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]