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Resource 2﻿ ** ﻿﻿﻿ **Simple Science. (2008). //What is the Solar System?// Retrieved September 26th, 2010, from: [] **__Description of Resource:__** This video is derived from an educational video website called Vimeo. This website contains several scientific education videos to assist educators in understanding the numerous scientific concepts. This particular resource provides a learning objective which allows students to watch and learn the characteristics of the Solar System, including the Sun, and how the planets orbit the sun as an Elliptical plane. The learning objective provided allows students to understand the characteristics of the Sun, the planets, as well as asteroids and comets. The visual representation of the video enables educators to explore the different features of the Solar System with text provided, differences in colours and shapes of the planets, as well as their distance from the Sun.

__** Rationale: **__  **Relevance to the outcome:** This resource is relevant to the outcome in that students are able to explore the role of the Sun in the Solar System, followed by the planets, from the closest to the Sun to the furthest, noting particular variations in features and what each planet represents, prior to exploring what’s beyond the Solar System. This new information will provide students with the ability of learning about our place in space exposing student ideas that have the potential to change their views about the way they perceive themselves and humanity in general. (Skamp, 1998, p.348)

 The nature of this resource being in the form of an educational video, provides students an alternative rather than limiting their information to that of a textbook to learn about the Solar System. Because learning is in the form of a digital resource, videos have a tendency to engage students in a way which will provide interest and motivate students to learn as McInerney & McInerney (2006) cites, learning is sustained by the desire to learn through the development of particular cognitive skills (p270). Through the use of digital media, those cognitive skills are developed with interest of the content of the outcome being taught.

 The visual representation provided in this resource supports the outcome by offering further assistance for students who have special needs. The text supports the visual, aiding to its meaning. This caters for students to further understand the informational text. This form of scaffolding promotes inclusion in that students are not left out in the learning process. As Foreman (2008) cites “an inclusive approach argues that the needs of all children should be catered for, regardless of their level of ability. For that reason, many of the concepts related to individualisation of instruction and catering for student needs will apply across the range of students.

 **Aspect of literacy:** Because this resource is a multimodal text, it can explore many avenues of literacy. A great way for students to achieve the desired outcome would be to incorporate an information report “which is used to give generalised information about an entire class of things” (Droga & Humphrey, 2003, p. 135) into one lesson. This text type benefits the learning outcomes for the students, as they begin to learn about and write a report on what they  know about the Solar System using the video as a stimulus. When incorporating this resource into lessons, it will allow students to explore their talking and listening skills by promoting a discussion after viewing the video to signify what students have learnt. With the use of oral language, “students will begin to discover that although spoken language can be written down, most written language is different from speech.” (Winch, Johnston, March, Ljungdahl & Holliday, 2006, p. 25) When introducing this particular text type as a writing activity, it would be suitable to group students together to promote collaborative learning as it “produces positive attitudes towards learning, raises self-concept and self-esteem, improves relationships between students, increase feelings of social support and enhance acceptance of ‘difference’ such as gender or disability”. (McInerney & McInerney, 2006, p. 291) Again, this comes back to inclusion.

 This resource can also identify elements of visual grammar which may be further explored in another lesson. The visual images presented in the video promote students awareness of the key features of the solar system, knowing where they are located to increased students understanding of the position of the planets to the sun and distinguish each planet from one another. For example, when the sun is mentioned, the focus is on the picture of the sun with text above it, outlines its key features to promote further understanding.