Feb. 25, 2010
Gifted Teacher Wins First STELLAR Award
Special to Huntingtonnews.net
Wheeling, WV (HNN) — A teacher of gifted students in West Virginia is the first winner of the STELLAR Award, presented through the NASATalk web-based collaborative, which features teacher reflections on their use of NASA products.
The STELLAR Awards recognize excellent uses of NASA science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) materials by educators in classrooms or informal settings. Eileen Poling of Tucker Valley Elementary-Middle School in Hambleton was honored for Family Flight Fun nights, a series of evening rocketry workshops for students and their families. The workshops used activities from the NASA Rockets Educator Guide.
Poling earned a $100 stipend for winning the STELLAR Award. Educators are invited to apply each month for the awards at the NASATalk website, which was created and is hosted by the NASA-sponsored Classroom of the Future at the Center for Educational Technologies at Wheeling Jesuit University.
Poling worked with two other teachers at her school, Rebecca Moore and Michele Felton, to create activities for fourth and fifth grade students and their families. Dominion Power helped fund Family Flight Fun nights with a $500 grant.
Working with the parents was a treat, Poling said.
“We just stood up there and said, ‘OK, here it is.’ Everybody just started getting involved in it,” she said. “If there was a student without a parent or grandparent, another parent just took them under their wing and worked with them. We did get some whole families who came where the parents had never been to school. There were people who showed up whom you would never have expected to be there.”
Poling recalled a grandfather, a retired engineer, who helped out his grandson during the program.
“When the grandson would come up with an idea,” Poling said, “the grandfather just seemed to know how to pull more out of him. So he evidently spent a lot of time with him.”
Participants also built “Newton Cars” and raced them. Six different trials were made with the cars. The first trials varied the amount of force applied to accelerate the car by using a different number of rubber bands on the car. The second trials varied the mass of the object by putting different weights of objects in the film canister on the car. As a result, the students found that the velocity of an object is proportional to the amount of force applied to the object and inversely proportional to the mass of the object.
“We did a pre- and posttest.” Poling said. “It showed that we had a very big impact on understanding Newton’s Laws because the students didn’t get very many right on the pretest. At the end on the posttest, you could just see how there was much more understanding of the concepts.”
The STELLAR acronym represents the intent of the award: STEM Teaching Excellence for Leading, Learning, Articulation, and Reflection. The STELLAR Awards will be given regularly based on certain themes, such as human spaceflight, Earth science, aeronautics, astronomy, space science, and exploration. A nomination can be completed at the NASATalk website, www.nasatalk.com. The online form outlines the award criteria and encourages thoughtful, complete reflections about using NASA products.
The Erma Ora Byrd Center for Educational Technologies (www.cet.edu) houses cutting-edge educational technology in its 48,000-square foot facility on the campus of Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, WV. In addition to the Classroom of the Future, the space agency’s principal research and development center for educational technologies, it is home to the Challenger Learning Center®, one of 47 worldwide established by the Challenger Center for Space Science in memory of the space shuttle Challenger. It provides students, teachers and adult learners with simulations that emphasize teamwork, problem-solving, decision-making and communication skills.
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Gifted Teacher Wins First STELLAR Award
Special to Huntingtonnews.net
Wheeling, WV (HNN) — A teacher of gifted students in West Virginia is the first winner of the STELLAR Award, presented through the NASATalk web-based collaborative, which features teacher reflections on their use of NASA products.
The STELLAR Awards recognize excellent uses of NASA science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) materials by educators in classrooms or informal settings. Eileen Poling of Tucker Valley Elementary-Middle School in Hambleton was honored for Family Flight Fun nights, a series of evening rocketry workshops for students and their families. The workshops used activities from the NASA Rockets Educator Guide.
Poling earned a $100 stipend for winning the STELLAR Award. Educators are invited to apply each month for the awards at the NASATalk website, which was created and is hosted by the NASA-sponsored Classroom of the Future at the Center for Educational Technologies at Wheeling Jesuit University.
Poling worked with two other teachers at her school, Rebecca Moore and Michele Felton, to create activities for fourth and fifth grade students and their families. Dominion Power helped fund Family Flight Fun nights with a $500 grant.
Working with the parents was a treat, Poling said.
“We just stood up there and said, ‘OK, here it is.’ Everybody just started getting involved in it,” she said. “If there was a student without a parent or grandparent, another parent just took them under their wing and worked with them. We did get some whole families who came where the parents had never been to school. There were people who showed up whom you would never have expected to be there.”
Poling recalled a grandfather, a retired engineer, who helped out his grandson during the program.
“When the grandson would come up with an idea,” Poling said, “the grandfather just seemed to know how to pull more out of him. So he evidently spent a lot of time with him.”
Participants also built “Newton Cars” and raced them. Six different trials were made with the cars. The first trials varied the amount of force applied to accelerate the car by using a different number of rubber bands on the car. The second trials varied the mass of the object by putting different weights of objects in the film canister on the car. As a result, the students found that the velocity of an object is proportional to the amount of force applied to the object and inversely proportional to the mass of the object.
“We did a pre- and posttest.” Poling said. “It showed that we had a very big impact on understanding Newton’s Laws because the students didn’t get very many right on the pretest. At the end on the posttest, you could just see how there was much more understanding of the concepts.”
The STELLAR acronym represents the intent of the award: STEM Teaching Excellence for Leading, Learning, Articulation, and Reflection. The STELLAR Awards will be given regularly based on certain themes, such as human spaceflight, Earth science, aeronautics, astronomy, space science, and exploration. A nomination can be completed at the NASATalk website, www.nasatalk.com. The online form outlines the award criteria and encourages thoughtful, complete reflections about using NASA products.
The Erma Ora Byrd Center for Educational Technologies (www.cet.edu) houses cutting-edge educational technology in its 48,000-square foot facility on the campus of Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, WV. In addition to the Classroom of the Future, the space agency’s principal research and development center for educational technologies, it is home to the Challenger Learning Center®, one of 47 worldwide established by the Challenger Center for Space Science in memory of the space shuttle Challenger. It provides students, teachers and adult learners with simulations that emphasize teamwork, problem-solving, decision-making and communication skills.
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