TPACK

Content: This project will cover some standards included in the Utah core curriculum for 3rd grade. More specifically, standard 1: students will understand how geography influences community location and development. Objective 1: determine the relationships between human settlement and geography. Students will explore Mount Everest, the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, and the Alamo. They will determine what geographical influences these places have and there developments.

Pedagogy: With google earth, students can experience many things and learn many things by personal research. They can can better grasp how the world looks like, distances between places, and where things are. They can also access information about historical events and passages. Most of what they will do with google earth is discovery learning.

Technology: The technology we use for this activity mostly deals with google earth. With the availability of computers, students will be able to do some exploring. Students can find out a lot of information and see pictures about places they have never been to.

Location	Activity	Google Earth Content
1. Mount Everest	Students will first estimate how big Mount Everest is before having the terrain icon on, they will then have to estimate how big Mount Everest is after they turn on the terrain icon.	Using google terrain function, students will view and explore Mount Everest.
2. New York	Students will find out properties of the Statue of Liberty. They will find out about its height, width, and materials it is made up of. They will learn about how it is able to withstand weather and time.	Using a link, a picture of the Statue of Liberty, and a short article, students will learn more about the history of the statue of liberty.
3. South Dakota	Students will find Mount Rushmore and answer the following questions: How many faces are there? What are the names of the faces? How big is it? How much money did it take to make it?	Images of Mount Rushmore with a short article including major facts.
4. Texas	Journal Entry: Students will write about important points that they find out about the Alamo. They should include dates and important people.	Wiki information about the Alamo and its importance.
Details of image overlay / path / polygon:	Polygon

Digital Story Telling

TPACK

Content: We are going to focus on teaching students about poetry and its different structures. We covered part of Standard 8 objective 6 indicator b: Produce traditional and imaginative stories, narrative and formula poetry s an individual/shared writing activity. Produce traditional stories, narrative and formula poetry as an individual/shared activity. During this language arts activity, students will be able to practice rhyming.

Pedagogy: Our pedagogy is teaching kids different forms of writing through poetry. Students will better understand the format AABB with this particular poem. They will later be able to research a peice of work that will interest them that fits this format.

Technology: We will use a PhotoStory to create this project. Photostory will be fun for students to work with. It will alwow them to see peotry not just as writing but in pictures. They will be able to hear themselves rehearse peotry and become more interested.

TPACK Questions

Content: Through Stellarium, we were able to create a lesson plan about both geometric figures and constellations . We were able to cover part of standard 4 of the 6th grade core curriculum. Students will understand the scale of size, distance between objects, movement, and apparent motion (due to Earth’s rotation) of objects in the universe and how cultures have understood, related to and used these objects in the night sky. Students would have to look at the night sky in Stellarium to find constellations that resembled geometric shapes or had geometric shapes within them. They would also become more familiar with constellations and their names.   

Pedagogy: Learning about the stars could be difficult to do during school because it would still be day time and you would not be able to see anything. Stellarium is a great tool to use to be a more effective teacher. You would not only be reading out definitions of things or reading out names, instead you would be using Stellarium to help your students literally see what they are learning about.  

  

Technology: The technology we used for this activity was the program Stellarium. The students would be able to see features of the sky through a computer program. Stellarium is a useful program because it helps students get a real life image of things in the sky. 

 

The tech savvy teacher

Students often find science and math a bit boring. Using a program like Stellarium, students will become engaged with the constellations, stars, and the night sky. The program is easy to use and students will have no problem accessing the information it holds. You can do neat things with this program. One example is you can look at the sky the night you were born. But, we are not going to learn how to do that now. This time we will learn about constellations and how they form geometric shapes and patterns. For this activity, the students will identify at least 5 constellations with a geometric shape or pattern. Then have them draw the constellations on a piece of paper.

Discuss with the students that constellations are made up of stars, and that they create different kinds of shapes. Explain to the students that you will be finding shapes in the sky. The first step is to open up Stellarium. Then the student will click on the drawing of the constellations and names of the constellations icons in the lower left hand corner of the screen in the tool bar. This will bring up a screen that looks like this:

Next,  the student will use the mouse to move the sky around until they find a constellation that has a geometric shape. Here are some examples:

This is an example of triangles.

In this picture you see a triangle and a parallelogram.

This is a picture of a constellation that is the shape of a kite. 

As shown in the above pictures, there are lots of geometric shapes made out of stars. Through this activity students are able to better understand math through a science activity. This activity expands the students' knowledge about star constellations. It helps them become more familiar with their names as well as what they look like. This activity is for sixth grade, but it could be used in lower grades as well.