Podcast appearances and mentions of Russell Stannard

Our own Russell Stannard has his coffee with us, discussing all the post-pandemic technology trends. He also answers the frequently asked question: “ To tech or not to tech our classrooms?”. You may want to choose between hybrid, remote or face-to-face teaching. The ELT tech-guru Russell Stannard knows the answer!

ELT Under The Covers Podcast Interview #18 with Russell Stannard. Russell is a multi award-winning Educational Technologist and founder of www.teachertrainingvideos.com. He has more than 70,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel. He received awards from the British Council ELTONS, the Times Higher and the University of Westminster for his work in the use of ICT in education. He is especially known for his work in using technology to enhance feedback, teaching online and blended/flipped learning. He currently works as a consultant on educational technology at Kings College University London and as an associate trainer at NILE. where he teaches on the MA programme and runs courses in blended/flipped learning. #TEFL # TESOL #ELT

A Física Clássica é diferente da Física Quântica?O que é que uma gaivota tem a ver com Física Quântica?O que é o Quantum?Por que razão o esoterismo se apoia tanto na Quântica?Senhoras e Senhores, apertem os cintos de segurança da capacidade de abstracção e sejam bem-vindos ao desconhecido desta Física de que se fala tanto, mas da qual existem tão poucas explicações fáceis de entender. A Joana Marques vai ser a vossa companheira de bordo e o Vítor Cardoso o comandante. Acreditem: depois disto vão sentir-se mais… omnipresentes.REFERÊNCIAS E LINKS ÚTEIS:O Novo Mundo do Sr. Tompkins, Russell Stannard e George GamowThe Feynman Lectures on Physicshttps://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/29/66141/what-is-quantum-computing/https://aeon.co/essays/uniting-the-mysterious-worlds-of-quantum-physics-and-musicMcDonald, J. F. (1993). Russell, Wittgenstein, AND THE PROBLEM OF THE RHINOCEROS, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 31(4), 409–424. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-6962.1993.tb00684.xBIOSJOANA MARQUESNasceu em Lisboa em 1986. Toda a gente sabe que os nativos do signo Virgem são fadados para o sucesso. Infelizmente Joana é Capricórnio e não percebe nada de astrologia. Quando era mais pequena (ainda) queria ser pintora, felizmente mudou de ideias entretanto, já que o talento que tem agora para pintar é o mesmo que tinha aos seis anos, quando desejava ser a nova Paula Rêgo. Assim que começou a aprender a escrever percebeu que o “foturo paçaria pur aí”, depois aprendeu que se escrevia “futuro passaria por aí” e nunca mais ninguém a parou. Começou a trabalhar como guionista em 2007, chegou à rádio em 2012, à maternidade em 2016 e 2020, e espera demorar ainda muito a chegar à reforma. Até lá, não segue o carpe diem porque isso de viver cada dia como se fosse o último parece perigoso. Gosta de viver cada dia como se fosse o primeiro, e observar o mundo como se tivesse acabado de cá aterrar.VÍTOR CARDOSOVítor Cardoso é Físico Teórico no CENTRA, professor Catedrático e Presidente do Departamento de Física do Instituto Superior Técnico. Os seus interesses de investigação incidem sobre astrofísica e gravitação, em particular a física do espaço-tempo curvos, ondas gravitacionais e buracos negros. É autor de um livro e de cerca de 200 artigos publicados em revistas internacionais. A sua investigação foi distinguida duas vezes pelo European Research Council. Em 2015 o Presidente da República concedeu-lhe a Ordem de Santiago D'Espada, pelas suas contribuições para a ciência. Neste momento, é líder do GWverse, um consórcio internacional de mais de 30 países e centenas de cientistas, que se dedica ao estudo de ondas gravitacionais e buracos negros. É membro fundador da Sociedade Portuguesa de Relatividade e Gravitação.

COSMOS - If the universe had been ever so slightly different, human beings wouldn't, couldn't, exist. All explanations of this exquisite fine-tuning, obvious and not-so-obvious, have problems. Featuring Martin Rees, Leonard Susskind, Alexander Vilenkin, Russell Stannard, Stephen Wolfram, and Roger Penrose.

Welcome back to The TEFLology Podcast - a podcast all about language teaching, and related matters!  Today we bring you an interview with Russell Stannard. Russell is a multi award-winning Educational Technologist and founder of www.teachertrainingvideos.com He is especially known for his  work in using technology to enhance feedback and his experiments with screen capture technology.  In this interview, Matt asks questions to Russell about teaching languages through the use of technology.  Recorded remotely with Zencastr.  Theme music by James York (Cheapbeats)   Visit Russell's YouTube page here - https://www.youtube.com/user/crete1987  Email us at - Check out our website at - https://teflology-podcast.com  Follow us on Twitter at - https://twitter.com/TEFLology  Like us on Facebook at - https://www.facebook.com/TEFLologypodcast/ 

Former online teacher training manager Matt Courtois and I meet to talk about online teacher development and evaluation. What opportunities does online teaching create for teacher development?Opportunities in Online Teacher Development (with Matt Courtois)Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn. This week, once again, we have Matt Courtois.Matt Courtois: Hey, long time no see.Ross: Last time, Matt, you and I talked about the effects of coronavirus and teaching online to serve things that teachers can do in class with students.Today, I thought it'd be interesting for us to talk about the effect that teaching online, and teachers just not being in the same physical space as either their managers, or their trainers, or their peers is having on teacher development.Matt: I think this whole teaching online thing, it's so lonely. Before all this happened, you're in here, your teacher's office, with 10 colleagues who are bouncing ideas. Here, you're sitting in possibly in an empty apartment, lonely experience.Ross: Absolutely. Before, when I at least worked in a school, sometimes you have a thing of a teacher would come in on a break and just be like, "Oh my God, that was a disaster," and you would have the chance to go like, "What's up? Can I help? What was the issue here?"As soon as you're online, those interactions in the staff room or by the water cooler, those don't happen anymore. It made the importance of formal teacher education stuff even more important than it was before.Matt: A lot of the feedback you get from your peers doesn't necessarily happen in a formal avenue, but a lot of times you're just sitting here talking about your lesson.Ross: It's like what we were talking about last time with teaching, that online is not necessarily better or worse. It's just different. There's some advantages to doing teacher education online, but taking the offline stuff and putting it online, it's not going to work.You have to think of some other potential advantages of online that maybe don't exist offline, and try to take advantage of those.Matt: There some things that you can do that are completely different from face‑to‑face feedback or coaching or training that online can be a lot more effective.Ross: One obvious place is that if you are teaching online, it's highly likely that every lesson you teach is going to be recorded. There are huge opportunities for doing self‑observation and peer observation, that in face‑to‑face settings are really difficult to set up.Matt: In a previous company that we worked at together that had face‑to‑face lessons, it's something we encourage lots of teachers to do. Video your lesson, then afterwards, you can watch it. I really think, over the two or three years that I was advocating this idea, I don't think a single teacher actually did it.Ross: Even doing the thing of peer observation. I might want to observe you teaching such and such a class, but when you're teaching that class, I also have a class. It's really difficult to ever actually make that work.Obviously, all of these problems just disappear immediately since we started talking about online teaching, where everything's recorded.Matt: One of the best things you can do is watch yourself teaching. I know the way I am. If I have that video there, and it's already done, I'm going to watch myself teaching.I know if somebody is giving feedback, you do want to be specific because it is helpful. If you, as the observer, think something didn't go well, you can refer them back to minute 5, 12 seconds, and say, watch this and watch how you interact with the student or that student.Ross: Or, let's watch it together. There's no more of this, "Oh, I didn't think this went very well. Well, actually, I thought it went fine."I think it's powerful to be able to say like, "Which part of the lesson do you want to talk about?" "This part." "OK, let's move the video forward to that part and we can watch it together. We can we can talk about it."The videos could be used in at least one of three ways that immediately spring to mind. One is that, as a teacher, you could proactively go watch this yourself and reflect on it or transcribe bits of it or whatever.Another potential use is that you could make a video available to your peers to watch, for example. Or, another bit is that your supervisor or trainer or whatever could come and watch you teach.Having things online, there's a real issue around privacy and access that is going to be really interesting.For example, at the moment, if we were in a school together, and you were the manager and I'm the teacher, and you want to come and observe me teach, you could just barge into the classroom and watch me, if you really wanted to.I might be upset about it, but I would know you were there. As soon as it's online, there's all of a sudden this thing of like, well, maybe everything's probably being recorded by the school or at least by someone.Potentially, you can observe anything that I've taught without me knowing about it. There's a flip side to this, though, of course, which does mean that when you're observing people, they're automatically going to be more nervous than they would be if there was no one in the room, the whole observer's paradox thing.Often, you'd find that a lot of the feedback I'd end up giving trainee teachers would be about teacher talk and talking too much. I sometimes wonder, are these people just talking too much because they're nervous because I'm in the room? If I wasn't here, they wouldn't be nervous.Therefore, I'm giving them feedback on this aspect of the teaching that really is not an issue for 99 percent of the time. It's only an issue when they're being observed.This is another advantage to this covert observation that, as a teacher, you can be observed, and as a manager, you can observe teachers. There's no longer this problem of people being nervous and changing their behavior because there's an observer in the room.Matt: Ideally, it's going to be a much less intimidating and less distracting experience for the teachers and the students. By having this avenue for observations online, your presence isn't going to be known at all by students and the teacher. Maybe it's less intimidating.Ross: At the moment, in terms of teacher observations, there's also different ways of doing it. You could have the manager just walks in completely unannounced, so the teacher has no control over when they're observed.You could have the manager tells the teacher in advance, I'm going to observe this class, and you spent all this time preparing. You could have the manager gives the teacher some options, so the teacher has a bit more ownership over when they're observed.Or, the teacher even could say to the manager, "I would like you to come and observe this class before I teach it." Of course, with online, it moves, it almost adds an extra part on that graph, on that continuum.You're the manager, I could say, "Not that I would like you to observe this class that I will be teaching next Tuesday." I can say, "I want you to observe this class yesterday that I had this problem with and tell me, what should I had done in the situation or what tips you could give." It could give teachers more autonomy.Matt: I know a lot of teachers who would want to impress their observer. Most teachers are going to choose one of their stronger lessons, which I actually think is a good thing. As an observer, I would like to see you at your best.You were talking about teacher talk earlier. I don't want to see some mistakes and coach you about something that doesn't really occur to you very often.I want to see you at your best and see if we can find some areas of that that we can move forward a little bit, and the teacher coming to that decision about, "This is my best lesson," and they're showing that to you.Hopefully, through that process, they watched that lesson. They're thinking about a lot of really good reflection that's going to happen automatically by trying to show their manager their best lesson.Ross: The potential there is for the teacher to choose something that they actually want the manager or the supervisor or trainer to see.Matt: Odds are, at this point, if teachers are choosing their best lessons, there's probably a lot of things that we can find in their online teaching to help push them forward a little bit.Who was your guest a couple of weeks ago? I don't remember, but he was saying most of the online lessons.Ross: This was Russell Stannard. He was saying there were a lot of terrible online lessons, which is true. The opposite of that could also be true. The other advantage of having everything filmed is to take us to peer observations for a moment.If we all, you and me and we've got five other people, who work in the same school, we could make our professional development with something. Like, you can choose one of your classes this week or an activity that you did in the last week that you thought was particularly good and show it to everyone.Normally, if you do that, it's going to be you standing up in front of everyone describing what you did. It's you actually showing everyone, "Here's a video of this activity I did. It worked really, really well." I think that's a lot more useful. A lot more potential benefits for everyone else in the school.Matt: Especially now, I talk about Bloom's taxonomy a little bit. A lot of teachers with online teaching are at the very first stage. When they see something that works, they're going to try to replicate it.They're not higher up on this taxonomy where they're trying to invent their own things. They're just trying to see what works and copy it. Showing these video examples is so useful for where they're at right now.Ross: Another interesting thing about this is that if you make a video of an offline lesson, you must’ve had this before, you video the class and afterwards, you put the headphones on and you watch it.It's like, "I can't really hear what the students are saying." I wish the board work was clearer. I feel like offline, the video is not as good as actually being in the room.Online, of course, watching the video after the class is just as good as watching the class live or even better, because you have 100 percent accurate representation of what actually happened there.Matt: You're seeing exactly what the student sees from their perspective when you're looking at a recording of an online lesson.Whereas offline, I don't know, whenever you have a mingle activity with 20 people talking at the same time, you don't feel the excitement of those people talking. You don't get to hear what they're saying. You just hear a bunch of noise. [laughs]I feel the very nature of these online lessons, that you can observe the whole thing, what's happening with every single student at every single point, and exactly what the teacher is doing, and how they're using their board exactly, how it ties into everything together to get an overall picture of this experience that students are having.Ross: That's a lot about the actual process of the observation. Observing or having classes online, observing and giving feedback or having a discussion afterwards, also opens the door to different ways of giving feedback or at least discussing lessons that wouldn't really be possible offline.Those conversations, when they do happen face‑to‑face, can often be very emotionally‑charged because the observer might be defensive. It's called hot cognition, when you're still affected by the emotion of event itself.There's also this potential by doing an observation on line of an online class. You then open up all these possibilities for it to be a much more cold cognition and for people to be more objective about the whole process.Matt: I think online, with email as well, a lot of your tone gets lost.Ross: You've observed my class. Emailing me about it afterwards is probably not ideal. What are some of the ways of trainers and trainees or supervisors and teachers actually talking about a lesson after it's happened?Matt: I can go on Skype, or Microsoft Teams, or whatever messaging device. A lot of these, there's a function to leave a video message. With video messages, you don't miss out on some of the body language and stuff that you would in an email.Your tone and maybe supportive nature as an observer can show up whenever you're sending a video message rather than an email. The observee doesn't misconstrue what you're saying. That's the benefit of writing an email.The benefit I find over face‑to‑face feedback. When you're giving face‑to‑face feedback, it's almost a confrontation. If you, as the observer, are maybe talking about an area for improvement, it's almost like an argument, or it can be, if it gets out of hand.Whereas, by giving video messages, you can, first of all, use the observer. You can try to record it a couple times. You can make sure that you're saying it in a way that the teacher can accept it.As the observer, you can say like, "Before you respond, can you look up this article? Here's a link to an article that you can read, then I want you to compare that to what we're talking about in your lesson."Also, the teacher has the chance to watch this video, with your body language and all the benefits of video. They can sit back and think about that message for a while. They don't have to respond immediately like they would in a face‑to‑face conversation.Once they've come up with what they want to say back to you, they can send the video message back to you. You'll find that the level of conversation is actually much higher.That way, it's not such a hot debate. It's a little bit cooler. You can take more time. You can actually prepare people to come up with a better response to what it is that you're saying.Ross: Matt, thanks for joining us.Matt: My pleasure, as always.Ross: All right. We'll see you again next time, everyone. Goodbye.Matt: See you.

Russell Stannard joins me to talk about online teaching. We discuss some of the current challenges that teachers around the world are facing due to Covid19 forcing classes to go online, and we also talk about what the longer term effects on teaching and learning will be. How will this encourage learner autonomy? How will it change the role of the teacher? And how could it create more learning outside of the classroom?Ross Thorburn: Hi everyone. Welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute Podcast. I'm Ross Thorburn and this episode again, we're doing something about teaching online. I know this is a huge issue for so many of you at the moment.We really have someone top‑notch to help us with issues about teaching from home and that's Russell Stannard. Russell's founder of teachertrainingvideos.com which is a great resource with so much information on how to use different technological tools and education.Russell in 2008 was awarded the Times Higher Outstanding Initiative in ICT for his work on that website and trusting that he beat the University of Oxford who came runners up to him there, which is quite amazing. Russell also won in 2010 the British Council ELTons Award for technology.He's also worked at University of Warwick, University of Westminster, at the moment he's a tutor at NILE, Norwich Institute for Language Education, where he's MA tutor and in fact he's a Miami tutor.Russell's going to talk to us today about some different platforms that teachers can use, what teachers can be getting students to do outside of online classes and really just gives us some top tips for teachers using platforms like Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts, etc. Enjoy the interview.Ross: Hi, Russell. Thanks for joining us. Russell, someone who's an educational technologist, what do you think are some of the advantages to what we're seeing now, which is so many teachers using technology to teach online?Russell Stannard: I'm not sure at the moment there are that many positives in all honesty. I think there will be, but I think at the moment is just too much for most teachers to deal with. They're really scrambling to. I've been watching quite a few classes and some of them are just a disaster.Where the positives will come eventually is that it will kind of open up a lot of people's eyes to the options that are available as people begin to move beyond just thinking about the live session and start to think about how they can combine, for example, working with a live session and working with a platform.Whether that be mood law rep model, because they'll need to understand that really there are two paths to teach an online. There's the live session in some sort of platform. People are beginning to see that. I think that will be one good thing that's going to have a big impact in the future if they go back to blended learning.Number two that could be really interesting is if it begins to change the role of the teacher in terms of their relationship with the student. We've really now got to bring to reality this whole idea of students becoming more autonomous.Because when you work online, the students do have to do a lot more work. In the live session as well because they need to learn to technically screen‑share and to technically be able to work themselves with the technology, they can't just be a passive consumer of a live lesson. They've got to get involved in it and that requires some skills from their part.Also what they're expected to do outside of the class and how really they've got to take much more responsibility now for their own learning. That the contents are there, the technologies are there, the platforms are there, but really up until this moment, that hasn't happened.Now, one of the things that we start to talk about in that area about autonomy is that it's a vast exaggeration to say, "There's masses of material that students can do everything." That's not actually how you learn the language. There are routines that you always do. For example, you might study some vocabulary every day and use Quizlet.You might listen to some videos on YouTube with the subtitles and study those. You might go onto a platform and do some exercises or do some listening activities. It's not as if this world of technology outside of the classroom means that there are 101 different things that you can do or possibly there are but they're very small things.What we really want to concentrate on these continuous routines that you need to do to develop learning a language.Ross: Russell, you mentioned there the different platforms that teachers can use, and you mentioned the two halves of that equation. If Zoom and Skype are teaching synchronously, teaching students in real time as one half of the picture, what's the other half?Russell: There's two types of platforms. There's the platforms that are developed by the publishing companies. Now you've got the advantage that the students can log in to that platform and the teachers can give them assignments to do and track what they're doing and see their scores, etc.They aren't so good on the communication side because they are really more platforms for content but you normally can email the student through the platform. We know why a teacher's almost got a choice.Do they go for a publisher platform where they've got loads and loads of content but maybe they can't do so many communicative collaborative type activities or do they go for a platform like Edmodo or Moodle, which does offer lots of opportunities for collaboration and working together but of course there's no content on there.My feeling is for people in ELT, the best direction to go if you can is to work with the platforms that the publishers have because that is going to save you a lot of time. It's going to allow you to set up activities for the students to do at home and it's going to allow you to track and see what they've done in and allow you to connect that to the lesson.The other thing that's happening at the moment is that people are just thinking about the Zoom class. There's no relationship to any content outside of the just doing a lesson. I've been watching, Ross, some of the lessons would give you a heart attack. Absolutely. It was a complete waste of time for the students to be on.The teacher just rambled on, played a few videos, ask the questions. The students said yes, the students said no, a couple of them, most of them didn't do anything, and then that was the end of the lesson.Ross: Yeah, I'm afraid I've also seen my fair share of bad online classes, but why do you think these teachers are, are so ineffective at teaching online? Why do you think all of a sudden from teaching online these classes end up becoming so teacher centered?Russell: I was really interested in that. That's a really good question. I do think that when you work with technology, the whole kind of thing of it making you very nervous at the beginning and you don't really know how the technologies work until you've really got control of the technology.It's sometimes very difficult to become creative and to start to think about how you can get the students engaged in an activity. I think that does happen because it's even happens to me. I see technologies in a very narrow way at the beginning when I've learned in them. It's only when I really follow fade with the technology, then I start to think I could do this or I could do that with it.That's been my experience even working with Zoom and if I look back how I used to work with Zoom and Adobe connect and say how I might be using them now as I've got more confident with them. I've passed more control over to the students. I've done the same thing with screen capture technology.There might be something almost psychological about this need to feel secure about the technology you're using before you feel you can start to get creative with it. I think that thing, that's quite a lot of truth in that. I think that that's true of almost anything we try and learn.Ross: Yeah, that's interesting. It's almost like a Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for using technology or something, isn't it? That first you have to become comfortable with using it yourself before you can maybe hand over control to some of the students.Russell: Yeah.Ross: In terms of that passing ownership over to the students, can you tell us a bit more about how teachers can do that in live online classes?Russell: First of all, if you actually look at a live session, there are four or five things that the students simply need to know how to do. They need to know how to screen share. They need to know how to minimize their screens so that they can open up content and get it ready for screen‑sharing.They need to know when they're in a screen‑sharing situation that they've got everything prepared before that so they can go into their breakout rooms and share their content. There's certain things that the students need to do. Then there's other things that they might need to do to make sure that the Zoom session works well.For example, if we're looking at almost like a flip classroom where the students do the lower order thinking skills at home, they're maybe watching a video in preparation for lesson, taking some notes, preparing a presentation.Let's say, for example, we teach them to use Google Earth and we say, "Go home, go onto Google Earth, choose a famous location that you want to talk about. Get a basic presentation together because tomorrow in the lesson I'm going to get you to open up Google Earth and show a monument and talk about it."All of those things require way more work on the part of the student to make sure the lesson works. If they don't do that preparation it won't work. There's a whole thing about responsibility and I'm in a bit of a dilemma myself. It's the fault the teacher in it was always wanting to control the lesson.If you give more responsibilities to students, they will actually adapt and take it up and make use of it. Or is there a problem with just controlling students? If you do that and then the whole lesson is going to fall apart. I'm not really sure.Is going to be a case now of inculcating into students this understanding that if you want to progress, you've got to learn to study on your own, which is a general theme. It's coming out of the 21st century anyway.Then the other thing is about starting routines, because I really think that that whole thing about autonomy is a bit exaggerated. We ended up giving out the wrong message sometimes because they're like, "Oh yeah, there's so much on the Internet."Well, tell me, where is it? What is it? How are we going to use it? That's not true. I see that with students even up to master's degree, in their papers and telling me about how they're going to encourage the students to be more autonomous, but they don't actually give them specific things to latch onto. I think we've got to do that.Ross: In terms of learner autonomy online, one of the first steps in that would be getting students to use breakout rooms. Can you tell us a bit more about how teachers can use those breakout rooms and how can they help students to use them?Russell: Ross, you're absolutely right, mate. Unless you train the students in what they need to do in a breakout room and what task you've set up and how they should approach it. They've got screen share because if you put students into a breakout room, they're the ones that have got our open up whatever it is that you want them to discuss.Let's say you've set up some discussion questions in a PowerPoint, you need to make sure that the students have already got that PowerPoint open on their computer so that when they go into a breakout room they can it open it up and then discuss it.When you're working in breakout rooms is you need to make the task a little bit longer sometimes because you need to structure the tasks much more. If you're in a class and you've got your students working in groups, you can quickly see if an activity is not working. You can stop it very quickly and then reorganize it or if they've not understood exactly what you want them to do.When you've got students working in breakout rooms, you can't do that so easy because you have to jump in and out of one room and you might come to the fourth room and realize they're sitting there in silence and no one's doing anything.Working in a breakout room takes a lot more preparation. That means more training for the students. That means setting up the actual activity a lot better. You have to do the activities as a group first with the teacher may be screen‑sharing and then one of the students screen‑sharing into the whole class.I'm making the activity clear before you then put them into breakout rooms and get them to do the activity and breakout rooms.Everything has to be rehearsed much more. Everything takes a lot longer when you're doing the Zoom's lesson as well, which is another reason that we have to put more responsibility on the students to work at home because simply not going to be able to cover the amount of content that you would in a normal lesson.Ross: Russell, one of the things that I'm quite passionate about is helping teachers really take advantage of things that they can do online that they can't do elsewhere. Can you tell us from your experience, what are some features ‑‑ you mentioned for example screen‑share earlier ‑‑ that teachers can use with online platforms that maybe you don't see them using very often at the moment?Russell: I'll tell you where I think you could have a lot of power with these breakout rooms. For example, if you sub some type of collaborative activity. Let's say you've got the students to have a discussion and brainstorm some ideas in a Padlet. They go into their breakout rooms that open up a Padlet, they work together.They put their ideas up onto that Padlet. Then they come out of their breakout rooms and individuals could then open up the Padlet on the screen for the whole class to see.That can be really quite powerful way of working with a technology or even to a degree interacting with a coursebook because if the students have the PDF version or the interactive version of the coursebook, when the students go into groups, they can open up the coursebook onto the screen. The whole group can see it in the breakout room.They could even interact with it by writing on it or marking things on it. There are actually quite a lot of activities that in a way are almost easier to do in a breakout room than they would be, for example, if the students were sitting down with their books open simply because of the visual element of the book itself or even say for example, sharing video content.When you put students into breakout rooms, you haven't got that problem that you might have if they're all trying to bundle around of computer screen to watch the video there is sitting in front of you. The students move into a breakout room, one of them plays the video, and it's all completely clear to everybody.One other thing I'd say about kind of the live sessions is you've got to take a break. At the moment, one thing is the teacher thinks that they've got to be on task all the time. Why not tell your students, "Open up your book, read this text and come back in a couple of minutes and we're going to then do a brainstorming activity around the vocabulary."You've just come across all the words that you don't understand or something like that. That might be jumping off and going on and completing a Google form. I did in some contents of the strategic and say, "Right, OK, I've got this Google form here. I'm going to share it with you and you can answer the questions and then we're going to come back in about five minutes."You can do activities like that as well.Ross: I think that thing was silence is so interesting because in a classroom it would be pretty normal to just have a period of silence where the students are just sitting reading. If for example, if we had a minute of silence on this phone conversation now it would be awkward. I can see why teachers would be quite hesitant just to have no talking for a period in the class.Russell: I wonder whether or not, for example, the student, teachers might have to learn to be able to do things like putting a bit of music in the backgrounds or thing while the students are doing a reading activity.Use something to mark the time. "I'm going to go off and do a reading now." I'll even put a timer onto the screen and, "You've got three minutes to read this passage. Now come back into the lesson." Teachers have got to get used to that to accept that there might be silence in their Zoom session.Ross: Russell, thank you so much for joining us. What's the best place for listeners to go to find out more about you and to access some of the great resources that you've got to help teachers teach with technology?Russell: Just go to teachertrainingvideos.com. It got lots of free videos that basically show teachers how to incorporate technology into their teaching and learning, and obviously at the moment it's very relevant and very popular.Ross: Great. Russell, thanks one more time. Everyone else, thank you for listening and we'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

In this episode we discuss attending a Society for Creative Anachronism Village Faire and Crucible Con. We discuss the games Klask, Reef, The Mind, Blood and Plunder, No Thank You Evil, DC Adventures, and The One Ring Roleplaying Game. We talk about the books Your Best Game Ever by Monte Cook Games, Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien, What if? By Randall Monroe, Uncle Albert by Russell Stannard, and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stephenson. We end by discussing the movie Godzilla. Intro and Outro music is by melodysheep, licensed under creative commons share-alike license. Support his educational music and videos at www.symphonyofscience.com.

Russell Stannard is emeritus professor of Physics at The Open University. He is a Christian and presenter of the RE Today Services Science & Belief videos Steve Jones is emeritus professor of genetics at University College London. An atheist, he is the author of "The Serpent's Promise: The Bible Retold as Science". They debate whether the Bible can be seen as scientific, what kinds of questions religion and science answer and more. For more debates visit www.premier.org.uk/unbelievable Join the conversation via Facebook and Twitter For Rusell Stannard's Science & Belief videos http://www.retoday.org.uk/scienceandbelief For Steve Jones' book http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Serpents-Promise-Retold-Science/dp/1408702851 Get the MP3 podcast of Unbelievable? http://ondemand.premier.org.uk/unbelievable/AudioFeed.aspx or Via Itunes You may also enjoy: Unbelievable? 1 May 2010 - Test of Faith: Do we need God, now that we have science?Christian Denis Alexander vs Atheist Stephen Law Unbelievable? 19 Dec 2009 - "What does Science Tell us about God?" - Atheist scientist Lewis Wolpert debates believing scientist Russell Cowburn

Today’s Tool: Jing Resources: Jing Overview video from Jing. The Jing website has many tutorials on how to use various aspects of Jing. Ideas for Using Jing from Russell Stannard at TeacherTrainingVideos.com (K-12 examples, but still good to get your ideas … Continue reading →

Physics professor Russell Stannard re-examines the claim he made 10 years ago about the way the universe seems mysteriously to have been geared up for producing life

Transcript -- Physics professor Russell Stannard re-examines the claim he made 10 years ago about the way the universe seems mysteriously to have been geared up for producing life

Russell Stannard uses simple analogies to explain difficult concepts. The expansion of space, and the cosmological red-shift, or doppler shift.

Russell Stannard explains why standard Euclidean geometry doesn't apply when considering the geometry of outer space.

Russell Stannard uses simple analogies to explain difficult concepts. The expansion of space, and the cosmological red-shift, or doppler shift.

Russell Stannard explains why standard Euclidean geometry doesn't apply when considering the geometry of outer space.