Science Challenge Summary

The three presentations I reviewed were:
1. Alexandra
2. Beth
3. Andrea

The upside of implementing a science activity idea in an elementary classroom is it's a great way to implement technology for students to use in learning about science. The downside of of implementing this is the lack of control over each individual student, because they are individually or in groups using the technology.
Overall, though, the upsides outweigh the downsides, because it truly is a magnificent way for students to interact with science and internalize the learning better.

Sandy Kellyn & Maria

Science Challenge

For our Science Challenge project we will be teaching basic cloud types. The teacher will define the basic cloud types, while showing students different pictures of each type. Once they've been introduced to different clouds, the students will organize and identify the cloud types, and make predictions of what types of weather conditions each cloud will produce, recording that in their journals. For our assessment we will use the 'Clouds' worksheet on Kidsperation to see if the students can create their own organized sheet of the various cloud types.

For our content we've decided to fulfill the Science Utah Core Standard #2 objective 1 for the 4th grade. Students will be able to identify the basic cloud types.

Our pedagogy will have the students observe different pictures of cloud types, organizing and identifying the clouds, and making predictions of what types of weather each cloud will produce. It allows students to have a visual to see what the types of clouds look like, they'll be able to interact with their journal by identifying clouds each day, and finally they get to put their input in with their weather predictions.

We will us Kidsperation for our technology because the 'clouds' worksheet not only enables the students to have interaction with identifying the cloud types, it will assess their knowledge of what they have learned.

Using Kidsperation adds in a multimodal representation to our teacher because it allows the student to interact on various levels of their knowledge.

Virtual Tour Comments

I viewed Kerry's, Alexandra's, & Gillian's virtual tours.

The upsides of implementing a virtual tour in an elementary classroom are as follows: visually stimulating and virtually interactive. Students are able to apply different modes of learning. The Downsides are: there's a lot of room for playing around and it's hard to control the students; targeted learning information is put off to the side, causing other stimuating facts surrounding it get in the way.

National Parks Google Earth Tour

Virtual Tour Description

In my virtual tour of national parks, I will be addressing standard 1 for 3rd graders, which is: Students will understand how geography influences community location and development.

I chose to do a virtual tour on this topic because I've always had an interest in our country's national parks, and thought it would be fun to create a tour of some of them. The content in this tour will not only familiarize the students with 4 national parks, but give them activities to get them more acquainted with what each of them are like and give them a chance to imagine what it would look like.