I recently discovered Juno, an interesting online program for creating and publishing lessons, assignments and assessments. Terie Engelbrecht has a great blog post on using Juno for assessments.
Since break interrupted our current unit, I’ve been exploring using Juno to create a review for my students. Today, I tried to convert it into a mini mobile “textbook” for the rest of the unit. I found it refreshingly easy to do.
Creating Lessons
Click “New Slide” for a content page. This can be plain text, or you can insert a media file. Juno will automatically create multiple pages as needed to optimize viewing on devices of all sizes. Students can also adjust font size from their device.
If you click “New Question, you can select from several question types. 
If you click “Media,” you can insert an image, audio file, or video via upload or web link. You can also incorporate media files into the question and the answer choices. It is easiest to add videos via a youtube or vimeo link to ensure browser compatibility, and faster opening. You can also type in a regular web address to create a hyperlink.
You can see the (limited) formatting options by clicking “Format.”
Once you’ve created multiple slides or questions, you can reorganize by dragging and dropping.
I find it easiest to create a separate lesson document for each topic. These lessons can then be organized into a bundle.
Bundling your Documents
To create a textbook bundle, Click “Create New,” and select “bundle” as the document type. 
There’s not much there yet.
Click “Add Document” to add previously created lessons or assignments to the bundle.
Repeat for all of the documents you wish to add to the bundle. You can drag and drop to reorganize them, or click “Add Section” to organize into subsections. It looks as though you can add bundles to your bundles, which will help organize your textbook into subsections.
Once you are finished, you can post the entire bundle, or individual lessons within your bundle. To bulk post, click on the bundle on your document list, and click “Start/Stop”
Or for individual lessons/assignments (preferable)
Click on individual students or whole classes to provide access to the lessons, then click save. It will be immediately accessible to student accounts.
Students can view the lessons from an HTML5 web browser, or from a mobile device (iOS for sure, haven’t checked Android). Here’s what students will see from an iPod touch/iPhone:
Pros and Cons
Juno is still in beta, so I’m hoping they’ll make some improvements before the full launch. For now, here are some pros and cons for the textbook component of Juno:
Pros:
- Very simple, intuitive UI for creating and viewing lessons
- Easy to add questions for understanding checks, with immediate feedback to students.
- Can embed video: great for showing chemical demonstrations, flipped lessons, or solutions to sample problems.
- Integrated with my grade book, JupiterGrades. Once out of beta, it will likely be linked to other online gradebooks. See Terie’s post for more on assessments with Juno.
- Like with Jupiter Grades, the customer service is very responsive and helpful. The Juno help link also provide lots of information for creating your documents.
Cons:
- Once a student opens a lesson, or you share the bundle/lesson on the marketplace, there are limited options for editing it. I haven’t explored it enough to see what happens from term to term. For now, I will post lesson by lesson.
- Limited formatting. I’m glad that there are subscripts and superscripts, but it isn’t even possible to import basic symbols, or copy and paste a symbol from a word document. LaTeX integration would make this more useful for math and science.
- No offline access. It would be great to make this available for offline reading, or easily exportable into epub document.
If you use JupiterGrades, give Juno a try with your classes. They make it very easy to import your rosters into Juno. If you don’t use JupiterGrades, you can still set up an account to use this with your students (sans gradebook integration).
Well, sort of.
While I like to think of my classroom as student-centered, for the past two years, I’d been teaching in a classroom that looked like this:
Pretty much everything but the desks and the chemicals are bolted to the floor. Even the student chairs are attached to the slanted desks, which made arranging them into pods impractical. When I tried to escape the “teacher zone” between the demo bench and chalk board, I’d mainly have to circle the perimeter of the room awkwardly. Whiteboard discussions were either held around the lab benches (very easy to lose kids behind the 2′ x 3′ boards there), or as presentations, one group at the board at a time.
This year, we made a tiny change to our space:
Ok, it has been a huge change.
Everyone’s able to see each other, talk to each other, hear each other. Every class has been a true discussion.
We doubled the number of whiteboards, so we use it frequently as a tool for discussion rather than the chalkboard. Whiteboard meetings are very easy (and frequent) as students can prop their boards by their feet, and easily see every board in the room. No one can hide.
Also, there’s an extra desk. I’m sitting in the circle along with the class. And I’m easily able to move from student to student.
Plus, now there’s a great deal of open space in the middle of the circle. Was perfect for the “blow up a student” pressure demo.
While this arrangement works naturally for modeling chemistry, it has been even better for my advanced classes so far.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
This will be the final post of the Build Your Own Theme series. I will post another series about organizing a class site.
In this post, we’ll customize the site appearance, and publish as a template for future use.
Customize or remove Search Box
Sometimes you design a nice header, and when you look at your site, the search box ruins it.
Depending on how large your site will be, or how it is organized, you might want to keep the search box, and design your header around it as needed.
Unfortunately, you can’t move the search box to another part of the page, so it has to be all or nothing. I remove the search boxes from my class pages, since most of the information is duplicated in Google Documents (where there is a much better search feature that can search within documents).
To remove it, go to Manage Site (type g then m), and click on Site Layout. Click on “Configure Search” 
If you uncheck “Enable Search,” it will remove the search box. If you want to keep it, you can also set search parameters: search this site only, search all sites in the domain (Apps accounts only), and search google. 
Whatever you choose, be sure to click “Save Changes” before returning to the site.
Page Settings
When you create a new page in Google Sites, there are some features that will automatically appear: Page Title, Subpage listings, Attachments, and Comments. You can remove any of these on any page.
The Page Title is set when you create the page, but you can change it at any time by replacing it in the editor function (press e). The URL won’t change, until you change it in Page Settings (see below).
When you create a new page, it is placed by default on the top level (no hierarchy). You are given the option to place it within the page you were on when you clicked “Create a Page,” or you can place it anywhere else you’d like. 
It is very useful to use page hierarchy to organize your site. However, when you do, you will see the “Subpage Listing” on the page. It is organized alphabetically, which I don’t find particularly useful. I prefer to use the dropdown menu in horizontal navigation (even though it has to be set up manually) just so my site doesn’t look cluttered.
“Attachments” can be a useful feature, if you want to add a file or files to a page that visitors can see and download. It saves the trouble of making a separate page for downloads. I haven’t used attachments in this way (my “attachments” tend to be Google documents), so I remove it.
“Comments” is an interesting feature, and useful for certain types of pages (when you want student feedback/comments/input), but on an information only page (like syllabus or home page), I remove it. I think you have to be logged into a Google account to submit comments (at least, it didn’t work for me).
To modify these, go to Manage Site > Page Settings (or type u)
You can unselect the ones you don’t want to include. Again, you’ll have to do this for each page.
I remove them all as soon as I create pages, and add them back later as needed.
Customize System Footer
The System Footer is the ‘Google stamp’ that appears at the bottom of every Google Site. 
Its a way of letting visitors log in to edit, or report sites for abuse. And, of course, that the site is powered by Google. As such, you can’t modify it very much, but you can trim it a bit. Go back to Manage Site, then Site Layout. If you scroll to the bottom, there is a box for the system footer. Click “Customize Site Footer Links.” 
Here, you can hide 4 out of the 7 system links. If students are going to have edit privileges, you may want to keep the “Sign in” box, but there’s really no need to keep the others. I’ll hide all four. 
Click “Save Changes” before returning to your site. Your new system footer will look like this:
Create Custom Footer
While you can’t remove the Google System Footer Completely, you can add your own. Perhaps you want to include other helpful links for students (School Web Page, Your Email Address, Gradebook, Etc). Back in Part 1, we added a Footer to the page layout (Site Layout > “Change Site Layout” > Click checkbox next to “Footer”). Now, we’ll click “Edit Footer” on the Site Layout page. 
You will have basic text editing capabilities (text, insert image, insert link, insert horizontal line) and formatting that you will find on any Google Page (headings, sub/super scripts, etc). You can also use HTML editing. 
I kept it simple, three links, and a horizontal line to separate it from the system footer. Once you save changes and return to your page, it will look like this:
Publish your theme as Site Template
Now that we’re done with the theme, you might want to save it somehow to use for a future site. Unfortunately, there’s no “Save theme” feature on Google sites (yet?), but you can copy the site, or publish it as a template. For either case, go to Manage Site, and select General in the left menu. Scroll to the bottom, and you will see both options.
If you “Copy the Site” it will be private only to you. If you Publish the Site as a template, it will be searchable by anyone searching for a template (though you can usually only find it if you know the title). If you have Google Apps for Education, you have the added option of publishing the site template to your domain only.
If you have any questions about any part of this series, please leave your questions in the comments, or click “Contact Me” at the top of my blog.
On Day 6, we begin to take a quantitative look at energy. We used the LOL charts to describe the qualitative role of energy in phase and temperature changes.
While we can’t calculate the amount of energy in each of the accounts initially, or at the end, we can measure the energy entering or leaving the system, 
.
We used a few scenarios/mind exercises to get to the idea of specific heat:
Suppose you had two identical cubes of Substance A
If you wanted to increase the temperature of the first cube by 5K and the temperature of the second cube by 10 K, how would the energy needed compare? (since everything else is identical, it will take twice as much energy to heat the second cube by twice the amount).
Consider two cubes of Substance A that are different sizes:
If you wanted to heat increase the temperature of both cubes by the same amount, how would the amount of energy necessary compare? (Since the second cube is twice as massive, will require twice as much energy to heat increase the temperature by the same amount as the first cube)
Finally, if you had two cubes of equal mass, but of different substances, and wanted to heat them increase their temperatures by the same amount,
how would the amount of energy required compare? There’s not enough information! So specific heat is introduced as a way to take the nature of the substance into account . If we assign arbitrary specific heat (C) values to each:
You can use cancelling units to help determine just how much energy will be needed in each case.
needed to heat substance B
Compared to Substance A, which will need half as much energy. You can introduce 
equation here, or just use the unit reasoning shown above. If I use the equation in my class, I’d rather have the students come up with it.
After this introduction, we whiteboarded some problems from two worksheets from the unit, making intentional mistakes so that we can observe how the discussion is led. The idea is to keep students as far from “plug and chug” as possible, and not divorce the equation (if used) from the meaning.
Since we did not observe temperature change during phase changes, it should be clear that we will need something else to determine energy for those situations (
and 
). For evaporation and condensation, it is useful to go back to the LOL charts:
Note that energy isn’t entering or leaving the system, but energy is transferred from the thermal account to the phase account to go from liquid to gas phase. This is why our bodies don’t have to reach the boiling point of water for our sweat to evaporate.
Doesn’t the LOL chart perfectly explain why we call it “evaporative cooling?”
We then discussed what we liked and didn’t like about unit 3, and the modeling approach to energy. The first day of bar charts, there was a HUGE learning curve among all of the participants, but by the second day (and through the subsequent units) we all became much more comfortable with it. I’m going into a great deal of detail on energy, primarily because its helping to cement the concept in my own mind (and because I think its really cool!).
It would make sense to include a specific heat lab, and a heat of fusion lab in this unit, so time permitting, I hope we’ll do those.
Next, we started Unit 4. It makes sense to split posts, based on the content, so stay tuned for Day 6b!
Energy is an integral part of the modeling curriculum. We began to talk about it a bit in unit two, and will extend the model in unit 3.
We started with a discussion of heat vs. temperature (which included viewing a Eureka video):
Next, we did a lab (Icy Hot), where we heated a sample of ice at a constant rate until it boiled. Very straight forward heating curve lab (especially using a Vernier temperature probe), but the discussion portion was very helpful. (My logger pro file)
The most important part of this lab is that students record observations during the lab. Since the computers is doing most of the work (set up to record a temperature twice a minute), students can really focus on observing what’s happening in the beaker.
Afterwards the discussion focuses students in on what’s happening at various points of the graph.
Since heat (energy) is being supplied at a constant rate,
- Why doesn’t the temperature of the water increase for ~ 14 minutes? Where is that energy going? What do you observe during this time (still ice present)
- What do you observe when the temperature begins to increase (liquid water)? Where is that energy going?
- What do you observe when the temperature levels off (beginning to boil/boiling)? Where is that energy going?
Students struggle with explaining/accepting this first plateau (want to blame it on human error, or “it takes time for the energy to get to the water”), but you can note that the beaker is obviously getting hot, and a physical change is observed).
Since we use temperature as a measure of how fast particles are moving, and the temperature does not increase on the plateaus, then the energy has to be used for something else. In our model, the energy is forcing the separate particles apart from each other (which we observe as a change from solid to liquid). Once separate particles are no longer held together by these attractions, then the energy supplied can make those particles move faster and faster (the rapid increase in temperature). Once we reach ~100 degrees, it levels off again, which means the temperature is no longer changing, so the energy must be going towards pushing the particles apart again.
Students conclude this activity by sketching their heating curves on whiteboards and drawing a particle diagram for 5 different points on the graph.
Because energy can have two different uses, we want to distinguish between the two. For thermal energy (energy that contributes to a change in temperature, we use 
. For phase energy (energy that contributes to a change in phase), we use 
(Later, we’ll use chemical energy, 
). Its all energy, 
, the same energy, but its being used for different purposes (different accounts).
The modeling approach gets away from the common approach (energy takes different “forms:” potential, kinetic, etc. ), as it is easy for students to assume that there are different kinds of energy, and that energy changes. While it makes sense to most teachers who have an understanding of energy, it can be confusing to students. (“How does the hotplate know when to stop supplying potential energy, and start supplying kinetic energy?”). Instead, modeling uses the metaphor of energy as a substance, as something that can be stored and transferred into and out of different accounts. We use energy bar charts (LOL charts) to describe the transfer of energy from one account to another, as well as energy flow into and out of the system:
LOL Chart. Get it?
For a example, we could complete an energy bar diagram for the first plateau of the Icy Hot graph (where the temperature didn’t change, but the ice melted) would look like:
You will notice:
- Energy in the thermal () account does not change from initial to final (1 bar in each, though the size is arbitrary)
- Energy in the phase () account increases (from low energy solid to higher energy liquid). (solids = 1 bar, liquids = 2 bars, gases = 4 bars)
- The chemical account is left empty. No chemical change is happening. (though I question why/whether it should be left empty).
- The energy doesn’t come from nowhere. In the “O” portion, we identify the system (ice) and show the flow of energy into or out of the system. In this case, 1 bar of energy enters the system (from the hotplate).
So, for the the portion of the Icy Hot graph where the temperature of the liquid water does change, the energy bar diagram might look like:
where the initial “L” is the same as the final “L” from before. The added bars of energy goes into the thermal () account, since an increase in temperature is observed. No change is observed in the phase, so the phase account will still have two bars of energy.
For the final plateau, we observed no change in temperature, but a change to gas phase, so the energy bar diagram might look like:
LOL charts are also useful for situations where external energy isn’t being added to a system. For instance, when you leave a hot mug of tea on a table for some time, it will cool down:
Here, we depict two energy bars from the thermal account leaving the system.
The bar charts are a useful way to qualitatively describe what the energy is doing, and connecting it to a particle description matter.
We did some reading about energy, and practiced drawing bar charts for different scenarios. It does take practice to get it (moreso for teachers!) , but writing this post has helped it make more sense to me!
More energy on Day 6!
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