GCSEPod - Education Anywhere

Louise Bessant, author of our Circulation title, takes a look at a controversial issue relevant to your GCSE studies

Dr Andrew Wakefield was in the news recently because of his study on the side effects of the MMR vaccine, and was described as ‘unethical’ by the General Medical Council.  Meanwhile, thousands of girls have received the HPV vaccine to protect against cervical cancer, and a new vaccination against the emerging swine flu virus was given to health workers and vulnerable people last summer.

So, how do vaccines work?  Vaccines ‘kick start’ your immune system. Your body is given the answer to a disease by giving it a sneak preview of the question.

Firstly, we need to know about our immune response.  White blood cells patrol around our body.  All types of cells have different shaped markers on them, called antigens, to make them unique.  White blood cells can tell by the antigens on a cell if it is an unwelcome invader.

We fall ill with a disease as the pathogen takes hold.  Our body produces white blood cells to fight it off, and we recover.  Most of the white blood cells die, but some that can fight that particular disease remain in your blood.

The next time they detect the invader these particular white blood cells remember it and reproduce very rapidly.  The invaders are dealt with before you become ill; you are immune. This is ‘immune memory’ and is why most people only catch diseases such as chicken pox and measles once.

But some microorganisms are too powerful and fast-acting for our bodies to deal with, and can cause severe disability or death.  Vaccination prevents this by cleverly using your immune memory.

When you’re vaccinated against a disease, you are given either a small amount of the pathogen, a modified safe form of it, its antigens, or a very similar version. The white blood cells go into action, and will remember the pathogen without you contracting the disease. Your body is already defended against the disease when you meet the pathogen for the first time.

If our immune memory is so good, why do hundreds of thousands of patients receive a flu vaccine every year? It isn’t because the body has forgotten, it is because the flu virus mutates regularly and the body cannot recognise it.  When a new virus emerges scientists have to work very quickly to combat the new form.

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With half-term approaching, History teacher Emily Thomas suggests ways to stay focused when revising

1. Routine is crucial. Set yourself up with a revision timetable, with fixed slots in the day in which you will work. If you allocate a whole day to studying, you are likely to spend all day procrastinating, and then realise half way through Eastenders that you’d better start revising. If you do this, you’ll find yourself staying up until midnight, exhausted and unproductive. Instead, look at it like a job, with fixed start and finish times. Do a maximum of seven and a half hours of revision a day when you are on study leave. On days when you are at school, try to limit your evening work to two and a half hours. Finish at a set time, such as dinnertime. If you know that you have to finish at say, 6.30, you will work much more efficiently. Share this information with your family so that they will respect your working time and help you stick to your timetable.

2. Make your study time count for more. Find a quiet space away from other people. Turn your phone, television and radio off. Unless you need your computer for a specific reason, turn that off too. If you know that something distracts you, however silly, put it away and avoid it. Put your headphones in if you’re listening to GCSEPod!

3. Don’t listen to your friends when they talk about revision. People almost never tell the truth about how much revision they are doing! If friends suggest that you revise together, think carefully about whether this is a good idea. Joint revision sessions often become a forum for sharing anxieties, for procrastination, or for one person to show off. You will generally come away feeling less confident than you did before.

Don’t forget, GCSEPod can help you revise across 8 different subjects!

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Nicola Greener, English teacher and author of The Crucible topic and Media and Non-Fiction Texts, gives us her tips on answering specific types of questions in English

It is useful when considering how to answer exam or coursework questions in English, that you consider different question types.  For example, some questions will ask you whether a passage or phrase is effective, or will ask you to fully explain how a writer creates an idea in their work.

So, it is useful to consider the meaning of these phrases and make sure that you understand what is being asked.

Let’s deal with effectiveness.  Many questions in exam papers will ask you to evaluate the effectiveness of the writer’s use of language, which they use to create a particular effect.  This question is therefore asking: does the writer draw a response from the reader, or highlight and emphasise a particular point?

For example, you may be asked to evaluate the effectiveness of the following phrase: ‘“The children were as quiet as mice”. Here you will recognise that the writer has used a simile, but what qualities do children and mice share?  Asking this question will help you to decide whether the phrase is effective. The comparison emphasises the aspects of the children’s behaviour that is quiet and hardly noticeable.  A good answer would be something like - “This simile is effective because it emphasises how little noise the children are making and that they are still; hardly moving, so as not to be noticed”.

This is the same when we consider metaphors.  When looking at the phrase: “the lake is a mirror for the clouds”, we ask the same questions as before: what is the writer trying to emphasise and what are the qualities of the comparison?

A good response to the phrase would be: “The writer is using a metaphor to create a picture in the mind of the reader of the reflection of the clouds in the lake. The lake is described as a mirror because the still, flat surface allows the movement and motion of the clouds to be reflected”.

Watch out for more blogs on how to deal with different question types in your English exam!

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We’ve seen blizzards of snow, ponds turning to ice, and temperatures plummeting to -22 degrees, so Louise Bessant, author of our Circulation title, tells us how we keep warm

During the ‘big freeze’ your homeostatic mechanisms have been working hard to keep your body functioning, despite the sub-zero temperatures.

Homeostasis is ‘maintaining a constant internal environment in the body’ and thermoregulation is when your body keeps its internal temperature constant.  Even when your fingers feel numb and the hairs on your arms are standing on end, your core body temperature stays at around 36-38 degrees Celsius.

This is very important to protect your vital organs and cells, and to maintain an optimum temperature for your enzymes to work in.  It’s ok for your extremities to feel cold, but it’s certainly not ok for the chemical reactions in your body to stop!

Receptors in our skin and hypothalamus detect the stimulus of the cold weather.  The hypothalamus co-ordinates our responses to this, using different effectors:

Shivering
This response is the rapid contraction of muscles. Energy is released, which keeps you warm.

Goose bumps
It’s not the bumps that keep you warm, but tiny muscles which contract to make the hairs on your arms stand on end.  This traps air under the hair, which helps to insulate you.

Vasoconstriction
We lose a lot of heat from our body to the environment; especially from our head area!  To reduce this the blood vessels contract.  This makes them smaller, so less blood can flow through; therefore less heat is lost through your skin.  Blood flow can be diverted away from extremities, towards the core, to minimise heat loss further.  This is why your fingers and toes can look pale in the cold.

Our body uses negative feedback to control temperature. If temperature is rising too high your body can lower it, and if it is falling too low your body can increase it.  Our bodies have antagonistic effectors; antagonistic means they have opposite effects. For example, hairs standing on end vs flat hairs.  These antagonistic effectors are beneficial to us as it means we can have an incredibly sensitive response to a change – keeping things just right.

Click here if you’d like to learn more about how the body controls temperature.

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With exams coming up for many of us over the next few weeks (weather permitting!), History teacher, Emily Thomas, offers up some advice for a clear-minded approach

Here are some top tips for staying calm during the exam period:

1. Know what the exam demands of you in advance. If you have done practice exams in class, look over these. If not, ask your teacher for past papers or look on your exam board’s website. Think about how many questions you are expected to answer, and from which sections. You might also give some consideration to how much time you will spend on each section. Remember, GCSEPod’s ‘Recommended for you’ page shows you titles relevant to upcoming exams

2. Arrive in good time and with the right equipment. There’s nothing worse than having to be shown to your seat by an angry teacher when everyone else has started, or not having a calculator in Maths if you need one!

3. Avoid scaremongers like the plague. Before and after every exam you will encounter the scaremongers. They are people who, whether they know it or not, make themselves feel better by standing around comparing how well they are going to do/have done in comparison to others. A conversation with these people is guaranteed to be pretty confidence shattering. Go straight home after the exam.

4. Get some rest between the exams. Your timetable will have ensured that you have already covered everything at least once. Resting after exams is more valuable than looking over the same thing for the tenth time. The brain uses calories, and exams are exhausting.

Above all, stay calm. The fact that you are reading this demonstrates that you want to do well, which means you probably will. But don’t over-do it: your sanity is more important than any exam result and if you find yourself getting really stressed, talk to someone who’s been through it all before: a teacher, a parent, or an older friend perhaps. They’ll help you put things into perspective.

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With Science exams often calling for knowledge of human evolution, Louise Bessant (author of our Circulation title), discusses how contemporary science relates to this

In October 2009, it was revealed by scientists that ‘Ardi’ had been discovered.  But who was Ardi, and why is she so important?  This 4.4 million year old hominid (meaning ‘human-family’) from Ethiopia was about 1.2m high, hairy, and changed scientists’ thoughts on the evolution of humans.

Scientists worked for 17 years on Ardi, and they now think that Ardipithecus ramidus (to use her scientific name) may be the earliest human ancestor discovered that could walk upright.

Prior to the discovery of Ardi, ‘Lucy’ had been the oldest known hominid, but she was only 3.2 million years old.  This discovery is so important because scientists did not know what older hominid species looked like.  One of the lead scientists, Tim White, said “Ardi is not an ordinary fossil. It’s not a chimp.  It’s not a human. It shows us what we used to be.”

So, how have human’s evolved? Scientists believe we are not from monkeys and other apes, we are related to them as we are descended from the same ancestor; from something called a common ancestor.  Scientists don’t know what this common ancestor was, but they think it lived 7–9 million years ago in the forests of Africa.  Ardi is not our common ancestor, but is very close.

Over time, the different species evolved due to natural selection. This happens because most living things show variation.  Individuals with good characteristics for their habitat survive and breed, and pass on the good features.  Some were best suited to staying in the trees, due to their strong wrists and long limbs.  These features were passed onto future generations until they evolved into the monkeys and apes we recognise today.  Species that were not adapted to their environment became extinct.

Others evolved to be able to walk upright because of the shape of their pelvis and feet, but scientists don’t know why they did this.  It could have been to look for food as forests disappeared, or to look for a mate and carry food to it.  As time went on, hominids developed larger brains to enable them to learn and solve problems.  Scientists do not yet agree on how all of this happened, so will need more evidence and data to support their theory.  The debate of how human evolution happened carries on, just as it did in Charles Darwin’s time.

Remember that being up to date with what’s going on in the world of Science can be really useful for your GCSE exams. Click here for more information on evolution and natural selection.

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With Christmas just around the corner, you may be worrying about mocks or exams in January (or thinking about Christmas food!), so History teacher Emily Thomas offers up some easy-to-digest advice

Many GCSE subjects require students to process and memorise what can feel like an impossible amount of information. The feeling that you are drowning in facts, figures, and arguments is completely understandable. As GCSE students you are studying up to twelve separate subjects. Remembering what you learnt last week can be hard enough, let alone remembering everything you have learnt over the last two years for the exam.

But do not fear. There are ways of making all this information digestible. The ‘takeaway’ is one of these ways. It is an idea borrowed from the business world. When giving presentations, some modern business people like to finish with a takeaway. This doesn’t mean that they order in burgers and chips for everyone. It means that they finish with one message (the takeaway) that their listeners should take with them.

In my GCSE classes, I find that the idea of the takeaway helps students remember important messages from week to week. At the end of every lesson I ask each student to come up with his or her own takeaway sentence. It needs to be small enough to remember, but dense enough to be useful.

You might, for example, spend a whole history lesson debating whether or not World War Two was good for America. You will talk about a range of social groups, look at sources and discuss different interpretations. There is no way that you can memorise the entire lesson, and nor should you try to.

You need to strip it down to the basics. Get into the habit of looking over your work at the end of the lesson or revision session. Think about how you would explain your learning to someone who knew nothing about the topic. Use no more than one sentence. Write the sentence underneath your work and underline it. Or, even better, put it on a post-it note and stick it somewhere at home where you can’t avoid seeing it.

To revisit our example of the lesson on America and World War Two, your takeaway might be “WWII boosted the American economy and gave opportunities to women, but some minority groups faced discrimination”. Although it lacks detail, the key message is there. It is only once you are confident with key messages that you can start to pad out your revision with the details.

To begin with you might find it difficult to strip a whole lesson or topic down to a single sentence. You might worry that you’re missing something. If this is the case, do it gradually. Start with limiting yourself to ten lines, and then strip those ten lines down to a sentence. After a while, once you get good at it, see if you can reduce your takeaway to a few words and abbreviations. For example, “WWII good for economy and women, BUT bad for minorities”.

Give it a try. And if it goes well, reward yourself with a real takeaway. Why not try it out on some of your relatives over the Christmas holidays!

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Nic Worgan, English teacher and author of Animal Farm and Poetry from Other Cultures: Cluster One and Two, offers up some advice on how you can make working in a group work for you

Chances are that at some point during your school day you will be put into a group to work on a particular task. As a rule, you get out of a group work task what you put in, so they shouldn’t be used as an opportunity to catch up on the gossip from the weekend! Here are some suggestions for getting the most out of your group work and making it a positive learning experience.

1) Make sure everyone in the group is involved. This is easier said than done, as your group could consist of someone who dominates the task and someone else who is very quiet. The best way to overcome this is to go around the group and make sure that each person puts forward their ideas or comments. As a group, make sure those ideas are discussed. Remember that everyone in the group can contribute something and the more ideas that are shared and explored, the better the learning that will take place.

2) Be supportive and interested in the ideas of everyone in the group. Support and encouragement from each group member will ensure the most productive group work and develop important skills for everyone.

3) Always try to give further suggestions to develop everyone’s ideas. Don’t be afraid to do this. Sometimes a “wrong” answer can lead to the most productive discussion, as getting something “right” first time doesn’t always lead to productive exploration.

4) A simple idea, but one which is often overlooked, is listening to each other. It is an important skill that needs to be developed for your GCSEs and beyond. If you don’t listen to other people’s ideas, you can’t be involved in the exploration and you might miss something really important!

It is no coincidence that group work is used a great deal in the classroom. If done well it can develop several important skills and provide you with an excellent learning experience. It is up to you to take advantage of it!

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GCSEPod and our team of Maths teachers have been hard at work for the last few months, making Maths as useful as possible for you!

You might be thinking how can we make Maths easy-to-understand with audio, and surely it’s not possible to revise Maths without trawling through pages and pages of examples in exercise books?

Well, through a mixture of well-explained scripts, an interesting voice and lots and lots of images – we think we’ve managed it! Our images even show the working out you’ll need to know for your exams.

The ‘Test Yourself’ section at the end of each title will make sure you’ve understood what you’ve just watched, and if you get any questions wrong you can flick back and listen to the relevant chapters again.

Maths is relevant to many areas of everyday life, whether you like the subject or not! So it’s useful not only for your GCSEs. In our ‘Ratio and Proportion’ title we’ll be looking at wine gums, charities, boys, recipes, girls, toilet roll and starting up your own business – all in relation to Maths!

In ‘Number Operations’ we pose the question - ever since the first calculations were written down, how could Mathematicians be sure that anyone reading a calculation would interpret it in the same way and come up with the same answer? Answers on a postcard (or you could just listen to the title)!

‘Powers and Roots’ states that the moon is approximately 384 million, 400 thousand metres from the earth. But do you know how to put this into standard index form? Listening to this title will help you find out. If you buy a whole topic from GCSEPod you save 20% over buying the individual titles. Using Maths can help you to work out exactly how much you’re saving!

So watch out, GCSEPod Maths is coming soon…

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With many of us taking exams this month, or taking mocks at some point in the future, Hazel Chee, a French and Spanish teacher, gives us her tips on surviving revision and exams

School can be stressful at the best of times, throw in exams and you may feel overwhelmed.  Worry not! Regular reviewing of work and careful scheduling can help make your anxiety disappear.  Completing homework is the bare minimum you should do.  Become an independent learner, take responsibility for your own learning and don’t leave it all to the last minute.

It might be useful to make a timetable, set attainable goals, and stick to it.  You could also make a list of the subjects you need to study.  Prioritise your time, study your least favourite, or most challenging, subject first.  No-one can learn things in detail without taking short, regular breaks.  You’ll need the time to process the information.

Don’t stress – it’s only an exam, NOT the end of the world.  Should you find yourself stressed – calm down by taking slow deep breaths.  Sit up straight, inhale slowly through your nose, feel your rib cage expand then breathe out slowly through your mouth.  Repeat this simple exercise at least 5 times.  You should feel better at the end of it.

Make sure you eat healthily and are not filling up on junk food.  Yes, it may be quick and convenient, and yes it’ll be a quick burst of energy, but it won’t last.  Instead, try eating a piece of fruit rather than chocolate before an exam.  It won’t leave you hungry and energy will be released slowly into your system, giving you more opportunity to concentrate in the exam.  Keep hydrated by drinking plenty of water.  Caffeinated drinks are not a good substitute.  Above all, get a good night’s sleep.

During the exam, If you don’t know an answer, stay calm and move onto the next question.  However, remember to go back to it.  If you’re still unsure – make an intelligent guess, go with your gut feeling, and try not to leave any blank spaces.  The examiners aren’t out to trick you – they want you to demonstrate your knowledge.  Regular, thorough revision is the way to go - don’t forget GCSEPod can help with this!

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