Most of the DIY Podcast topic modules include audio and video clips from the space station. If your students are looking for background information about the station, you might want to point them to “What is the International Space Station?” This NASA Education homework helper answers questions such as:
How old is the space station?
What are the parts of the space station?
Why is the space station important?
Tidbits of information about the station might fit nicely in a DIY Podcast script that features astronauts on the space station.
When students are searching for more information to build their products with the DIY Podcast activity, NASA TV is a good place to look. You can watch live events, including live space station video and mission coverage.
NASA Television is a multichannel, digital service that includes the NASA TV Education Channel, which provides grade-level programming for teachers and students. You may refer to the NASA Television Education File for the monthly programming schedule. Much of the educational programming is theme-related. Monthly themes are listed at the top of the Web page, and a link to the previous month’s theme is listed at the bottom of the page.
The education file also provides links to information on sources for viewing NASA TV, how to get digital NASA TV and a list of program descriptions. As you click through the educational programming descriptions, you’ll find links to CORE, the Central Operation of Resources for Educators, where you can order many of the videos. You’ll also find links to NASA eClips™ that are available for online viewing.
As your students engage with NASA content in the DIY Podcast activity, we hope they’ll become intrigued with NASA’s mission and want to be a part of it. NASA offers fulfilling careers for engineers, mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, chemists, pilots, surgeons, attorneys, accountants and experts in many other exciting fields that may interest your students. NASA Education has launched a new Web page to help students learn about jobs at NASA. It provides career information, such as opportunities for students to intern at NASA, descriptions of jobs at NASA and career resources sorted by grade levels.
The DIY Podcast Rocket Evolution module includes links to some of NASA’s Apollo and space shuttle images. But, as you might expect, NASA has many photos of the Apollo/Saturn V and the space shuttle. These images are available online in several places.
The JSC Digital Image Collection from Johnson Space Center in Houston offers most of the Apollo images, early shuttle images and images from other human spaceflight missions. Browse the collection to find images from a specific mission. NASA Images features a timeline at the bottom of the main page that could be helpful as students collect information and multimedia content for their podcasts. Rolling over the timeline causes different NASA missions to pop up. Students may select the mission they want and then narrow their search by selecting from a list of What, Where, Who and When. Students also may use the search box to find images of specific parts of Apollo or the shuttle, such as the J-2 engine or solid rocket boosters.
Each shuttle mission has its own image gallery. The Space Shuttle Gallery has photos from preflight to postflight and lets you select images associated with a specific mission. Some of the best pictures of the spacecraft are captured during launch and landing, and are available in Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Archives.
The main page of the Solar Arrays module lists resources for students to use if they want to gather more information for their podcast script. Here are a few more NASA educational resources that you may find helpful in teaching about solar arrays and electricity.
NASA’s Student Observation Network includes the Living and Working in Space: Energy module, which promotes inquiry as students answer questions such as “What variables might affect the operation of solar panels?”
NASA’s Environmental Control and Life Support Systems Water Filtration Challenge Educator Guide is an engineering design challenge in which students build and test water filtration systems.
If your students create a product using DIY Podcast video or audio featuring astronauts living and working on the International Space Station, they may want to learn more about the orbiting laboratory. International Space Station: An Interactive Reference Guide is a helpful resource that includes a tour of the station and explains how the station works and how the crew lives. The guide also has an extensive list of printable documents about space station modules, missions and systems.
