Making Sense of Our Place

Trying to get students to understand that their world goes beyond their own world is relevant when you teach science! This is an attempt to create a story that will interest your students as well as educate them about the the bigger picture! Our story begins....

Understanding what is science and how it is related to our world is a concept that is difficult for students to understand We will take a short tour through it to try and make sense out of it. First stop on our way is called Googleville. In this peculiar place, we will use the help of Google earth and Neo. http://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/Search.html

http://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/Search.html

http://www.allthegoodness.com/images/evap_09_clouds.jpg cloud cover

Unfortunately, Neo was not working well at Googleville so we could not see our house because of the dense cloud cover. So we need to investigate the story from a different perspective. We need to explore the reason why we have this cloud cover over a place that is usually very sunny and bright. In order to do this, our story will take us to a place called "Large Collections". This place has numerous amounts of information that will be used to help figure out our problem.

Before we engage on our next adventure we will take a short break!

BREAK TIME

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot

Now that was refreshing! What do you think?

Now back to our story

In order to understand this large collection of information we will use My NasaData.

http://mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov/science_projects.php

Here we learn about clouds and see data about various clouds. How will this help us understand our own cloud cover? We will now use this large amount of data to make sense of why we have clouds where there shouldn't be clouds. Was all the data helpful or was it to much? Let's talk about the story all this data creates. THINK TIME!!!!! Okay enough of that! Let's go to another section that will help us make our story seem more do able.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cloudsat/multimedia/video-cloudsat-animation.html

Let's try something simple!

http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/experiment/00000030

RESOURCES

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/paleo.html

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cloudsat/main/index.html

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/