Astronomical Discoveries

As a class we have been working diligently outside of the field on new assignments to further expand our abilities to be wonderful science teachers. The past two weeks we have been focusing on astronomy. Astronomy has always been my favorite science topic. Previously, before I transferred to the Mount, I attended a community college that offered two courses on astronomy. I took both and loved it. The teacher created the class to be very hands on which is my learning style choice. He allowed us to attend school at night to observe the sky through his telescope. He made the class exciting. 

I was enthused to hear our current topic. During our first session doing space we created a virtual collage of astronomy articles. I chose to create one based on the planets in our solar system. I found a recent article on each planet and organized it in a coherent manor on glogster.

Check out my Glogster. Glogster is a really easy to use website that allows you told hold links about a topic in one easily accessible location. It allows you to create crafty backgrounds to match the theme of the articles. As a teacher, you can assign students a topic to research and allow the to gather different articles on this virtual collage. As a teacher, introducing a lesson could be very helpful with this tool. It is easy to access, easy to use and a great space to gather information from different sources on one engaging document. 

On Thursday we split into groups of two. We were assigned a topic to research. Elizabeth and I were assigned to work together on Neptune. I have never had the opportunity to collaboratively work with Elizabeth. I like that our groups change every topic and we are all having the opportunity to work with different people. This is a teaching method I will take advantage of in the future. It allows all the students to collaboratively work together. Switching groups also allows for different bonds to be made between classmates and different views to be exchanged between each other. 

Elizabeth and I presented our research on Neptune via PowerPoint. We combined groups and added Danyela and Bridget to our group. As a group we must create a word cloud based on our articles than create a virtual time line. We have been introduced to a number of different virtual applications to assist in our teaching experiences. I'm excited to continue learning more about how technology can benefit me as a future teacher and my future students as learners.