Roberta Tevlin, OAPT Newsletter Editor, Teacher Danforth CTI
roberta.tevlin@tdsb.on.ca

In the spring of 2015, Robert Prior brought the newsletter into its new responsive and accessible format and in August Roberta Tevlin signed on as editor. In the last ten months, there have been 37 articles from 18 different authors as well as many timely announcements. Thank you to all our wonderful authors. There is no Newsletter without you!

You probably missed a lot of these articles during the busy teaching year. It is easy to catch up on these as part of your summer reading.

Summer reading
Go to http://newsletter.oapt.ca/ and scroll down until you see the tags. The first is Astronomy. If you select this, you will be directed to the following items:

• A great article about how show the connection between resolution and diffraction.
• A summary of the best teaching resources for gravity waves
• A couple of radio lectures on black holes by Stephen Hawking
• An article about how to see the International Space Station. No telescope is needed!
• A review of York’s 2-day astronomy workshop, which is on again this summer.
  

If Astronomy isn’t your thing, we have articles on many other physics topics, from Kinematics to Quantum.

Rave review!
The OAPT Newsletter got a rave review from Dan Isaacs who write the websights column for the AAPT’s Physics Teacher magazine. He wrote:

“The Ontario, Canada section of AAPT continues to produce an outstanding online newsletter with articles, lessons plans, commentary, etc. on physics teaching. Kudos to OAPT for another nice article/lesson discussing how to lead a class about lasers for HS students. Other offerings include demonstrations, activities, testing and evaluation, questioning strategies, and discussions of physics pedagogy and reports from the travels of OAPT physics teachers.”

Why submit something?
After you have read the articles, done the crossword and tried out some of the activities, why not considers making a submission to the newsletter? There are many forms this can take:

• Take a picture of yourself reading the newsletter in some exotic locale.
• Write a review of a physics related book, movie, piece of equipment or PD opportunity.
• Write an article. These articles are not the serious formal things that you might submit to Physics Review Letters. They are more like the informal conversations that you would have with another teacher over breakfast at the conference. They can be really short and snappy or really long and in depth. If you are not sure whether your ideas would be of interest, just email me and we can chat about them.
  

Have a great summer!
Robert and I will be taking a break from publishing during much of the summer. However, we will be still be looking for, accepting and working on new submissions. We want to build up a bank of articles so that during the school year, we can continue to produce one new item for each weekend.

Tags: Professional Development