Project Video

My project video, "How to Brush Your Iguana's Teeth" is a light-hearted instructional video not to be taken serious. My goal was to learn how to use a number of applications, including Garage Band, iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie to make this video. It utilizes photos and still images created from a video. It applies tooth brushing procedures to my iguana Bob, who really just wanted to chew on the toothbrush. It was fun but extremely challenging to make.

Engaged Learning

My first goal next year will be to adjust assignments or tasks to be more authentic by tying them into real world topics and experiences and increase the number of individuals students can involve in their learning. My second goal will be to encourage students to construct and produce meaningful knowledge by increasing the number of opportunities students have to interact through brainstorming, problem solving and teaching one another.

Dennis

Copyright and Fair Use

I'm not sure I was really surprised by any of the issues more than I was overwhelmed by restrictions we have to live by. Since I use many images from the Internet on my Power Point presentations, I'm not going to be able to put them on my class website next year as I had planned to. I guess the best way to make sure the projects don't violate copyright laws is to educate the students on copyright issues before they even start their projects. I'll go over the issues involving copyrighting and give them a list of safe sights where they can find the information they need for their projects. Also, they are 7th graders and I had most of them last year for a study skills class in which one of the important things they learned was how to properly reference all information and images taken from the Internet (I hope).

Dennis

Reflective Blog

Dennis Gerrity

I found all of the material and products presented today to be very interesting and potentially very useful. They were all very new to me and as such, somewhat intimidating. I hope I can remember it all. I found it difficult to keep up with the continuing number of instructions on who to send things to, etc. I think the Comic Life Program will be very useful the first week of school in my Advisory Class just as we did today. They could be posted in the classroom for the entire year. Additionally, I can see using Google docs spreadsheets to gather group data from labs and projects to share with the entire class.