Meet Toni Herrmann

Toni Herrmann teaches 3rd through 5th grade technology at St. James-Santee Elementary School in McClellanville. Toni believes that integrating technology throughout the curriculum in a research-based environment provides rewarding and enriching learning experiences for her students. To motivate her students to gain in-depth understanding of important scientific concepts, Mrs. Herrmann's students participated in the EarthKam Exploration Project. In the project, students determined the orbital path of the ISS Space Station, identified continents that fell within the selected orbital path, calculated the latitude and longitude of a target, and submitted their pictures to NASA for online picture consideration. Using available technology, Toni's students researched, organized, and developed their real-world findings into selected multimedia presentations.

Toni Herrmann's Best Practice Strategy:
Increasing student knowledge in earth science, math, art, and language arts by integrating cross-curricular web-based units and multimedia projects.

Lesson Plan Overview:
Using the big idea of "Changes on Earth," the students were asked to complete hands-on inquiry based science experiments to build prior knowledge of landforms and how landforms developed on earth. Through sponsorship of Charleston County's CANDO project, this core knowledge was used when the students joined other schools throughout Charleston, Berkeley, and Dorchester Counties in an ISS EarthKam Exploration Project. Using the World Wide Web to direct a camera mounted on the space station during the week of January 28-31, 2003, the students tracked the orbital path of the ISS, requested pictures using latitude and longitude coordinates, and downloaded their pictures that had been uploaded to a NASA web site through the University of San Diego, CA. This project was also maintained through the help of MUSC Image Lab and Mr. Jim Nicholson.

In this lesson, fourth grade students completed their Microsoft Publisher brochures using their downloaded pictures from the space station. They indentified landforms, cloud formations, man made structures and added any additional necessary information. The students determined what they saw on their pictures, from plots of land to mountain ranges. Many students also included a poem dedicated to the Space Shuttle Columbia that was in orbit at the time of this EARTHKAM project. The students accessed their pictures, maps, and topographical maps through the web and incorporated them into their projects. Fifth grade students completed Microsoft PowerPoint projects, and third grade completed Microsoft Paint projects. All projects were displayed throughout the school and some were sent to the EARTHKAM project coordinators.

Lesson Plan
Rubric for the Brochure
Checklist for the Brochure
Sample Brochure
Pictures from Space
Sample PowerPoint Presentation