My topic is satellites and I really don't know much about them except they're used for transmitting signals to devices around us, say, for cable TV, or, umm, GPSs and, so, yeah.
That's all I know about them.
This student seemed to be very concerned that he complies with my guidelines as he often asked "Can I do this?" etc. I have since reassured him that he is free to follow his own path as it is his learning and decision making processes in which I am most interested.
Satellites are objects which orbit around a planet. Most satellites orbiting the Earth are placed there by humans for communication.
This is fat Jeffery. He is a couch potato but recently he hasn’t been able to get a signal on his TV so he can’t be a couch potato any more! Let’s see what is takes for Fat Jeffery to get his TV signal.
Satellites can only send transmissions in straight lines but the Earth is round.
A satellite dish on the Earth transmits a signal to a satellite. This is the uplink. One satellite sends a signal to another satellite to cross the Earth’s surface.
Inside a satellite is a transponder which changes the frequency and amplifies the signal before sending it on.
When the signal is close enough to the destination it can be received by another satellite dish on the ground. This is the downlink.
Synchronisation of video and scaling some of te graphics was part of my assistance with the animation. The only unique imagery which not part of this students storyboard was the following octagon:
This 'animated sequence' (when viewed in .html) image (if restricted to hard copy.doc) was used to accompany the narration about satellites sending straight lines across a round Earth. Constructing this image side-by-side on the screen helped to reinforce this point.
Showing the transmission lines smoothly proved to be difficult in PowerPoint because it wasn't possible to make small enough increments. Any disruption to the position of the lines was also unacceptable so we got around this by having the completed red line and then erasing small parts of the lines in Photoshop. Each change was then saved as a new file and then these files were played in reverse order to show the transmission signal moving (i.e. growing).
At the start I got a big, like, head start with my animation but then from then on it started to slow down as I had to do more research (and) just add small things that were harder to change.
I put Fat Jeffery in…yeah just came up with, just a random name and…Fat Jeffery yeah. But I just wanted to add something like this to make it a bit more humorous.
Yeah I liked the way that I presented it and put it into a way that you could show like, the two words joining into one. ‘Cause that’s what they actually do from transmitter and responder into…yeah the transponder.
Overall we were just trying to fix all the small things and just get everything right.
The "head start" that this student was referring to came from the fact that he immediately grasped the concept of the PowerPoint "insert new slide" animation technique. Each session was a struggle to get him to ensure that his content was correct before he animated anything or else he would end up double handling everything. This was an issue which ran right through until the final session.
Although it may not seem politically correct to include a character such as "Fat" Jeffery, I agree with this student's choice to add some humour to his animation.
When we learnt that "transponder" was a portmanteau the animation potential of morphing the two words was obvious.
| Uses correct terminology | With assistance | Simplified terminology | Some correct terminology | Actual terminology |
Identifies relevant variables |
Not apparent | With assistance | Basic understanding | Deep understanding |
| Identifies relationships between variables | Not apparent | With assistance | Basic understanding | Deep understanding |
| Self assessment. Does the student think that they understand their topic? | No | Not really | Basic understanding | Yes |
| Uses correct terminology | With assistance | Simplified terminology | Some correct terminology | Actual terminology | ||||||
Identifies relevant variables |
Not apparent | With assistance | Basic understanding | Deep understanding |
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| Identifies relationships between variables | Not apparent | With assistance | Basic understanding | Deep understanding | ||||||
| Self assessment scale (1-10). Does the student think that they understand their topic? | 1 |
2 |
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This student developed a deep understanding of everything he presented in his animation. The reason I have given him "basic understanding" in his conceptual consolidation rubric is that we left out some issues to make the topic more manageable. Such issues include the geosynchronous orbit which keeps each satellite in position.