Friday June 20 (day 4) discussion
Today we broke into subject groups to discuss where we were, our common themes, and any questions we were having. The groups were math, technology, science, and humanities. After we spent some time discussing in our groups we shared around the room by subject.
Then we got back into our school grioups and worked on taking video and cutting and pasting it into a new video. We had lots of video to go thru to condense down to 3 mintes worth of edited video.
After surviving the scorching heat during lunch time we met with our scientist to debrief from Thursday's field trip. She quizzed us on different types of whales and/or dolphins. We continued our discussion of the novel. We finished the day by examining the results from each of our hydrophones from Thursday. Unfortunately, we didnt hear any dolphins just the water movement and some other unknown noises.
CyberRaiders Change the World One Blockbuster at a Time
AM Session –
Last night Tim expressed concern that we were varying away from our primary objective; “to make science popular.” Last night talking with my Dad I decided that heart or no heart we need a Jurassic Park, Da Vinci Code, Close-Encounters-of-the-Third-Kind-of-product, which mobilized the public to investigate the reality of these blockbuster movies. As high school teachers we are “experts” at getting the millennial adolescent to take interest in a variety of subjects. As Tim reminisced it occurred to me that we needed to first find what our kids want and then fuse it to “matters of the heart.”
This morning the tech teachers shared our best tricks. It seems that Tech guys are more scientific minded than I thought. We spend more time trouble-shooting problems, hypothesizing, and experimenting with new solutions to the plethora of problems technology creates. I discovered that I am not the only one to deal with the constant flow of teachers displaying a technological SOS. We talked shop and learned that I-Movie ‘08 is limited and that Final Cut Express will become the standard entry level editing software. We broke to teach our teams simple editing techniques.
Half way through our editing Tim and I went to Shelly to share last night’s epiphany. We discussed openly the need to discover our students’ interest before we continue studying information that might not be pertinent to our final product. With one week left we are feeling closter phobic.
Things that we thought might get our students excited:
• Iron Man
• Sports – how does your heart compare to your favorite athletes
• Beats of the Heart goes to Beats on the Street – Flash Game for organizing beats to make music and rap to it. Hip-Hop Hearts
PM Session-
In the afternoon we watched online animations and illustrations of heart function. Heart Fight was the most elaborate, while the online illustrations were more simple (2D). Heart Flight was entertaining but the 2D animations were easier to conceptualize heart function. I have no doubt we could replicate these own our own. Then we discussed our brainstorms with Paolini. He seems excited and when we reminded him that we only have one week left he felt pressure to streamline the process and focus on the archetype of our project.
Attached is a model of a graphic novel that a student might produce.