Billings Beta

Parallax Project by Jake.

Parallax Project by Cillian (7th grade).

For Winter term, the 6th grade will be enrolled in 2 tech classes, running concurrently: Tech Tuesday & Working Wednesday.  Typing will continue to be required, 3 days per week.  Students can get ahead on these assignments by typing over Winter break.  For each day over break that a student completes an assignment, they receive a day’s credit (up to 10 days) for the Winter term!!

Tech Tuesday

Jac & the 6th grade will work in a seminar style to research, hypothesize and deconstruct tech companies that are having a huge effect on our lives. Students will be expected to work in small groups and participate in full class discussions.  There will be some homework - mostly reading short articles in preparation for class discussions.

Working Wednesay

Kasha will introduce the 6th grade to the Microsoft Office suite of applications.  Students will become proficient with Word, Excel & PowerPoint this term through a series of creative and practical lessons designed to introduce program functionality and teach students when such tools are appropriate.  There will also be time for students to use these programs beyond their “intended” use, for instance, making art with Excel or creating Mad Libs using Word’s mail merge feature!

Parallax Project by Shana (7th grade).

Last 2 weeks of 6th grade tech have been used to practice memory and critical thinking skills as well as self reflections.

Quiz summary:

Class average: 72% (77% adjusted)
Range: 47-95% (52-100% adjusted)

Last day of discussions around the Internet. We covered a lot of ground today.

Imagine a cell phone address book.  This software presents information about a “contact” such as their name, phone number, possibly an email address or photo.  Your phone is actually creating a big table for all your contacts, and the address book presents the info you want clearly.

The web is designed in much the same way.  Humans use domain names (e.g., www.yahoo.com) because they are easy to remember.  When you type a domain name into a web browser, the name is sent to the company that provides Internet service, which sends the domain name to a giant network of root servers.  These root servers are the world’s most used database, looking up the appropriate IP address (phone number for a specific computer) for the requested domain name.  That IP address is sent to the internet provider, which sends the numbers to your computer and then you are connected with the computer. Phew!

We have a root server in Seattle, located in the Westin Hotel.  This server is operated by Verisign, Inc.

Some resources from our discussion today:

• Here is a map of the world’s root server network.
• Here is an article about how domain names are handled.
• Here is a list of TLDs (top level domains).
• Here is an article about the guy that figured out how to hack the whole Internet!

This week was an intro to the Internet.  Although students have become comfortable using school-provided email addresses and the student Start page, we haven’t had a clear discussion on how the Internet is used in an academic setting until now.

Some terms we learned along the way:

• web browser
• domain name
• web address/URL

We discussed the 3 most popular web browsers, their history and the companies that produce them.  We also learned about Google’s very recent entry into the browser war.  We reviewed the 3 most popular search engines and talked about market share and critical mass.

Finally, we discuss the lab and Internet guidelines that have been created by Billings students in negotiation with the faculty.

Tuesday is November 4th, elections day! In tech today, after a brief conversation about typing homework and passwords, we read an article from Computer World called Election Day: What could possibly go wrong?  This article examined 6 errors that can occur with electronic voting machines:

1. machine malfunction (hardware)
2. touch screen calibration errors (hardware/software)
3. training problems (user)
4. human error (user)
5. voter registration database errors (software/data)
6. malicious attack (software)

As one of our first forays onto the WWW this year, we used this time to identify pop-ups and advertisements in the article to build awareness.

When finished, we took a quick pop quiz and identified the electronic voting issues that Homer Simpson encountered when trying to vote.

We took a couple of days to reflect on all the work we’ve accomplished this year so far.  Email, passwords, intranets, programming, Boolean operators, logic statements and prototyping are just a few of these things we’ve learned about.

While remembering past classes, we took the opportunity to create a visual mindmap of the concepts that have been introduced.  We found some interesting discoveries, one of which was that we use typing in almost everything we do!

On Wednesday we created a new mindmap that explored how people use technology.  This schema will be evaulated throughout the rest of the year, as we connect ideas and deepen understanding.

Classes split themselves into 2 groups on Tuesday…

One group used the time to catch up on Venn diagrams.  We learned to visually diagram Boolean terms using Venn diagrams.  The other group got to watch a new Discovery Channel show called “Prototype This!” which can be watched online for free.

Wednesday we took a review worksheet designed to find out how well the tech teachers have taught Venn diagrams.  The rest of the period was free exploration in Scratch.  Most students have successfully incorporated at least one Boolean operator into their programs.