Thursday, September 1, 2011

Morrell's Project

Sorry for my absence on the blog for the month of August. A lot of personal stuff went down but I think I'm back on track. Posts the the blogs will be incoming this weekend.  Anyways here is what I'm going to be doing to get myself ready for the project and the execution of the project.

Like stated earlier I want the students to create a known plate boundary for each of the three types of boundaries using Google SketchUp. To do this I feel that I need to be more of an "expert" at SketchUp than I am or previously was during the STI2011 week. I'm going through more of the tutorials, even more than once so I have an idea of the questions that might be asked of me. I will more than likely respond with "What have you tried?" and "Have you asked your partner?" before leading them down the right path. Near the beginning we will all learn Google SketchUp together much like we did at the conference.

I still haven't decided on whether or not to use my school site that is already up and running or create some sort of blog or other website to house this. Pictures and videos that I take of the students during this process could become unruly in FirstClass as I don't have much space on the server. However the website, regardless of where it is hosted, will include a run down of what's going on in the class as well as pictures and video to be used as examples of the written descriptions. Finally when everyone is done their final product will be screen captured so I can upload it as a picture instead of a document.

Grading will be group based as well as individual. They will have a group grade on how well they completed the requirements and an individual grade for how much they contributed to the final product. I think I'm going to have it be a 70/30 split between individual and group. Not sure about that part yet.

What I need to do right away considering it's the beginning of school (finally! Two days closed because of Irene) is to send home a photo permission slip to parents. Other than that I think it'll be a trial by fire as the project progresses.


1 comment:

  1. When you send home the photo permission make sure explain / show examples of what you will be doing with pics so parents understand that. Also you can watch some tutorial videos on Sketchup as well. The difficult concept is Dynamic Components to get. With the age of your students making them responsible for there own education is valuable. We have a tendency to think we have to "teach" every aspect of programs/technology when in the real world they will be responsible for figuring it out themselves. The internet has a lot of excellent tutorials.

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