The Tech Savvy Teacher

We, as teachers, have to constantly struggle to find a balance between teaching core standards and engaging the students in in-depth, meaningful learning activities. With all the pressure that we receive from standardized testing requirements to district expectations, it's hard to really find ways to just delve into a topic and create meaningful experience from it because we're always rushing on to the next core topic. But if we are truly interested in our students' learning, growth, and development, we have to take a time out and find ways to engage our students in interesting and informational learning activities.

In an attempt to take a Utah State core standard and have an exploratory experience with it, I designed a lesson activity using Stellarium. For third grade science core, standard 1, objective 2, the students are supposed to be able to describe the movement of Earth and the moon and the apparent movement of other bodies through the sky. Instead of just holding up a flashlight sun and spinning a globe, I decided that it would be better to use Stellarium. Not only is this resource fun and engaging for the students, it actually shows them the apparent movement of the sun, moon, stars, and other bodies through the sky. To start out, have the students pick their hometown or another place that they'd like to be. I'm from Frisco, Texas so that was my starting point.

Next, have the students start at the current time of day. Make sure that the constellation application is on so you can see the stars that make up each constellations.

Have them hit the hour button up slowly. After each increase in hour, have them observe the sky, how the constellations seem to change, how the amount of light seems to change, etc. I would definitely recommend having the students either draw pictures or write in their science journals.

Of course, constellations show up the best at night so this is where students may be interested in spending most of the time of this activity. Here's what Frisco, Texas looks like at 11:53 p.m.

My favorite applications is being able to look at which stars make up each constellation, but then to add the artwork behind it to truly see where the names of each constellation came from. Whoever chose the names for the stars had an excellent imagination.

Some students may want to see how the sky changes for different parts of the earth. Allow them to check out other countries, cities, states, etc. Here's what the sky looks like at night in Antarctica.


The technology worked well in this lesson because it actually showed the students something tangible and observable that they wouldn't have been able to see otherwise. Which one of us has the resources to go to Antarctica at night with our classes? What about students who are interested in Africa or Australia? We can take the students natural curiosity and desire to explore the world around them, and capitalize on it as we teach them core curriculum standards. This way, not only do they have the knowledge to pass their standardized test, but they have actually learned something meaningful and interesting that they can retain.