Critique of my Astronomy Lesson

    My lesson I chose to critique was the Comets, Meteors, and Asteroids lesson. I definitely plan to effectively use many different online technologies. I think that these will greatly help my students’ understanding of the concepts. I love all of the technology resources I have available to me at my school. It creates such a rich learning environment for my students. I very purposefully included classroom management in this lesson in the form of the Class Dojo iPad app. This app allows me to monitor and track my students’ behavior no matter where I am in the school. Having it with me while I teach the lesson helps keep my students on task.

     In the first part of this lesson, students are researching comets, meteors, and asteroids and creating a graphic organizer to show the differences between them. I think adding an additional technology resource would be appropriate here. Some options include applications like Popplet or Webspiration that allow students to create digital concept maps. I have not used either technology in my classroom this year, and I would need to do some frontloading of how to use those technologies before I introduced them with this lesson.

    The second part of this lesson was students creating their own projects and rubrics to demonstrate their learning. I really love this idea, but actually putting it into practice makes me feel worried and a little overwhelmed. I have worked hard to train my kids to be able to complete a project of choice like this, but relinquishing control of my classroom is hard. I definitely need to trust my very capable students. I also think that I need to include some specific options for my students to choose from. A little bit of choice can be really powerful, but a lot of choice could be chaos.

    The most important I was trying to make in this lesson was that there is a difference between asteroids, meteors, and comets. So many people clump them all together as space junk, but it matters that they are not the same. I think I was successful in getting the point across to my students, and reminding them of their learning using the learning objectives.