Using the WWW to teach Astronomy

Xavier Bohigas, Montse Novell and Xavier Jaén
Departament de Física i Enginyeria Nuclear
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Internet and the WWW comprise a new pedagogical resource that the Astronomy teacher must learn to use. A great amount of information is available on the WWW. Teachers must provide their students with some well-chosen web sites to guide their search for information on the WWW.

Teachers have been using different resources to teach Astronomy, such as video, slides, scale models, computers, etc. Now they can use Internet and, in particular, the World Wide Web (WWW). The growth of Internet has generated vast expectations in different areas of knowledge and education and these expectations have sometimes been questioned. Nevertheless, it is not frequent to find specific pedagogical resources on the WWW yet. This article tries to make some recommendations for using Internet as a pedagogical resource for teaching Astronomy.

The most important features of Internet as a teaching aid for Astronomy is the enormous amount of information and interactivity that it offers.

The great abundance and variety of information available on the WWW is not necessarily easily accessible for students. Students generally use search engines to find information. This resource can be useful when searching for some kinds of information, but the results are often very disappointing when the search is related to education.

For example, suppose our students need information about the solar system. If they do not know any WWW addresses dealing with this area they will surely use one of the search engines. To simulate their search process, we type the word "sun" in the corresponding dialog box at Altavista (www.altavista.com). The first three addresses in the search results are:

1. Sun Microsystems, Inc.
2. Sun Microsystems' Java Technology Home Page
3. Deutschland. My Sun | Regional Sites

Obviously our students will not find any information on these pages about the Sun.

Another example: we enter "Venus" in the Terra (www.terra.com) search engine; our result is not less frustrating:

1. Los vínculos de Venus - Página personal de la escritora argentina Lucía Quinto
2. Venus BBW. Site con diversos servicios internet
3. Benidorm: Hotel Residencia Venus ***

Our students will be disappointed with the overwhelming information that Internet offers. If we teachers want to use Internet as a pedagogical resource, we must provide guidance to enable students to find relevant information. Consequently, we should have lists of well-chosen web sites to help learners to start searching for information on the WWW. This way, students will not be at a loss searching for something and finding nothing.

The information available on the WWW is varied. Sites that offer links to other pages with comments about the subject and characteristics of the target page are an especially interesting pedagogical resource.

The most important features these sites should have are:

1. A stable address.
2. A credible site content.
3. Pages with appropriate information for our pupils.
4. Pages with interesting links. This is necessary if we want our learners to get supplementary information.
5. Fast downloading. There are some very slow pages with many pictures. They take a long time to load.

Interactivity is an element of special interest for learners, as they can participate in their own learning process. Teachers can propose different kinds of interactive activities such as simulation of astronomical events, inference of laws, stimulating games, self-evaluation questions, etc. Internet is a resource; not an objective. Therefore, teaching and learning activities must be designed with the pedagogical objectives rather than the resource in mind.

Here are some WWW addresses that can guide our pupils.

• Some of them can be considered as a starting point for exploring. They offer general information and a well-selected series of links to other sites on the web. Two of these kinds of pages are:

Astro Web: http://www.cv.nrao.edu/fits/www/astronomy.html

• Other sites containing more specific information:

CfA Planetary Sciences Division http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/ia/

Comet Hale-Bopp Home Page http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/comet/

• We can also use commercial sites for information. For example, about telescopes:

Celestron International http://www.celestron.com/main.htm

• Or propose different interactive activities