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.