Great Stuff From NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) offers a wealth of educational materials through the web and through workshops and professional meetings. I know I walked away with a pile of stuff from a session I went to at the MACUL meeting last year. Well, awhile back I stumbled upon a whole repository of NASA educational materials at the Teacher Link on Utah State University's website.

Of particular interest to me are the Units and Lesson Plans. There is some really good stuff here even for teachers who don't teach and astronomy. I've used a few activities out of their Rocket Unit when teaching Newton's Laws of Motion with my 9th grade Physical Science course. This year I may also build a drop tower to simulate micro-gravity in my class room. There are units for life science, chemistry, mathematics, and physics along with astronomy.

You should also check out the other stuff they have:

• Educational Briefs - These help explain how to use some of the units in your curriculum and how to fit them with the standards.
• Pictures, Posters, and Lithographs - Here you find exactly what the title implies. These are printable posters. Most (if not all) of these have been produced by NASA and made available to educators free of charge (well, not totally free, that's one of the reasons we pay taxes). Some are still available and some are out of print. These are available through NASA, but I don't believe there is a single repository to find all the free stuff. You just have to hunt around a little. (here's a link to Mars stuff.)
• Websites - There are really too many good NASA websites to list, but the Utah State site lists some of those that might be most interesting to educators.

All in all, the Utah State site is a great repository of NASA educational resources and well worth a look for any science (or math) teacher.

Technorati Tags: NASA, Astronomy, Space, Free, education, falconphysics

Stuff I Didn't Get To in the MDE/COATT Presentation

Here are my links to my "Out of this world freeware". WARNING: Only download when you have some time to just play. It is very easy to loose a lot of time with any of these.

NASA World Wind: Cool program for visualizing the Earth in 3D. There are a number of cool plugins that people have created to map data in, including: Earthquakes and Volcanoes (shows plate boundaries quite nicely), near real time satellite photos, historic earth surface temperatures, ocean currents. The newest version includes the Moon, Mars, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. (Windows only)

Celestia: Tour the universe in an interactive 3D environment. This is really cool and people have created lots of add on stuff including educational units. Check out the Celestial MotherLoad. If you're going to use the educational units you'll need to download the version of Celestia from the educational unit page. The educational units are great! They include information in Word Documents with links into Celestia, so you read about a planet/object and then you get to interact directly with it. (Windows, Macintosh, Linux)

Stellarium: Interactive planetarium in your classroom. You tell the program where you are in the world and it generates a 3D picture of the sky. See a star and click on it for some information about that star. You can even zoom in on planets or nebulae to get a close up view. It is possible (I've not done this) to take a series of pictures from your backyard and "skin" Stellarium so the program will look exactly like what you will see when you step out side. Stellarium will draw constellations or show constellation art as well. I haven't used Stellarium in class, but Ben Rimes over at The Tech Savvy Educator has had success using it with his 6th Grade students. (Windows, Macintosh, Linux)