Core Content for Virtual Tour

Standard 2

Students will understand that volcanoes, earthquakes, uplift, weathering, and erosion reshape Earth's surface.

In the Science 5th Grade Core

I chose this topic for the virtual tour, mostly because everything else I tried kept bombing. I just kept going through the Core curriculum to try to get inspired about something I could do. Plus it was hard to find places besides popular cities that had more stuff to click on. I wanted to do things like the Rainforest and the Sahara Desert but Google Earth didn't really like those choices.

I do feel like the virtual tour can help the students learn a concept more. I don't know if it is the best way, but it is different. Plus they can do it at home with a parent and they also have the option of playing with the layers and finding out different information. It is nice to let the students do the inquiring. I think the best thing would be to let the students just explore on there and see what they can find.

Plan for Virtual Tour

Location	Activity Description	Google Earth Content
1. Cleveland Volcano	Find the answer to the following question: Is this volcano active?	Places layer
2. Mt. St. Helens	Find the answer to the following question: What year was its' last major eruption?	Volcanoes layer
3. Haleakala	Pick your favorite 3 pictures.	Volcanoes and Panoramios layer
4. Damavand	Find the answer to the following question: Is this volcano active? Choose one other fun fact to share.	Wikipedia layer

Is it hard to use a Digital Story in the classroom?

I would say, it depends. The greatest challenge is that I plan on teaching young kids- so if I used this tool, I would be making it myself. That's fine, except that teachers are already lacking in spare time, so to try to find time to make videos that pertain to my lesson concepts is kind of unrealistic. If I'm teaching more like 3rd graders, they might be able to do a simple video by themselves, which I think would be absolutely fun. However, I have to be honest- this was a really fun assignment, stressful but fun. I felt very accomplished at the end when I watched my video.

My Digital Story- ABC Storybook

Screen shot of Storyboard

Click to Enlarge

Different Representations

This week, we learned about the different ways to represent content knowledge. We discussed textual, visual, auditory, dynamic, and multimodal. For our digital story, we will be using several different representations, including textual, visual, and auditory. This means that our digital story is considered multimodal. I think this info is beneficial, but the TPACK stuff got kind of confusing. What I gathered is that TPACK means you use your technology knowledge to enhance your pedagogical knowledge to teach content..... Wow, that sounded intense.

Skype shot!

Mrs. Whitney's Class Website

Click here to see My Class Website

Websites

Soo, today I learned how to make a website! Although, I felt quite rushed and frazzled, it's pretty cool to see my lil website. None of what we did for it is necessarily hard, I just didn't know how to do it before. I think that's what I'm realizing about this class, it's not hard, I just need the instructions for it. Hopefully I'll use this someday, it would surprise me though that a school wouldn't just provide a website for us to add our info on. Maybe they will but we will still have to know how to embed pictures and videos, so I guess it is beneficial. Anyway, it was a dandy class.

I don't know much....

So, I don't know much about technology. I know google pretty well and gmail. And I can blog somewhat, but other than that- I'm pretty lacking in the technology world. I do think it's interesting though, so I'm excited to learn more in this class. We'll see how it goes.