Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Weather Trends and the Weather.com App

One of the TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) for fourth and fifth grade science in Texas is that students are able to track weather patterns over a period of time.  This is an activity that simply begs for technology to be used.  Luckily, weather.com has an app for ipods, iphones, and ipads.  The app allows the user to track the immediate temperature and weather conditions, long range forecasts, and even patterns via weather maps.  This is an excellent way for students to track and revise weather patterns over a period of time. 

A great activity to help make the connection between a forecast and the actual weather is to have students use the 10-day forecast tab to write down weather for an period of time in the future and then compare the predictions to the actual weather on the day of.  This is done simply by switching between the immediate weather tab and the 10-day forecast tab. 

Finally, the weather.com app is very useful in classroom settings where there is not a 1:1 ratio of devices to students.  The app allows multiple locations to be saved to a favorites menu so that students can easily switch between locations to find their specific place.  This also allows students to find and track weather in a variety of locations around the world. 

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