TPACK questions

For the using technology assignment, we focused on helping the students gain a greater  understanding of the sun, moon, and earth.  From the UEN state core standards, we focused on standard and objective #1 from the 3rd grade science section.  We really wanted this to be an opportunity for the students to learn by experience.  The technology tools that we used to help us were Inspiration, Celestia, and Google Sky.  In using these the pedagogy that we wanted to focus on was observing, classifying, inferring, predicting, and measuring, acquiring and processing data, and analyzing the data.  We felt that by using the technology resources, it really helped us to accomplish our goals of our objectives.  I felt pretty apprehensive in the beginning about knowing how to use the technology in a teaching situation because I hadn't had much experience with any of them.  But I found that as I just explored and tried different things that I was able to learn a lot.  I realized that this is exactly what we want our students to do.  We want them to feel confident in themselves so that they will explore and try new things.  Technology can be such a fun way or learning and it gives students a way to learn and remember facts in a different way other than just reading the text.