The Atmosphere (and Using ThingLink)

As a part of Science Methods, we did a short unit on Earth Science.  I reflected on those chapters in a previous blog post.  As a part of learning this, my fieldwork group and I worked together to figure out a part of Earth Science that we are not competent in. We decided that the atmosphere was a topic that we did not know too much about.

After we picked a topic, my group and I used the program ThingLink to present our information on the atmosphere to our class.

Thinglink was a great program to use.  You can use an image and put information about the topic on the image (in what ThingLink calls pins) as you are presenting the information.  The picture that we used showed each of the five layers of the atmosphere (the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere) and we put information for each layer where the layer is located. This is a photo of our project. The background is the image we selected and each of the circles are the pins that contain information when you put the mouse over it.

I believe that ThingLink is a great tool to use to teach lessons  to students.  It is different from the average PowerPoint slide, but they are still getting the image and information about that topic.  It is also a great tool to teach the students how to use so that they can present information in a different way. 

Other groups in our class used ThingLink to go over topics that they were not competent in Earth Science and those topics included plate tectonics, the ocean, and fossils. They all used an image about their topic and added the information to th
at image using the pins. The ThingLink presentation about the oceans stood out to me a lot.  That group used a beautiful picture of the ocean as the background, they added a lot of interesting information and videos, and they kept it engaging.  They also taught me about a new ocean, which is the Southern Ocean! A photo of their ThingLink is above.

The group that taught us about fossils used a cool picture of a fossil and taught us about what fossils are and how they are made.  To further explain how fossils are created, they showed us an experiment that we could use in our classroom.  You take a piece of bread and a few gummy bears, then you press the bread over the gummy bears, and when you lift the bread up there is an imprint (fossil) from the gummy bear!