recent posts
- Hello, World!
- At Play in the Classroom for Thirty-Five Years: Recollections and Recommendations for Keeping Our Spirits—and Our Students—Soaring
- Reaching every student in your General Education class
- Classroom Stories: Teaching Astronomy to Primarily Non-science Students in Group-setting Activities, by Sandi Brenner (Bryant University)
- JWST Carina Nebula
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Category: Classroom Resources
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We are so lucky to have a spiffy new telescope that has captured the public imagination over the summer! I used the first group of five images (one is really a spectrum, but for simplicity, I’ll refer to them all as images here!) to introduce the course to my Astro101 students this semester, and it…
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By Tabitha Buehler (University of Utah) I consider my introductory astronomy class (The Universe) at the University of Utah to be an active-learning class. To me, this means that my students don’t sit and passively listen to a lecture for the entire class period—I sprinkle in activities that engage their senses besides hearing among short…
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By Stacy Palen Apropos of the last few posts by Ana Larson about online classes and cheating (Thanks, Ana!), this week, I’m working on my Astro101 midterm. It’s important to state up front that I think the purpose of exams varies from course to course. In Astro101, I think the purpose of exams is to…
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By Stacy Palen Typically, in a F2F class, I use the workbook one day per week. In general, I do this on Friday. For each workbook activity, I’ll usually spend about five to ten minutes introducing the topic and pointing out places where students might get stuck or need a reminder. My astronomy course for…
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By Stacy Palen As I think about what I usually do in lecture, in order to try to capture some of it for the online experience, a few book-related things come to mind. There are a few things I do for each chapter, as general practice: I provide students with an overview of each chapter.…
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By Stacy Palen As I adapt to teaching online this fall, I find that the one thing I really need students to know how to do on their own is read the textbook. I’ve always assumed they knew this skill because I remember being in high school, checking out the textbook at the beginning of…
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By Stacy Palen No one knows what this fall semester is going to look like, and it stresses me out! We might be back in normal face-to-face classes, but we might be back at half-capacity. Or we might be all online. Or we might start face-to-face, and then the second wave will hit, and we’ll…
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By Stacy Palen Sometimes, “learning by doing” requires the use of a model or a simulation. It’s not possible for students to go into space far above Earth’s North Pole, or to change the mass of a planet and see how it affects the behavior of the central star. There are loads of simulations and…
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By Stacy Palen My favorite way to use Reading Astronomy News is to prompt classroom discussion. The articles at the end of the chapters are short enough that students can read them in less than ten minutes—if they forget to read one before class, they can read it at the beginning of class—and the questions…
Teaching Astronomy by Doing Astronomy 