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Carl Pennypacker
Carl Pennypacker

Thursday 23rd June, 2022

Talks & Workshops

Carl Pennypacker – Successful Global Hands-On Universe/Galileo Teacher Training Zoom-enabled Remote Teacher Workshops for Uganda Teachers

  15:45 - 16:00

Members from the Global Hands-On Universe (GHOU) Association, the Galileo Teacher Training Program (GTTP) and the National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC) planned a series of face-to-face and online workshops, to take place during the summer of 2020, for high school physics teachers living in and around Kampala, Uganda. This professional development was intended to support the teaching of astronomy, as required by standards adopted by the Ugandan National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC), an agency that works in partnership with the Ministry of Education of Uganda to set national achievement goals. After the COVID-19 pandemic rendered face-to-face workshops impossible, NCDC administrators and the enrolled teachers expressed a keen interest in moving the teacher workshops online. Through the generosity of a grant from the Office of Astronomy for Development (OAD) of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), GHOU/GTTP were able to provide the teachers with the technology necessary to participate in a series of Zoom-based workshops during the 2020-2021 school year. Pre- and post- self-reporting suggest participating teachers gained a deeper understanding of astronomy and became more comfortable using modern IT tools in their classrooms as a result of their participation. Use of LCO telescopes was a high point of the workshop, and teachers acquired images and shared them on Padlet, an internet visual blog tool, sort of.