Virgin Galaxies

   Today, I completed a series of tasks about virgin galaxies. I learned a lot about not only that though; I also learned a lot about new technology I can use in the classroom once I become a teacher. I used Google drawing for the first time while completing this activity. I really like this program because I'm not too great of an artist usually, but it's so easy to draw with it. I can use it in my future classroom whenever I have to draw something for my students. This program is also easy enough for students to use themselves. You can check out my Google drawing here. My drawing is of the earth, the atmosphere and the International Space Center. I estimated the distances between all of those things, and then drew Mount Everest on earth, and labeled its height, which is 5.5 miles high.   I also learned a lot about outer space in general while completing these tasks. Something really cool that I learned was that there is a "super-earth" that scientists have recently discovered. This "planet" is next to Bernard's star, which is the closest star to our sun that we know of. We believe it to be very icy and cold. What's really interesting about it though, is that scientists believe that there may be life there. Even though it's really cold, scientists still believe that it could support life. We believe that this "planet" is about 6 light years away, which means it would take over 100,000 years of travel to reach. "After a very careful analysis, we are 99 percent confident that the planet is there," Ignasi Ribas, of the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia and the Institute of Space Sciences in Spain, said in a statement. This is fascinating to me, and I would like to learn even more about other life that may exist on other planets. If you would like to learn more about this, the article is linked here.

   Something else I wanted to research after this lesson was dark matter. The last link in the series of tasks brought me to Wonderopolis, which is a website where teachers and students can look up things that they have wonders about and find resources to help learn about them. While on this site, I learned that dark matter is a hypothetical type of matter that scientist believe makes up over 85% of the total matter in the universe. Wonderopolis helped me find this answer very easily, and I would use the tool again in the future to find information about my wonders.   After completing all of these activities, I think that I have figured out my method of teaching this topic to students. I absolutely would teach this in an inquiry lesson following the five E's: engage, explore, explain, elaborate and evaluate. This would allow the students to explore and learn by themselves about this topic. Virgin galaxies and outer space is most certainly a topic that students are going to have questions about; so it is best to let them explore and answer those questions. Students should also make hypotheses about these questions before they explore their answers. Inquiry is one of the most fun, student-centered ways to learn, and is highly appropriate for this topic.

Teaching Earth Science!

   Yesterday, my class and I all split into groups and presented all about different kinds of earth science! There were presentations about the ocean and pollution, instruments used to measure weather, violent weather and earth's atmosphere. These presentations were all engaging and informative and provided me with a lot of new information on these topics and how to teach them to my future students one day. My group presented to the class about Pangaea and the earth's surface. You can find the link to my groups presentation here. Check it out!
   I gained a lot of new insights on teaching through exploring this topic and creating this presentation. My group and I chose to do this topic because we decided that we did not know a lot about it at all, and it would benefit us as future science educators to learn it now. We decided to focus in on Pangaea as well because Pangaea and other supercontinents that have existed throughout history shift the earth's surface. Something really interesting I learned from this presentation was that there will in fact be another supercontinent one day. A supercontinent like Pangaea forms about every 600 years. Pangaea existed about 300 years ago, meaning that we are about halfway to having another supercontinent exist. This is because the earth's plates are constantly moving and shifting; sometimes the plates shift together and sometimes they shift apart, making the land closer or farther away from each other. I did not know this before our project; I thought Pangaea was the only supercontinent that we would ever know, but that is not the case.
   I also learned all about a new technology that I can use to collect and store student answers during a lesson. It's called mentimeter. Mentimeter is an app or online program that lets the teacher ask questions in a variety of ways and get the responses in real time. It can be used as a pre-assessment, check for understanding or post-assessment during a wide array of lessons. During my groups lesson, we used mentimeter for all three! You can ask basic multiple choice questions or true or false questions, or you can do something like a word cloud, which is a much more interactive way to display the responses and collect student data. This is a great form of technology to use and is appropriate for all ages! Check out this link and see how mentimeter works and how my peers answered the questions we gave them.