A Star's Story

Today instead of class we had a web seminar. This was my first web seminar I had ever attended. At first it was a little awkward but it did get better. Yet, the content at times was a little hard to understand since my knowledge in Astrology is not very good.
I learned quite a bit from today’s seminar but at times it was very hard to follow and was over my head. I have not had any classes on Astrology since my freshman year of high school and even then it was minimal. I felt like today’s seminar was more for people who know about astrology. Sometimes it was very hard to understand the content of the lecture.
Today I learned that a star is made up of seventy to eighty percent of hydrogen, twenty to thirty percent of helium and the rest is other elements from the periodic table. Next, I learned the definition of a star which is: massive, hot, glowing balls of gas. I also learned the difference between high mass and low mass stars. High mass stars are bright, burn fuel rapidly, live short lives while low mass stars are less bright and burn for millions of years. People can categorize stars by temperature, composition and brightness. The sequence of a star’s life is: Nebula, protostar, main sequence star, red giant, variable stage, planetary nebula, white dwarf, and finally, black dwarf.
This lecture helped me learn a few things about stars to teach in my future classroom. At the end of the lesson there was also websites I could visit to find ideas for my classroom. This experience was a great one to have. It was nice to be able to be a part of a web seminar. It is a great use of technology.