I saw the International Space Station (ISS) yesterday. Seriously, I looked up in the sky and saw a dot that slowly moved across the sky. There were people on it orbiting Earth, and I saw it. Seriously. Insert epic hashtag here: #eduawesome, #epic, #stoked, #edustoked, #outofthisworld, #issthisreallife. Here’s how I did it:
- I followed @twisst on Twitter.
- When the ISS was two hour away, I received a tweet:
https://twitter.com/twisst55/status/278651433811857408
That’s it! Insanely cool, right!? Plus, in the tweet I received, the link gave more info:
ISS will be visible passing at your location -weather permitting- on
December 12, 2012, 17:55:05 PST
Is it a good one?
This time, the International Space Station will be flying over at 40 degrees. Its magnitude will be -2.6: extremely bright!Where to look?
ISS will come up in the west and will be heading for the north. This pass lasts ~5 min.
There are two things that blew my mind once I reflected on the awesomeness of seeing the ISS with the naked eye. First, I received a tweet with this customized info. This would be impressive enough if you could look up the information on their website. But, no–they tweeted my info to me. This is one of the most innovative applications of Twitter I’ve seen yet. Second, this would be an insanely eduawesome activity for students. Image telling your students, “Hey guys, the International Space Station will fly over our school today at 5:09 pm.” Right!?
As we begin to implement Common Core, we need to be doing activities like this. Less textbooks, less worksheets, less Scantrons. More insanely epic things like, “What’s up? The Space Station!”
