Science in the news!

  This week had to be my favorite week of the semester! This week we focused on the topic of astronomy! Even though my strength in school is definitely not science, I love to learn about outer space, the stars, and the planets. We were given a home assignment to find astronomy in the news and create a scrapbook or collage on our news articles. Last week I mentioned how me and my partner used Glogster for our weather topic and this week I used Glogster again! I found multiple articles on the new Planet 9, galaxies, stars, etc. To the right you can see a sample of my Glogster poster in my articles. Click the link and you will be able to see a full version of my poster! When you see the full version you can also click on the titles of the article to be directly forwarded to the article itself!

When we came to class the next day we were then put into groups! We were to look at all of our articles and pick words that we found repeated and all our articles had in common. When we found those words we were to use another digital tool to display those words. Some tools we could have used were tools like Wordle, Tagul, ABCya, Tagxedo, WordArt, and Tagcrowd. The ones my classmates used were very interesting and it was cool to see how they worked and what the finished project looked like. For my group we used Wordle! Due to technicalities we found it difficult to get the finished product but somehow we got it! Some words we found in common were Astronauts, Asteroids, Orbit, Mars, Moon, Galaxies, etc.

             We also, after creating our Wordle had to create a timeline of the different events such as discoveries, companies, like NASA, that were founded. For our digital timeline were use an extremely cool tool called TikiToki! I absolutely loved this tool. When creating it, it was very difficult to figure out. Since it was brand knew to all of us we had to explore and figure out how to make events on a timeline and put them on their right date. However, the finished product was amazing. It was 3D and for our background picture we chose the stars and it looked like you were actually in outer space. Especially when you click and make the timeline full screen.  If you would like to see our timeline click the link! Make sure you click the option to make it 3D to get the full effect and make it full screen! I would use this tool in my classroom and also recommend it to any

teacher. It is good for any subject and students would definitely love it. However, depending on the grade I would not recommend for students to use it due to it being somewhat complicated to use. If you wish not to use TikiToki, here is a        link to some other digital timeline website you could also use.  I really enjoyed this activity. I thought it was fun to do and very interesting to me due to my love for astronomy.