For those of you who are unaware of the NASA education resource centers located around the United States, they have excellent materials which teachers can use for incorporation into their lessons. NASA also has a presence at the various NSTA conventions around the country. At these conventions NASA gives away interactive CD-ROMS for education. These CD-ROMs usually address current projects. I have found that certain pieces (audio, video, animation, still graphics/photographs) will complement a specific instructional task and therefore will fit nicely in my teachings.

However, using the entire CD-ROM provides more information than I want my students to have based upon my time requirements. Using specific software programs I can extract just those portions needed to get the "point" across in a specific lesson. The same activity in the above paragraph makes use of the technique by incorporating a NASA quicktime movie (from CD-ROM) discussing orbital eccentricity.

When you find a piece of information which will complement your instruction, you can quite often pull that piece of information from the CD-ROM and incorporate it into your instruction. The advantage of this technique is the ability to personalize the information and use it in an appropriate manner for your own instructional purposes. For the most part, NASA's material (http://nix.nasa.gov/copyright.html) can be used without fear of copyright violations. However, NASA's Caltech JPL Laboratory is beginning to assert copyrights on the materials they produce (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/pictures/imageuse.html). When using someone elses materials, make sure you are within the guidelines of the owner's copyright/usage policies.