TPACK Questions week 7

What is the content you’ll be using in your lesson? The content of this lesson will be to explain how selected indigenous cultures of the Americas have changed over time. The culture we will focus on is the Mayans.
What is the pedagogy you’ll be using and why is it a good fit with the content? The strategies that I would use include observing, researching, comparing, etc. Students will be able to research information on different Mayan cities. In addition, they will compare photographs of Mayan ruins and current buildings/cities and will observe the differences. This fits with the content because in order to understand that a culture or city has undergone a change over time they need to be able to see differences. Seeing how a land was once filled with pyramids and is now covered in forest or more modern cities shows that there has been significant change.
What is the technology you’ll be using and why is it a good fit with the content and pedagogy? The technology includes google earth which will show students exactly what is located in a certain area now. As well as provide links to different pictures and information that will give students an idea of what kinds of changes have taken place. In this project, students focus is on the technology, the learning is individual based because they will be exploring and learning as they go through the tour.

Virtual Tour Plan

Location	Activity	Google Earth Content
1. Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico	Students will read about different Mayan ruins and write down the name of their favorite and why it is their favorite	Photograph of Chichen Itza, link to site with multiple ruins
2. Uxmal, Yucatan, Mexico	Search some of the ruins read about in the first part of the tour on GoogleEarth	Photographs of ruins in different cities
3. Merida, Yucatan, Mexico	Compare some of the buildings found here now, to the ruins previously read about (find ancient ruins in Merida)	Pictures of houses, buildings and streets in the area, link to photographs of ruins in Merida
4. Forested area of the Yucatan	Explain how the area has changed over time and the causes for the change: talk to your neighbor about these changes	Link to clip about Mayans, gives details about the land occupied by the Mayans
Details of image polygon:	Highlight the boundaries of the ancient Mayan civilization

Digital Storytelling

"Where did you come from baby dear?"
Poetry Interpretation

***I spent several hours trying to load this into teacher tube with no success, so I just uploaded it into my blog.

Storyboard

TPACK Questions Week 5

What is the content you’ll be using in your lesson? The content comes from standard 1, objective 2. Students will be working on developing language through viewing media and presenting. Students enjoy different types of media, which is why this assignment would be so beneficial because they are working with literature and creating a story through media that they will share with the class. Everyone will benefit from viewing other stories.
What is the pedagogy you’ll be using and why is it a good fit with the content? For the writing assignment, students will do a poetry interpretation. This means they will be putting a poem together with their own illustrations. I think this would be a good opportunity to talk about symbolism and how different people get different meaning from poetry.This fits with the content because they will be using media to present their poem.
What is the technology you’ll be using and why is it a good fit with the content and pedagogy? I will be using photostory or iMovie to put the stories together. Students may also be using digital cameras to capture images. This fits with content and pedagogy because the use of technology allows the students to put their presentations together.

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.