Week 8

I watched and commented on Kindy, Melissa, and Whitney's voice thread/presentation. They did a great job!!

I like using this program a lot. It was really fun making the voice thread, as well as using Stellarium. I think voice threads could be very helpful in the classroom so that students could re-watch the voice thread if needed. It could be very beneficial for students who need repetition and don't catch all they need to the first time. A downside to them perhaps would be if the students had questions. It might be easier if the teacher was right there to help answer questions. It also could be a dissadvantage to have students watching a screen rather than having a class discussion. It doesn't invite social language, ect...

On the whole- I reall enjoyed this activity, and think it would be areally good thing to try and impliment into the classroom.

Science Challenge

Week 7

The content of this project is based on stars. Specifically, we will be learning about brightness of stars and why some are brighter than others. We will also be talking about constellations. As a fun activity, and to make the information meaningful personally, students will get to find their own constellations, which feeds into our pedagogy. We are going to use the program stellarium which allows students to look at the starlit night sky from a computer. Because of this, the technology works perfectly with the content we are teaching. After finding their own constellations, students will document their findings by writing a short paragraph. They can summarize what they learned and also what constellations they found.

I'm excited about this activity. I think it will be fun and really neat.

Plan for Science Activity

This activity will be used for 6th grade and fulfills the requirements of Standard 4 Objective 2, which says to describe the appearance and apparent motion of groups of stars in the night sky relative to Earth. For this particular activity, we are going to focus on the brightness of stars.

To start out, we as a class are going to have a discussion about the reasons some stars are brighter than others. Size and distance are two of the main reasons. After our discussion, students will use the program Stellarium to explore the constellations in the night sky. After finding some well known constellations, students will continue to look at the stars and see if they can find any constellations of their own.

After looking at the various constellations, students will compare the brightness of the stars they see/use in their constellations. The will also state the two reasons for difference in brightness we discussed in class. Students will record their findings in a short paragraph.

Week 6

I commented on Whitney's, Heidi's, and Heather's tours. I loved them all. This assignment was a bit challenging for me, but I absolutely loved getting to know how to work with Google Earth better. I find it fascinating.

One of the benefits of using tours like this in the classroom, I think, is that the students literally get to see where it is in the world. It's fairly easy to use, and they get to travel the world in a "click of the mouse."

A downside of this kind of assignment, is that I can see it being problematic for certain students, such as those with learning disabilities. Making adjustments would be easy enough though. Instead of having them work on the computer, you could print out each of the sights and then help them view movies when you have them.

Super neat assignment. I liked it a lot!

Google Earth Tour!

This is a tour that takes you to some of the coolest places in the Middle East! As you can see, our locations are Egypt and Jordan. Hope you enjoy!

Week 5

The core standard I am addressing is in 6th Grade Social Studies. Standard 1. Obective 4-
Analyze how the earliest civilizations created technologies and systems to meet community and personal needs. a)Identify innovations in manmade structures over time (e.g. irrigation, roads, building materials) and their influence on meeting needs.

I chose this topic because I went to Egypt, Jordan, and Israel this summer, where I got to see and learn about many famous ancient structures. When I saw the structures, I was literally amazed that people could create them so long ago... and that they still stand today. I would love to talk about this and teach this in my classroom. I think the representation/ using google earth, will be very beneficial, because it will help students visualize where these countries are in relation to the US. Also, getting to see the actual structures in such a way, would be more exciting than just looking at a book with pictures and reading about it. Interactive learning is always better.