Wednesday, May 18, 2011

The Endeavour ' live ' in Sciences classroom





The space shuttle Endeavour lifted off two days ago, May 16, for its final mission.
Tens of thousands of people crowded in and around the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida for the launch of the shuttle's 16-day voyage.
Nasa is planning just one more flight, of the Atlantis in July, before the 30-year shuttle programme is shut down.
"As Americans, we endeavour to build a better life than the generation before and endeavour to be a united nation. In those efforts we are often tested," (...). "This mission represents the power of teamwork, commitment and exploration. It is in the DNA of our country to reach for the stars and explore"
Captain Mark Kelly
Commander the flight


Photo: NASA
NASA says that since Endeavour's launch in 1992 it has travelled more than 100m miles over 25 flights. 
The six astronauts on the shuttle marked the final flight of the Endeavour by posing for a re-enactment of the poster promoting the most recent Star Trek film.

Photograph: Nasa/Reuters. 
Education:
It's impossible to ignore such an important live resource in the Sciences classroom. It's a good opportunity to encourage the students to think about space exploration and its implication to innovation and astrophysics development.


Educators have different resources for different school levels: from primary school to secondary school on NASA Education.






Endeavour crew
Photo: UPI/ Joe Marino/ Bill Cantrell
And NASA TV has a full-time HD Channel available at no cost to cable and satellite service providers. Live coverage of space shuttle mission is online now 24 hours for all. 


So, put on students' devices and link them on this fantastic 'live' classroom!

The students can watch, debate and learn about the space history since the early years until this last mission.


On NASA Education, there are available imagery from NASA’s vast array of space satellites, as well as media briefings, presentations by expert lecturers, astronaut interviews and other special events, all in the improved detail and clarity of high-definition.


The students can find a growing collection of 3D models, textures, and images from inside NASA here. All of the resources are free to download and use.


There are interactive features here.


Even more powerful the Robonaut experience.

And why not watch the video below of the very first moon landing of the Apollo 11 mission in 1969? 

Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon with his now legenday words:

 "One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind." 




Impressive at the time! Even now! And the quality of the video! It was in 1969! This is a truly amazing video!





Tomorrow, May 19 PBS NewsHour correspondent Miles O'Brien will interview the crew live between 6 and 6:30 a.m. ET. He will include some questions submitted by viewers. 


Let your students submit their own question(s) visiting the Google Moderator page set up for questions. There is one day left to submit questions.


They can also submit a question via Twitter by including the hashtag#utalk2nasa. A retweet of a tweeted question counts as a vote. The questions posed to the astronauts will be selected from the top vote-getters.



There is some time left to submit questions. Even if students don't get their questions answered, it's still a good exercise to encourage them to think about space exploration.




NASA
Do you want to talk to Endeavour? There's still time to vote and ask questions with Google, PBS and 
The students might follow all the news on Twitter @NASA. Amazing following astronauts tweets. Such an experience, isn't it?

I am sure that students will be very excited about this unexpected lesson!


G-Souto

18.05.2011
Copyright © 2011G-Souto'sBlog, gsouto-digitalteacher.blogspot.com®


References:


NASA
http://www.nasa.gov/


Licença Creative Commons
The Endeavour 'live' in Sciences classroom by G-Souto is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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