TPACK Questions

The content that I focused on in my science lesson was for the third grade and addressed the earth's relationship to the sun and the moon. The method of pedagogy that worked was observation because students could best learn about the rotation and the revolution of the earth by observing. With something like this it is hard to get hands-on, but this is as close as you can get. It's hard to replicate something like this in a classroom, which is why stellarium is a great technological resource and fits well with the content and pedagogy.

Tech Savvy Teacher

There is a wide variety of technological resources available to teachers. Let me share a neat example of how to incorporate technology in the classroom.

For this activity, I focused on teaching students about the movement of the earth, moon and stars through the sky and how these movements related to the earth. To start out students were put into small groups of two to three and were asked to research about the movement of the sun. Students found that the earth moves in two ways through the sky. First, the earth revolves around the sun. Second, it spins on its axis. The research process is shown in the picture on the right.

The next step in the process was for students to experiment with the effects of the earth’s movement. To understand these effects, students were introduced to Stellarium. With stellarium students were able to observe the effects of the revolution of the earth around the sun, as well as the orbits of other planets. This can be seen in the pictures below.










In addition to observing the orbits of the planets and the moon, students could observe the effects of the earth spinning on its axis. These effects are seen as night and day. The students could capture these images (examples are shown below).










By using technology, students were able to observe all of these instances in the classroom. Students could actually watch as the earth orbited the sun. This is something that cannot be replicated outside the classroom. This technology (which can be downloaded on to any computer) allows students to observe something that, normally, could not be observed. To reinforce this activity, students can observe the movement of the stars over a period of time, which is what they can see through stellarium at an excelerated speed.