Apple iPad testing
Students got their hands on an Apple iPad today – weeks before the product has officially been launched! We did some testing and compared the size of this new device with an iPod and a laptop. Overall impression was that the screen seems small for web surfing, but it is a fun gizmo.
If you are interested in trying out the iPad for free, follow this link for access


Tech in the News updates
May 23, 2010 - 8:48 am
Tags: Apple, Google, social networks, Tech in the News
Posted in 7th Grade, Digital Identity | 1 comment
The last few weeks we’ve been following the upcoming iPhone, Facebook privacy updates, and a lawsuit against Google for Street View information.
Apple in the news – iPhone 4G (HD?) & profits
April 22, 2010 - 11:34 am
Tags: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Tech in the News
Posted in 7th Grade | Comments Off
Spirited 7th grade conversation today, as students tracked the latest developments in the case of the iPhone 4G. We started by tracking Apple’s stock price this year, beginning with the iPad announcement and following through until yesterday’s report that Apple made over 3 billion dollars in the last quarter. Using Bing’s finance charts and Google’s [...]
Independent Project Spotlight: Jamal
In conjunction with a month-long language arts identity writing project, 7th grade students have chosen independent creative projects to support their words. These projects have taken on a variety of forms, all sharing personal experience through vision, sound or touch. Jamal taught himself to use Garageband to create an original rap about his life and [...]
iPad a great Spring Break, thank you
This blog post is spoken directly into Dragon Dictation. I am Using the iPad microphone to capture my voice and the app to convert my words into written text. Dragon Dictation (available for iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch) is a free application and it could be a useful tool for students and adults find it difficult [...]
iPad deconstruction
February 1, 2010 - 2:01 pm
Tags: Apple, Tech in the News
Posted in 6th Grade | 4 comments
The 6th grade spent the period deconstructing the marketing around Apple’s new iPad announcement. We started with the official video that greets visitors to the Apple website. What does Apple want us to believe about the new device? How do they use music, backgrounds, demonstrations and interviews to convince us? Next we broke up into [...]
Where do we go from here?
December 14, 2009 - 9:07 am
Tags: Apple, Google, Microsoft, search engines, WolframAlpha, Yahoo!
Posted in 6th Grade | Comments Off
The 6th grade concluded Internet boot camp this week. Everyone is clear on why Billings provides computers and Internet access and their responsibilities as users. We took a moment to define some common terms that will be used throughout their middle school technology experiences. Student definitions: Web broswer an application used to connect to the [...]
Tech in the News – Verizon v. AT&T
December 3, 2009 - 4:14 pm
Tags: Apple, Google, Tech in the News
Posted in 7th Grade | Comments Off
7th grade has been using tech all year to support LA and Science…today was a day to kick back and talk about all the amazing things that happen in the world of technology. Today we talked about the mighty battle between Verizon and AT&T. AT&T has the iPhone, and pays Apple money for the right [...]
Are Google and Apple friends?
January 8, 2009 - 4:20 pm
Tags: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Tech in the News
Posted in 6th Grade | Comments Off
First day back to tech and the 6th grade tackled what turns out to be a difficult question: Are Google and Apple friends? Students agreed that Apple is a computing company and Google is an advertising company. They don’t compete for hardware (iPhone, computers, iPod, etc) but they DO fight for software users (Apple sells [...]
MacBook Air showdown
Last week Apple launched a new laptop, the MacBook Air. This week in tech, the 6th grade split up into 3 groups and each team compared this new ultra-thin laptop to others on the market. Macbook Air OS Leopard $1799-$3098 2GB Ram up to 80GB storage The competitors were: The OLPC XO laptop Linux OS [...]
Apple introduces Leopard (Week 9)
October 29, 2007 - 9:17 am
Tags: Apple, Microsoft, Tech in the News
Posted in 6th Grade | Comments Off
Today we focused on Tech in the News. The two biggest stories of the last week are: Microsoft buys stake in Facebook for $240 million dollars. We used this topic to learn about social networking services, how they rely on large adoption to be successful and how they leverage their customer base to create revenue [...]
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March 2, 2010 - 5:31 pm
This gave me and my mom a laugh. Thanks for the great idea!