drew.burrett

Finally, I made time to play about more with the graph tools in ALBA. As suggested by Derek Walker in his helpful emails (see correspondence), I was using Excel unnecessarily. The tools in ALBA are equally as powerful and significantly easier to use.

Delighted at having learned a new skill, I also find myself feeling pretty dumb for not knowing about it already. I suppose that’s what comes of being largely self-taught, and learning as I go. 

The experieince made me ponder how the kids, and possibly colleagues, must feel sometimes. Surely gaining knowledge should be celebrated, it shouldn’t mean feeling daft for not having known in the first place. Am I reading too much into it?

Finally got my broadband connection going – many thanks to talktalk. Also got my wireless network set up at home – and it worked straight away!

No excuse for not getting more done now.

Going to try and play about with SCHOLAR over the weekend. Seminar at SETT show highlighted a lot of new features.

Just back from the SETT show/Glow mentoring events. It was great to put faces to names and meet the rest of the team.

Except for my laptop being mislaid by the concierge at the Holiday Inn, it was a very enjoyable couple of days.

Never having been to SETT, I had no idea what to expect, and I have come away very impressed by some of the technology on display.The seminars I attended were very informative and the freebies will be put to good use.

Oh, and the laptop turned up in the end, safe and sound. Result!

Apologies for the title of this posting, couldn’t help myself.

I got my SETT/Glow stuff through at the end of last week, finally got to watch my Glow DVD over the weekend.

I must say its got me quite excited, the opportunities and applications seem endless.

I got myself booked in for some seminars too – Arts Across the Curriculum, One Year On (as I was involved in the program in my last post)and TEST – Technology Enhanced Science Teaching on the Wednesday, with SCHOLAR: A Mini-SSDN? on Thursday.

I hope to get around a lot of the exhibitors, and have been told to grab as many freebies as possible by a colleague who has been in the past.

I got a reply from Derek Walker at djb microtech regarding the ALBA experiment I’d been trying to do.

It turns out my method was more or less correct, and that the calculation functions built into ALBA should have been up to doing the analysis. I used Excel so that I wouldn’t have to learn how to make ALBA do the same thing. I will learn when I find the time.

Derek confirmed that there are plans to add the experiment to the ALBA applications on the next disk, and has asked me to send him my data.

• The Pressure Law using ALBA Interfacing

Having made quite a bit of use of ALBA interfacing over the past few years, I found myself trying to do an experiment that isn’t on the appliation menu. I’ve often wondered about doing experiments that aren’t built into the software, as these entail using the ALBA investigator which I’d not tried before.

Basically you work out a group of settings to allow the interface to take measurements determined by you, which is pretty straight forward. But I found I had to manipulate the data after it had been captured.

Although there are some fairly powerful calculation functions built into the ALBA software, for ease of use (and as I’m more familiar and comfortable with it) I exported the data to Excel. After a bit of fiddling about I got the desired product.

This was all a bit labour intensive, and meant that I couldn’t show the final result to the class straight away – which is sort of the point of me using ALBA.

The final result did, however, turn out to be much more accurate than the alternative method the pupils used, and it took a fraction of the time to perform the experiment.

Perhaps I set it up badly, or missed something fundamental, but it’d be nice to be able to do the experiments ’striaght out of the box’.

I’m off now to email djb microtech – I’ll post any reply here when I get it.

Another new skill! Finally got files mentioned in last posting uploaded. Had created a page called ‘Files’, but this refused to work (maybe there’s already something called ‘Files’ in the background).

Hence I have created ‘My Work’, which I’ll add to as I go along.

Please feel free to send comments.

Been doing the odd bit of ALBA interfacing – two pressure sensing experiments with H Physics, measuring the speed of sound with S2 Science.

Attempts to encourage AH Physics pupils to use SCHOLAR more have had varied success – only one convert, the others can’t stand the way the online assessments work; especially the format for numerical answers.

Put together a couple of powerpoints for Light topic in S2. One is a proper experiment, the other a bit of a parlour trick (but with a scientific explanantion). I’ll put them into the ‘files’ section (if I can make it work) for anyone who might be interested.

Not had much chance to look at the SETT program of events, but looking forward to booking my seminars when I do.