Standards/Proficiency based Astronomy

I love the fundamental heart behind standards/proficiency based education. Unfortunately the NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards) seem to focus more on the theoretical aspects of Astronomy:

1.   Develop a model based on evidence to illustrate the life span of the sun and the role of nuclear fusion in the sun’s core to release energy that eventually reaches Earth in the form of radiation.
2.   Construct an explanation of the Big Bang theory based on astronomical evidence of light spectra, motion of distant galaxies, and composition of matter in the universe.
3.   Communicate scientific ideas about the way stars, over their life cycle, produce elements.
4.   Use mathematical or computational representations to predict the motion of orbiting objects in the solar system.  
5. Evaluate evidence of the past and current movements of continental and oceanic crust and the theory of plate tectonics to explain the ages of crustal rocks.
6.   Apply scientific reasoning and evidence from ancient Earth materials, meteorites, and other planetary surfaces to construct an account of Earth’s formation and early history.

Most of these are covered in our freshman science class. My curriculum that I've coalesced so far does not touch any of the above. All the standards I would use in my class have to be my own creations.

For my first unit, that is currently a week long, I've developed the following objectives:
 

1. Night Sky
1. Identify constellations visible in the night sky at a given time
2. Identify ideal viewing times for a given object
3. Correctly identify 5 constellations on an unmarked image
4. Understand the relationship between the night sky and mythology (the constellation project project)
5. Correctly measure distance between two objects in degrees
6. Correctly locate an object based on its measurements.
7. Identify difference between "near sky (planets, sun, moon)", stars, and deep sky

  Oh lordy! All that in a week?! It will take a long time to learn to identify 5 constellations on an unmarked image. Both my standards and curriculum will need to be revised to be more realistic and focused. I still have not figured out how I want to do grades (traditional point gradebook, a hybrid like Ms. Hagan's A/B/Not Yet, or see if our online gradebook has a point scale. I have 2 days to figure this out!

Unit planning with OneNote sucks!

Yes, the title is clickbait!

Yesterday during our in-service work day (and fighting with OneDrive for Business's corrupted cache) I made a sad discovery. Files attached in a OneNote document, where they show up as cute little icons, are copied and embedded in the document itself. Any edits made to the original file will not show up in OneNote's copy, and edits made to the document in OneNote will not show up in the original file.

This makes sense, linking to the original file on disk would be disastrous with Office 365 cloud storage and sharing system. For most people this isn't an issue. Because I work on multiple machines, including my Linux desktop, I would be locked out of my files. LibreOffice does not have an OneNote equivalent. I am also terrified of the OneNote file being corrupted and I lose everything.

Unit planning with OneNote

In computer programming the programmer conforms their workflow to the particular software they code in (vim, virtual studio, emacs, etc) and the workflow their company or version control system uses (git, mercurial, subversion, etc).  There are no such workflow standards when designing instructional units. Software to plan units and lessons exist, but they often feel alien to most other teachers. It is like an IDE with no vim shortcut plugins if the programmer is use to vim. After playing with Microsoft OneNote last school year I feel it is versatile enough that I can plan Astronomy and my Integrated Science classes in a way that feels comfortable to me.

Continuous calendar in Excel

I like having a visual layout of my lessons on a calendar. The problem is almost every calendar add-on or template uses the standard monthly calendar. My units do not align to calendar months. I found a continuous calendar Excel/Google Sheets template that solves this. I set the spreadsheet to start in September and I hide the weekend rows.

OneNote can embed* at least Word and Excel sheets. Importing Power Point slides will import them as individual pages. I have not tried other elements from the Office suite. OneNote has some limited Word and Excel functionality for embedded docs. One minor thing missing is merged cells -- every cell is outlined in OneNote.

The lack of cell merging does allow me to organize my lessons. In the cell with the date I put in any special changes to the bell schedule. In the cell under the date I put in a summery of the lesson. If I was smart I would write content and language objectives for this. Under that I attach** the worksheets, power points, web links, and any other document that will be used for the lesson. I manually color code my units by setting the background colors of the cells and use grey for in-service or holidays. I also really like being able to slip in notes on the margin to remind me of changes I want to do.

Continuous calendar in OneNote

There are limitations to this process. I also forgot to add days for quizzes and tests. I want to insert lessons and expand some lessons into two days. I have no way to insert this without having to manually move every cell in the spreadsheet. Every resource I have found so far focuses on lesson planning, not unit planning. If anyone happens to know of one LET ME KNOW. There is a developer API that I am going to poke around in and hope it is trivial to add a continuous calendar.

* One way to do this is by clicking a dragging the file icon and select "insert..." from the menu that pops up. You can also copy from Word or Excel and paste it into OneNote.

** Same as above but select "attach..." from the menu. [EDIT]WARNING: this creates a copy of the document that is embedded in the OneNote file itself. If you edit the original file it will not show up in OneNote, and vice versa.[/EDIT]

Unit Planning Astronomy

Astronomy @ RHS: Semester long, standards/proficiency based class on the space science targeting non-university bound population of 11th and 12 graders.

My only formal education in Astronomy was a two semester college course. It was dual listed as both a 100 level physics class and a 300 level general science class (science class for non majors). This lead to a stark bi-modal distribution of students -- those who could integrate equations in their sleep and were use to the content-memorization paradigm of university science education, and those who did not. The class was taught by a physics professor who had a hard time with this*. Later on I was a TA for the class, the first semester was taught by a different physics professor who talked down to those who couldn't compute Kepler orbital parameters. The second semester was taught by a graduate student who was use to and enjoyed general education students.

*Interesting enough he differentiated by using separate curves for the exams based on if a student was taking it as physics or general ed.

When my Astronomy course proposal was accepted for the course cataloged at the high school I teach at (I was shocked), and especially when 150 students forecasted for it (even more shocked!), I began to research curriculum and lesson ideas. Almost all that I found taught the same curriculum that I had at university. Here is the general flow:

• The introduction is historical views on the night sky (heliocentric vs geocentric).
• A unit on the celestial sphere and the constellations.
• A unit on the planets, from Mercury on out. Students memorize facts about the planets and regurgitate them for a scantron quiz.
• A unit on stars and how to read the HR diagram.
• A unit on stellar evoltuion.
• A unit on galaxies.
• A unit on cosmology.

I only have a semester and my target population doesn't jive with rote memorization. Processes and hands on activities will be where I need to put my focus. Processing time is also needed to. I'm not a fan of word searches or (most) crossword puzzles, but those kinds of activities give students time to assimilate and accommodate information they recently learned. There will be a few small artsy projects for this.  I want to keep it contemporary. I want to focus on the humanity of space exploration: the stories of the missions be it robotic or manned. What is it like to live on the ISS as what engineering is needed to make it possible. What would traveling to the Moon or Mars be like and the challenges we face to get there.

Unit planning thus far

Here is my plan:

• Introduction is on the nuts and bolts of the celestial sphere and work on the constellations. In the first class students will be discovering the power of stars influencing their lives -- none at all! This is in blue and I'm struggling to extend it longer than a week. Map reading will be the skill I want to work on in this unit.
• Instead of fact-memorization of planets the second unit (green) will be on processes: volcanoes, impacting, plate tectonics, atmospheres, the sun and sunspot cycles and space weather, and magnetospheres. Students will learn about the planets and moons based on the processes they are associated with, not the heliocentric order.  With the length right now if feels a bit ADD, but with the sheltered instruction training I'll be able to expand this out a little more and avoid the lecture-lab format. Upperclasspersons need processing time too.
• Unit three will have students using the microobservatory network to collect information on an exosolar planet using the Other Worlds curriculum and the updated ExoLab tools. I'm going to fold in a field trip to the planetarium at a nearby community college.
• Here I have a two month cap of time that will hopefully shrink to one as I fill in the planetary process and constellation unit.
• My 5th grade teacher had us play Discovery as part of our unit of colonial America. It is a simulation/game that the class plays in teams of 6 over the period of 2-3 weeks. There is reading and other literacy components as well. I loved it. I'm going to mod this paper and pen game to be about research teams or colonizing mars in the near future. I'm going to replace a number of readings with excerpts from Andy Weir's The Martian as well as some more technical readings from NASA, JPL, and ESA. This is on top of the game play modifications as well.

Sheltering Instruction

Last week  additional literacy training was offered to the new hires. I chose to participate in SIOP/sheltered instruction training. It is a very common question in teacher interviews and, because I have never been in a school district long enough to get such training, have never been able to answer that question well.

Taken with the Microsoft Office Lens App

The basic idea with sheltered instruction is that students should learn language and curriculum at the same time in their content. Sheltered instruction is a fantastic idea as only 10% of our freshman reading at grade level.

Our IRLA Data wall. Past "pull out" ELL education has not worked.

The coach suggested picking a couple for the year

"The person who talks the most learns the most." In sheltered instruction students process information through reading, oral communication, and writing. Oral communication is the driving component. In the workshop we learned several activities where students communicate all at the same time in addition to the single student standing up to share that is seen in something like the Socratic Method. It expands on "I do-we do-you do" into "I do it, we do it together, you do it together, you do it alone."

I was very excited by this workshop. It was all the things I wanted to professional improve on this year. On the other hand all the work I put into my new Astronomy curriculum has now been thrown out the window.

sudo reboot

There are a few things that I hold dear. Being awesome at my job is one of them. Sharing and open source is another. I need a medium where I can articulate my reflections and share the work I've done Making Science Not Suck™. I began work on coding my own blog and website in Python/Flask that would be a kind of Schoology, lessons and handouts would be encoded in latex and markdown and the end user can obtain it in their format of choice. This ended up being overkill. Our student management system has all of these features built in. We, on the technological edge of education, need to remove barriers to help parents and students keep up to date on their progress. Reducing the number of websites they have to visit is one way to do that.

School districts invest in one of four possible ecosystems:

• Apple, the historical winner in education back in the 1990's and a resurgence with iPads in the classroom.
• Microsoft, expanding into education using what they have learned from their highly successful government and business contracts. Office 365 is the main product here.
• Google, the newcomer to the party. They are also trying to get their Android tablets into the classroom to complete with Apple and Google Drive and Google Docs to compete with Microsoft.
• Buffet, Districts promote using Schoology and other online services.

My high school is invested into the Microsoft ecosystem, but I continued my workflow of Dropbox, Google Docs, and LibreOffice on my dualbooting Arch Linux and Windows laptop. I was hired mid hear, it was my first time using Interactive Student Notebooks,  and I was teaching in 4 classrooms a day from a cart. I kept to my existing digital habits.

Then I got a Surface Pro 3. That changed everything. All my lessons are now in some Microsoft format or another and stored on the district's OneDrive account. No need to have a hand crafted website that renders LaTeX documents.

That leaves blogging. I could spend tonight writing code or actually start blogging. Just over two weeks before students begin, so I choose blogging!