Claymation

This week Doug and I added the task and the first few steps of the process to our webquest via questgarden. We then used our narration that we wrote last week to actually record the claymation piece of our example/model for students. The next thing we need to do is line up the narration with the movie and solidify our webquest. The process of creating a webquest is more complicated and time consuming than I originally expected but probably only because I have never created one myself. It is taking a bit of time to become familiar with the site and the organization of it.

New Direction

Well, after looking at Google Lit trips more thoroughly, I realized that I will definitely need more time to become familiar with using Google Earth before taking this on. I am still very interested in using this application, but I'm not ready to do so yet. Also I realized that it's going to take a lot of work on my part and the students won't necessarily come out with a project that they themselves have completed. After recognizing this, Doug and I decided to push lit trips off to the back burner, perhaps until later into the school year.
We instead decided to work a little more with the iStop Motion software and do a claymation project. We received the software and all of the cameras at the end of the school year and sort of threw the kids into the project without as much structure and thought as we would have liked. Our current plan is to create an earth science webquest which will take the students through a deeper learning about the different plate interactions within the earth. As a part of the final product of the webquest, each group of students will be required to create a claymation project that could be used to teach the other groups about one specific type of plate interaction. After the projects are completed, we will host the finished projects somewhere and require students from both of our classes to respond and critique each other's work.

Week 1

I have been doing some research about Google Lit Trips because they seem interesting to me, and I haven't seen them before. I am looking for something new that I can introduce to my students this year to add to our repertoire of technology resources. I am not super familiar with using Google Earth yet, so if I decide to create a project based on this I will have to do some more exploring and learning myself. There aren't currently very many of these precreated for 6th graders, so it would be nice to be able to add a resource for our grade level.