 |
|
 Lectures Created by High School Students Loretto Academy, El Paso, TX The Loretto Academy is a highly regarded Catholic high school for the girls of Texas, New Mexico and Chihuahua, Mexico. The requirements for graduation at Loretto are substantial, yet 82% of the students in the recent graduating classes have exceeded those requirements, taking more classes than required. Moreover, forty-one percent of the Class of 2004 received merit scholarships, totalling over $1,562,425.00 during the last four years. One hundred percent of the senior class applied for college, and all were accepted. 
Dr. Steve Judd, a biologist by training, is one of the teachers at
Loretto. Steve teaches biology, environmental science, computer science
and digital photography.
Zoology is a one-semester class taught in the spring. In the past, Steve
has traditionally asked his zoology classes to create PowerPoint slide
sets and present them to the class at the end of the semester.
This year, Steve had the girls create QCShow presentations.
Loretto Academy purchased five copies of QCShow Author — which in
reality means 25 installations. Steve put one copy on each of the
school's computers.
He then broke the zoology class into five groups, assigning each group
one of the following topics: fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and
mammals, with each group composed of three or four girls.
Perhaps the most interesting thing to note was that he only gave them ten
minutes instruction on how to use QCShow Author
and then left them alone to complete their presentations. The choice of
the technical content, the formatting of the PowerPoint slides, the
narration and its editing was wholly left to the girls themselves. What
you see here are the presentations that the girls created:
This generation of children has been born not with a chip on their shoulder but one at their fingertips. They expect to communicate digitally, and they apparently took to this assignment like fish to water. We anticipate that this form of academic presentation to become one of the more common uses of QCShow.2005 Zoology Class: Evolution and Physiology of Fish 2005 Zoology Class: Evolution and Physiology of Reptiles 2005 Zoology Class: Evolution and Physiology of Mammals School Journalism A second obvious use for QCShow that we expect to see soon in grades perhaps as low as middle-school or even upper-level elementary schools is that of an electronic school newspaper, published once every two or four weeks. Digital still images and text can be put into a narrated PowerPoint slide show, with the kids themselves narrating the slides, to produce an elegant school newspaper. You can easily imagine this use when you watch the talks above. Rather than having the slides focus on the evolution of reptiles 300 million years ago, they could have just as easily described what happened to the science and auto clubs last week. About one in a hundred high schools operate closed-circuit, on-campus television studios as a part of their journalism departments, but this is clearly an expensive proposition. The very low price of QCShow allows not only the equivalent of a television studio to be possible — well within the budget of any school district — but one where the contents of the "newspaper" could be viewed by parents and friends in the community as well. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||