For those of us old enough to remember when whiteboards (as opposed to blackboards) were themselves the shiny new technology in schools, its sobering to think that we're now in an era where we have to consider the relative merits of virtual whiteboards. Google, zoom and Microsoft and others all have their offerings, I know, and all seem fine when we need a whiteboard online (though none of them can make my onscreen handwriting any better) but there is now also the option of Whiteboard.fi - Free online whiteboard for teachers and classrooms. This was introduced by Paul Nugent at the IoP Physics Hub event on Thursday night, (and was only one of the many interesting ideas shared there).
Whiteboards.fi not only allow you to work on, and share, a whiteboard on your own screen - but you can also set your whole class up with their own boards, and then have a look at all of the work that they are producing - live, as they produce it. The free version has its limitations but looks functional enough. It would have its difficulties for students on poor laptops and/or phones, but there are certainly situations where I intend to try it out.
Also shared was JavaLab - a set of interactive simulations I hadn't come across before
And we had Sean Foley reminding us of the benefits of mathsphysics.com - and its suite of simulations of the Leaving Cert Mandatory experiments (that may well be needed more than ever this year)
And David Keenahan showed us that the BT Young Scientist Exhibition remains open to visit (virtually, of course) for the rest of the month.
All within a tightly managed 45 minutes on a Thursday evening. Sure what else would be doing? Find out more here: Forum – Teaching Physics in Ireland – TalkPhysics. And many thanks to David for hosting and organising the whole thing.
And lastly, for anybody interested, I've uploaded a few new PowerPoints on an introduction to electricity, including Coulomb's Law, Electric fields and Electric Potential. Available here: electricity | PhysicsResourceBank.