Daren's IPT287 science technology activity plan

Daren's Science Activity
My science activity will be covering 6th grade science, standard 4: objective 2 using the stellarium technology tool. For this activity, the students in my class are going to be using the stellarium program to locate and identify star consolations in the night sky. The teacher will give each student a list of constellations, star names that are in those consolations, and a specific time of night to look at, and what the constellations look like. It will then be up to the students to look at the night sky and the time given to them and to see if they can find the constellations pattern without using any special features. After they think they have identified a constellation, they can then use the more special features on the program to see if they have the right constellation. (Note. If there is enough time, the teacher can also have the student’s change the time of night they are looking at and see if the students can still find constellations that they found at the other time of night.)

TPACK
Content- We will be doing the Science Core Curriculum Standard 4: Objective 2 which is describing the appearance and apparent motion of groups of stars in the night sky relative to earth. We are doing this by locating and identify stars that are grouped in patterns in the night sky.

Pedagogy- I am using a teaching method where the students are learning how to find star groupings (constellations) are on their own. Doing this helps students internalize the lesson better since they are required to think about different ways to find the constellation. This also goes very well with the content since the focuses is to identify the star groupings. Being able to identify a constellation by themselves is much more effective then just being told where it is by the teacher.

Technology- My class will be using the stellarium technology to look at the night sky. This technology works very well with the pedagogy because it allows my class to look at the night sky on their own at any designated time (in this case, during class). Without this technology, the only time to do this kind of project would be at night with the real sky. Although using the night sky to find consolations would be great for the students, actually doing the project is much harder since you have to worry about weather and you cannot gather the class together at night.