The 11^th UNL Astronomy Education Workshop will be held on Saturday, October 11, 2008. Our featured speaker will be Dr. Pamela Gay of Southern Illinois University. Pamela is a well-known variable star astronomer and is very active in the American Association of Variable Star Observers. She also has a long history of communicating astronomy to the public through podcasts (see http://www.astronomycast.com). Registration will commence in late August.

Kevin Lee with Todd Young (WSC) and Dave Kreigler (UNO) will once again be offering a day-long workshop at the national AAPT meeting in Edmonton. The workshop is entitled “Teaching Astronomy with Technology” and is held on Sunday, July 20. It will strongly focus on computer simulation and peer instruction usage in the classroom and touch lightly on computerized ranking tasks and how technology can aid preclass preparedness.

The latest module to debut on the ClassAction web site focuses on stellar evolution. There are presently 16 questions and this module is likely to grow over time. It does a particularly thorough job of exploring student understanding of the different stages of the sun’s future evolutionary track and the source of fusion energy at each stage. A poster paper on the Stellar Evolution module will be presented at the AAPT meeting in Edmonton on July 22. Visit the Stellar Evolution Module page.