Modeling Earth Science

         For my Earth Science lesson I used maps and graphs from weather.com to show factors that affect weather. The student collected data on weather conditions and then used the graphs and maps to explain what factors would be causing those weather conditions. The lesson was a little difficult to do because of my limited access to school age students. I had to give the lesson to my nephew over Skype because of being on summer break and living across the country from all of my relatives. He did really well with the lesson and was able to complete the entire activity. I had to give him a data table to fill out and some help graphing the data but he was able to explain the data and form conclusions on his own.  He loved using the area maps on the website which also show realtime movement of weather systems. I thought the maps worked great for showing how weather and climate work. There are also other web resources we used to show the earths positioning from the sun. The only difficulty I had was implementing a lesson from 2000 miles away, otherwise it went well and my nephew reached my goals.

This week I looked at a couple tools for presentations. The first was Prezi.com a program similar to a powerpoint but it has more bells and whistles. At first, like anything else you try for the first time, it is hard to navigate and get used to. In the little time I messed around with it I never got comfortable using all of the different tools. It does make for an interesting presentation when you pan around to the different parts. It is a flashy way to present, but not overly easy to use at first. The other tool I played around with was creaza. I thought it was an interesting way to display information, again I could not quite get the hang of it with the little time I spent on it. I thought adding audio and syncing it with the video was fairly easy. It had some similar qualities to a mac program I use in the classroom. I did have some trouble adding my own content but I did not work with for long enough to call it hard to use. Overall I think both of these are great options for my upcoming project.