist? oh yes, yes it does. But why haven't I heard of it. Perhaps I should get one, eh?
Bottom line: Information Is Power.