The TPACK of the Project

One of my favorite things about this project is that students will have to do learning on their own. Instead of just sitting in class listening to me lecture, they will have a hands-on tool to discover the content. I believe that this is one of the best ways to learn and the goal of teaching. The technology project will really help with this pedagogy. The content encompassed in the project is not only important for the students, but fascinating to most people. Who wouldn't want to explore more about the heavens? This program "Stellarium" will really help the students explore as much or as little as they want, giving those students who are really interested in the subject an opportunity to learn. There isn't a whole lot of room for that in the curriculum, so it's nice to give them that option.

Technology Assignment Explained

As part of the core curriculum for secondary science classes, students muss learn classifications of structures. One focus will be the stars and planets. In order for our students to learn about these structures we have come up with a technology project these students can do on their own. We decided to have the students learn to use an online resource called "Stellarium". We created an assignment that helps them to familiarize themselves with the program and to explore a bit to help them understand more about these celestial structures. We took some screen videos showing how to do some of the steps for the assignment as a resource for the students. We posted these onto our course website so the students could access them and provided a link to a google document so that the students could have a template for their assignment. The students will answer the questions in the document by using "Stellarium" and take some screen shots. They will be required to post all answers and screen shots on their blog.