A busy lab day for the 6th grade!  Many topics were covered in a short period.

Boolify.org – this site is a visual Boolean search engine that looks cool but doesn’t do anything we can’t do using our Boolean operators in a regular search engine.

Homework – in middle school, homework is not optional.  Teachers assign homework to reinforce concepts, look for areas where additional support is necessary, to get boring stuff out of the way so class time can be used to learn and interact and grow.  Not Optional.

Typing – in general, this is the most successful typing term yet.  Almost everyone is keeping up with assignments and, surprisingly, everyone practicing regularly is getting better at it!

Paper, paper, everywhere! – students spend the bulk of class examining our paper usage at this school.  There is an amazing amount of paper left at printers around school – misprints, forgotten documents, and pages with very little ink on them.  We came up with a few different plans of action:

  1. If you print a mistake, it can be scratch paper!  There is a repository on Jac’s desk, and also bins in the math rooms.  This can be used for math calculations, doodles, paper airplanes and more.
  2. By using “Print Preview” instead of “Print”, we can see how many sheets we are about to print and either alter the text size, or choose specific pages instead of “printing all.”
  3. We can copy and paste text into Word, where margins can be changed, font-size adjusted, images and advertisements deleted, and more.

We calculated that if each student at Billings could print ONE less sheet per day, then the school could save 17,460 (1x97x180) sheets of paper a year!!!! This doesn’t even include the teachers’ paper usage. According to Conservatree, 1 tree can make 8,333 pages of paper, so we could easily save 2 trees a year!