Viktor's Reflection Post

Over the past two years, I feel that I have improved as a blogger a lot. I have learned to add and caption pictures, add more links, write more creatively, and make the post more interesting. According to me, my posts have just gotten better and better; in my first scribe post ever, I did not include everything that I have now; I didn't have captioned pictures, had no links, and my post was very brief and not very scientific. In my second post, I included some links and stuff like that, but I again wasn't very scientific and didn't explain why what we did happened. The last 7th grade post wasn't much better, and neither was the first 8th grade one. In my second 8th grade post, I feel that I made a huge improvement. I had big titles for all the sections, I included a lot of science, captioned pictures, and much more. I included vocabulary and a nice video (which was embedded). In my last post for this year, I think that I did pretty much the same things as in the 3rd quarter, but I added a few more videos and I my multimedia was better.

I feel that blogs contribute to learning in school because the posts are written by students, for students, which according to me makes it easier to understand, because it is less complicated and more self-explanatory. It is also easier to incorporate multimedia such as pictures, videos from YouTube, and much more. Blogs are a way in which we can learn and be creative at the same time!

I think that a blog could be used for many other things; for example, an 8th grade blog for all subjects where one person writes all the homework for the next day and what we learned. That would be better than having an individual blog for each subject, and the teachers could take turns grading them. Blogging could also be used instead of the School-to-Home news that the school makes.



Blogging has helped my overall writing a lot, by helping me make it more creative and more interesting. I have learned to check my spelling, make sure the color of the post is good, and more. I have also learned to make sure my grammar makes sense, because sometimes I write things without knowing that I'm writing them (making mistakes without realizing). I think that blogging is a good exercise for being creative, and it also helps in English class!

My commenting to others has gotten better and better. I think that I have learned how to be critical without being mean, and I have also learned to find mistakes that aren't visible to the naked eye. I have learned to talk more about the science and not just the multimedia, which I do a lot. Blogging has contributed to all of this. Even when I proofread something in for example English for someone, I have learned how to be a little more critical and what needs to be done and what doesn't.

The most important thing I have learned from blogging is to review. I have learned to have someone else proofread my work, because what makes sense to me might not make sense to other people. I have also learned to be more exciting and to use technology better.

All in all, I think that this year's blogging has been really good and I hope we will continue with this in the future!

The Sun - Presented on Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Hi everyone!

For my celestial body project, I was the first one in line to present. And you know why? Because I was studying the Sun, the center of our solar system and since we were going in order of the planets, the Sun has to start. After me, we go in order; Mercury-Venus-Earth... So I'm going to tell you more about the Sun in this post!
First of all, the Sun is not, I repeat NOT a planet. It is a star and that is what makes it special! It got its name from the Romans who named it "Sol". That is also how solar system got its name - because the Sun is the center of it! It has been known forever - all the discoverer had to do was look up! It is also 4.6 billion years old, which makes it middle-aged. As we learned from Ms. D, it is also middle-sized and middle-hot!

Here you can see a comparison of the sizes of planets (including the Sun), but also how small the Sun is to some other stars:


It is, as you can see in the video, much bigger than all the planets and is the biggest celestial body in our solar system. Its symbol is a circle with a dot in the middle.
It looks like this:

The Sun was born in a spinning cloud of gas and dust that was held together by gravity, which later formed a ball. The Sun also rotates, just like Earth; but it takes longer. One rotation takes 25.38 Earth days at the Equator and 35 days at the poles! This is because at higher latitudes, there is less solid, so it is harder for the gas to spin. All planets revolve around the Sun - so you must think that the Sun doesn't revolve. But it does! It revolves around the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which takes 225-250 million years. This can also be called a cosmic year. The star is one of over 200 billion in the Milky Way galaxy!

Do you like numbers? Well, you will see a lot of them when talking about the Sun!

• The distance to Earth is 149,598,000 km, also known as an Astronomical Unit (AU).
• The diameter is 1,393,000 km (approximately 110 x Earth's diameter.
• The density is 1.409 g/cm^3 (approximately 0.26 x Earth's density)
• The mass is 1.989 x 10^30 kg (approximately 333,000 x Earth's mass)
• The circumference is 4,370,005.6 km (approximately 1100 x Earth's circumference)
• The volume is 1,409,272,569,059,860,000 km^3 - (approx. 1,300,000 x Earth's volume).

The Sun is an extremely hot celestial body, although some stars are hotter! The temperature at the surface is 5,000 °C, and at the core, the temperature is 15,000,000 degrees Celcius! Some of these numbers are rounded - more exact ones can be found here.

There are also storms on the Sun. One type of storm is a Solar Flare. This is an explosion in the atmosphere of the Sun, and happen when the magnetic fields tangle. Another type of storm is a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) which happens in the corona (you can read more about the corona below) and increase solar winds which show up as auroras, or Northern and Southern lights, here on Earth!
Here is an example of an aurora:


The Sun is always hot and doesn't change climates, but it does affect the climate we have on Earth! You can read more about that at this website.

Basically, the Sun is just a big ball of hot gas, and in the core, nuclear reactions happen which produce light, energy, and radiation from the sun. Here's something interesting: Galileo Galilei, a famous Italian scientist (whom you can read more about here), thought that there was no solid material in the Sun at all, but NASA has now proven that there is solid in the core, made up of calcium ferrite (calcium + iron). There are also three layers of the atmosphere:

• The photosphere, which people consider to be the surface, is made up of hydrogen and helium gas (as is the whole Sun) and is approximately 5,000 km thick. Most of the light we see comes from here.
• The chromosphere is 2500 km thick, and is less dense but way hotter.
• The outmost layer, the corona, is visible from Earth only when there is a solar eclipse (the corona is the white part around it) because it is so thin and the photosphere blocks the view at all other times.

There have also been several missions to the Sun, but two of the biggest ones are:

• Chandra, launched in 1999, which focuses on taking x-ray pictures of the Sun and other stars. It takes very crisp and clear pictures and helps scientists study the universe. You can read more about it and see photos from it here.
• SoHo (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) was launched in 1995 by NASA and the ESA and is locked in orbit around the Sun just like Earth, which means that it travels at the same speed as us. It helps scientists study the Sun the way we see it, but closer. You can read more about it at its website.

Here are some pictures from SoHo and Chandra, and some pictures even have captions or objects labeled!:


And here are some interesting facts:

• There are things called "sunspots" which are "colder" spots (temperature "only" 3500 degrees Celcius... You can see these at 1:22 (they are the white spots) on the video above.

• Every 11 years, the Sun's magnetic poles (which we have on Earth, too) flip! This happens when there are lots and lots of sunspots on the surface. You can read more about them in this outdated yet informative article.
  
• I'm sure you love being out in the Sun, but be careful of its ultraviolet (UV) rays! They can burn your skin and cause you to have skin cancer! You might end up looking like this:
• Also, solar energy has become very popular these days. You can heat and cool your house with it, as well as get electricity through solar panels! It saves both money and the environment!
  

So now you know a little bit about the Sun - and I hope you enjoyed this post! Remember to be just as happy as the Sun is:

The next scribe should be Sophie - she was the only person who finished her presentation other than I, and if you are looking for any of our notes, visit the Moodle page for this week! There you will also be able to find blogging directions.

Good luck to the next presenter (who already started), Teréz!!
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Vocabulary used in this scribe post:
Note: all definitions are from Merriam-Webster

Star: A self-luminous gaseous spheroidal celestial body of great mass which produces energy by means of nuclear fusion reactions
Solar System: The Sun together with the group of celestial bodies that are held by its attraction and revolve around it
Aurora: a luminous phenomenon that consists of streamers or arches of light appearing in the upper atmosphere of a planet's magnetic polar regions and is caused by the emission of light from atoms excited by electrons accelerated along the planet's magnetic field lines
Nuclear Reaction (from http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Nuclear_reaction): A process in which two nuclei or nuclear particles collide, to produce products different to the initial products
NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration
ESA: European Space Agency


Note: ^ stands for exponent!

Viktor's Reflection Post for the 3rd Quarter

I feel that I have improved a lot on my scribe post since last quarter. I went thorough the rubric more carefully this time, and I made sure to preview my post before posting it.

According to my commenters, I improved because...

• I Included detail and neatness
• I had many pictures (with captions) and hyperlinks
• I had a good video, which was embedded into the post
• I used color
• I added a "definitions" part at the end
• I added more information about havin 3 sex chromosomes and genetic disorders
• I had accurate Science
• I elaborated
• I had real photos of people in our class
• I didn't include a long and complicated introduction about the blogging requirements this time, which a couple of people didn't like last quarter

The things I could improve on for next time are...

• Not having the whole first section of my post filled mainly with pictures
• Defining words that we used in a project, etc
• Talking more about the projects we do and why we are doing them
• Going even more in-depth with the science
• Including even more color
• Making my post more interesting by adding more emotion in my voice and making it more catchy
• Follow these eleven tips

In addition to all of those, for this particular post, the things I should have changed are...

• Making sure that my hyperlinks are visible and are not the same color as the text
• Including 3rd quarter in my title
• Expanding more on the Punnett Square's relation to genetics
• Choosing such a confusing song to put in the post
• Explaining more about having 3 sex chromosomes, because most 7th graders didn't understand it

The benefits of using a class blog are several. For me, a blog is much easier to look at than for example checking everything on Moodle. It is also easier, for me at least, to read something written by my classmates than by a teacher, because it is written in a language that I understand better and that I hear every day. I also like commenting a lot because it improves my writing, thinking, and reading skills! There isn't really anything I don't like about blogging - it is modern, fast, easy, yet fun. I would like it a little bit more if we had more options to choose from, such as fonts, and more. It is also very complicated putting in pictures the way I want them to, and making them smaller/bigger. Other than that, I think that Blogger is much better than WordPress because of its simplicity. I want us to continue doing this!

I also just noticed that I can change the color of the post on any web browser except for Google Chrome!

The First Scribe Post of the Quarter - Class on Thursday, January 27th, and Friday, January 28th

Hi everyone and welcome to the first blog post of the 3rd quarter!

Our requirements have changed a little bit, and the more detailed information can be found here. The main change is that we have to do less comments; only one per every two weeks! The next one is due on Friday, February 4th.

Thursday's class

On Thursday we immediately started working on our "Genetics Relationships" projects. We had a sheet with directions and a rubric. The project was mainly about defining words and then explaining how they are related with genetics and each other. The words we had to define were:

• Deoxyribose sugar
• Centromere
• Recessive/Dominant allele
• Proteins
• Heredity
• Genetics
• Adenine
• Thymine
• Guanine
• Cytosine
• Nitrogen Bases
• Genes
• Alleles
• Chromatin
• Chromosome
• Hybrid
• Gregor Mendel
• Homozygous
• Heterozygous
• Chromatids
• DNA
• Traits
• Purebred
• Fertilization
• Double Helix
• Phosphates

Almost everyone presented their project on Thursday;

Sophie, Noam and Ciprian:

Iva, Terez, and Vance (Iva missing):

Calvin, Bryce, and Antonia (Antonia missing):

and Gio and Reza (Reza missing):

Here is the song "It's Called Genetics" from "Bill Nye the Science Guy"'s show:

Our homework for Friday was to read pages 84-89, which was the section "Probability and Heredity".

Friday's Class

When we came to class, Val and Viktor (me) presented their "Genetics Relationships" project:

We started discussing Gregor Mendel (an Austrian monk who started studying heredity, and combined pea plants to get different combinations) and his work, and after that we discussed our homework and what "homo" and "hetero" mean. "Homo" means "the same" and "hetero" means "different". We also discussed people having three sex chromosomes, such as XXX or XXY. This often leads to Down Syndrome, which you can read more about here. Jamie Lee Curtis is a famous actress who has three sex chromosomes, as well as Lady GaGa. People who have this disorder are called hermaphrodites.

After that, we started talking about Punnett squares. Here is what a Punnett square looks like.

Then, we worked on the Bikini Bottom Genetics sheet that we got from Ms. D, which we have to finish for Tuesday (but only the front page!) If you want to, you can do the back page as well.

That's all we did these two days; remember to check the Science Moodle page for information about homework and other assignments.

The next scribe is Ciprian - good luck! :)

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Vocabulary used in this scribe post:

Genetics: The scientific study of heredity.

Heredity: The passing of traits from parent to child.

Chromosomes: A combination of two identical chromatids and a centromere, holding DNA, found in the nucleus of the cell.

Sex chromosomes: The chromosomes "X" and "Y", used to determine your gender. Usually you have two sex chromosomes, XX if you're a girl, and XY if you're a boy. This is not the case if you are a hermaphrodite.

Punnett squares: Charts that show possible combinations of alleles passed on from parents.