PhysClips – Mechanics Animations and Much-Much More
While attending a STEM 2012 Conference in Beijing China I happened to attend a workshop about a Physclips project – it is a great resource for teaching physics created by our colleagues from the University of South Wales in Australia. I found it to be a great resources and I recommended it to my teacher-candidates… I hope this resource will be used not only in Australia, but all over the world… Well done! Browsing the resource made me think once again of the value of lectures in our undergraduate science education… Do we need more lectures or can we flip the classroom and use class time for other things rather than lecturing? How will these new technologies change how we teacher science? How do we judge if the resource has a pedagogical value or not? How should these resources be used in teaching… This made me think of many TED videos that are posted online and the students can access them for free. How can we used them in teaching and should we? My answer to these questions is – YES, we should use technology, but not to substitute it for face-to-face teaching, but to give the teachers an opportunity to discuss physics with the students and to create a very active classroom… the classroom where the students have a chance to try and figure things out instead of writing down the notes from the teacher’s lecture…