9-25-08 - Web Seminar

Instead of meeting at our regular class time, we participated in a Web Seminar. The seminar was titled “Celebrating Astronomy: A Star’s Story” and our teacher was one of the presenters. Going into the seminar, I was a little concerned, because I had never done something like this before and I did not know what to expect. But, the concept of a web seminar is great. I really thought it was cool to have this live time discussion with people around the country (and Australia too). I thought it was neat to have so much interaction in the form of chats, white board markings, and the use of other tools such as the pooling feature and emotion icons.

As far as the content of the seminar, the seminar covered topics such as how stars are formed, information about the star life cycle or stages, how to classify stars, what happens when a star dies, and resources that we can use to help us use this information in a classroom. As far as providing more details about the content, I am afraid that I can not do that. I have had very little instruction in astronomy, meaning I really did not have much background on this topic going into the seminar. As a result, I felt that most of the information was going right over my head. When they asked for questions, I did not even know where to start asking questions. I am hoping that the resources given can help me get a better understanding of the topic so I can successfully teach my future students about astronomy.