Using Blogs in Science Education

I knew I was going to be absent from school last Monday and felt a lot of anxiety about it because I missed several days a few weeks before to attend a conference.  Every day I miss with my AP students stresses me out so much because I have to get through a ridiculous amount of content in order to feel that my students at least have a shot at performing well on the AP exam in May.

So, the day before my planned absence I decided to prepare a lesson using Jing.  Jing is a free application that allows you to capture what you’re doing on your desktop and save it as a video on screencast.com.  Apparently, there are some other apps out there that do the same thing, but I’ve found Jing to be super easy.  It also allows you to capture and edit images (but I prefer Picnik for that).  Here are the two that I made for the day I was absent. The embed option doesn’t work on Edublogs so you’ll have to follow the links:

The students had practice problems to complete and I was worried they would not be able to figure them out without the background.  So, either the day would be wasted or I could use Jing and make it productive.

It took me about 30 minutes to make the two videos, but that was due to the fact that I was getting over a cold and couldn’t stop coughing!  So, I had to delete a couple of times and start over.  Jing only lets you record video for 5 minutes and so I used two for the lesson.  Any more lecturing than that and you lose your audience, so the 5 minute time limit actually helps you get to the main points quickly.

When I returned the students said they liked it, but thought it was a little weird.  None of their teachers had ever done anything like that and they found it odd at first.  However, they said it helped them complete the packets so I think it was worth it.