Wednesday’s Site of the Day!
Welcome to Wednesday’s site of the day! Here I will highlight a great site that I use or have found to use in my classroom.
Today’s site is one that I recently re-discovered. However, I have not been able to use it until this year. In Alberta, we do not do Space Science until Grade 6 so I never had an opportunity to use it. Now, that I teach Grade 3 in British Columbia, though, we get to do Space. I am excited to use this site as I think it is a really cool tool to really get a sense of the Solar System and see it from different perspectives as well as gaining some valuable information from it.
The site is the “Virtual Solar System” (http://www.nationalgeographic.com/solarsystem/splash.html) and is provided by National Geographic. The site works on both types of computers but if you are using a PC, you can use the “virtual” version of the site. This virtual version allows you 
to zoom around the solar system. You can view the actual motions of the planets and see their rotation around the sun. You can move around the planets on all planes and see the solar system from different perspectives. Along the side of the screen, you can access more information as well as more pictures on specific topics relating to that planet. For example, if you are viewing the sun, you can get close-up shots of sunspots in the sidebar. The site is well done and nicely laid out for use by teachers or students. The only drawback is that you need to install a plugin to allow the simulations to work. The plug-in, Viscape, may be a little tough to find though the link from the National geographic site seems to be working now. I actually had to go to another site to find it. The site I used was http://vrcontinuum.richlabonte.net/download.htm. The site is really bright and hard to read but you can find the plug-in there if the main one does not work.
