NZIP Update – 22 April 2020
Dear Physics Teacher/Educator
The NZIP Education Section hopes that everything is going as well as possible for you and your families during these difficult times.
We want to let you know about some of the work we have been doing and our plans relating to supporting you during these times.
Website development
We have updated the look and organisation of our website www.nzip.org.nz
We are continuing to update this site and are also looking to do some curation work so that teachers have some essential links and material to assist them in their online teaching and for when we all get back to ‘normal’.
We are also continuing to update our Physics Teachers Resource Bank to make that a useful resource for everyone.
The site www.physics.school.nz provides a lot of resources for physics and science teaching for New Zealand schools: demonstrations, activities, experiments etc. This site is also unique in regards that it contains considerable Te Reo Maori content. The site now has a Te Reo introduction from our wonderful colleague Haggis Henderson.
We will post updates about further changes on the home page and on our social media channels.
Physics Teachers Shared Google Drives
These sites are looked after by another one of our wonderful colleagues Dave Thrasher.
Information about what is on the shared physics teachers Google-Drive site and how you can log in is found here https://sites.google.com/view/uoaptd2017/google-drive-info
The other site is for those looking for YouTube channels, animations and other assorted things to help kids learn and is found here https://sites.google.com/view/physicsrealm/global-list
Just added is a YouTube list of vetted videos for Yr10, Yr11, Yr12 and Yr13 physics. This is an epic resource including hundreds of links to targeted videos from various locations around the globe that cover NCEA external and internal content, and we highly recommend that you check this out. Many thanks to David Newton (Christ’s College, Canterbury) for creating this resource and making it available to us.
Reminders:
Our facilitators are available and able to assist you with free one-on-one support for distance learning and other topics. Please go to the following link and complete the online form https://nzip.org.nz/education/professional-development-support-for-teachers/
We have launched a Twitter account – you can find us and follow us at @NZPhysics or https://twitter.com/nzphysics
NZIP now has a Facebook page. Search for New Zealand Institute of Physics or go directly to www.facebook.com/nzphysics
We have also created a NZIP Education Section Closed Group (see details at the above Facebook Page). This group has a dual purpose:
1) to assist NZIP to carry out closed online discussions with teachers and educators who are directly connected with us. This will hopefully make us more responsive to the community’s needs; and
2) for educators connected to NZIP to share content and ideas.
We do not see this page replacing the current Physics Teachers Facebook page at all. Our new page is a uniquely NZIP-focused closed group.
Access to our secure teaching and assessment resources site
The 2020 examinations are close to completion and they will be posted as soon as all the quality assurance processes are complete.
We are also looking at ways to use our assessments in an online environment. Please watch out for updates relating to this initiative.
For those schools who have not subscribed and intend to please feel free to register and generate an invoice.
We will process your application and provide you with access immediately rather than waiting for payment. For many schools, invoices are still being paid but the potential delay just makes things more difficult for you in the meantime. We want to assist and we will work on a high trust model that means that we trust that all schools who take up our offer will pay for our service.
If you know of any physics teachers at your school who have not received this email please forward this to them.
(If they would also like to send me their email address I can add them to NZIP’s contact database for future correspondence.)
Please email me if you have any questions or would like more information.
Kind regards
Helen Housden
PLD Analyst
NZIP
pldsupport@nzip.org.nz