From: Marcella Dawson <dawsonm@tenet.edu>
Subject: class planning questions
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 1996 20:19:55 -0600 (CST)
1. Primarily to Jan--I am not clear what will be available via the Internet for the live TV program. Audio - yes. Pictures? If I plan to participate via the Internet what can I expect? 2. My classes plan to participate in the webchat after the program. Based on past experience, will there be a bottleneck getting through? 3. My students registered to participate in the toolkit project. Is there any way I can check that they are registered or should I just register again? 4. I just did a 0% tech lab. It was a huge hit and I thought I would share it with everyone. I realized that my 8th graders have no concept of distance (basically not of time either!). I found two great labs in the NSTA middle school astronomy book. We built a scale model of the solar system at 100 meters from the sun to Pluto. There is a great amount of math included; working out a strategy for completing the measurements in one "teacher class period" was also interesting. The girls were far more astute than the boys. The boys had a hard time deciding who the chief was. The second lab required the solar system to be laid out on a large field. One student is the electromagnetic messenger sent out from earth to each of the other planets. This one reads like a nut-case, but it is perfect for 8th graders. They loved it. I strongly suggest both of these labs from "Astronomy", Project Earth Science, NSTA: Solar System Scale and Hello Out There. 5. We are all madly reading the bios and anything we can find on instrumentation to enhance our tool-kits. We have tool-kits, the 6th graders' seed experiments, and the 7th graders bones all over the lab. It is a mess but I guess mess comes with projects. Marcella Dawson, Science Department St. Anne School 2120 Westheimer Houston, TX 77098 (713)526-3279