technology with intention
Jac de Haan
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Home page: http://www.billingsmiddleschool.org/beta
Posts by Jac de Haan
Digital identity close to home
270 days
8th grade students examined two stories of digital identity occurring this week in Washington state:
Story 1: Two tweens charged with cyberstalking in Facebook incident
An 11-year old and 12-year old are accused of using an ex-friend’s Facebook account to post mean and sexual images and messages. This is a clear instance of posing, which we’ve previously studied as a form of cyberbullying. The 12-year-old student went before a judge today and pled not guilty.
Story 2: A superstar teen loses chance to be featured by the Seattle Times because of distateful tweets
A Seattle journalist was writing an article about a teen who is heading to college after beating the odds and moving to the US from a refugee camp. As part of his research, he took a look at the teen’s Twitter account, which contained lewd language and drug related posts. As a direct result of the tweets, the journalist has decided not to write the story.
8th graders spent time debating the conflict between the teen’s positive actions and negative digital identity. Which is a more accurate depiction of the teen? Do we all have negative aspects of our life that aren’t meant to be recorded forever? What are healthy ways to explore identity without putting everything online?
STEM: Lego Mindstorm Sensors
275 days
by Jac de Haan
in 6th Grade
6th grade students are continuing their study of programming and creative problem solving with Lego Mindstorms. Building on our study of robot movement last week, we were presented with 3 new challenges this week, all requiring sensors!
- Convince your robot to stay within a path outlined by masking tape against a black floor. The path weaves around the classroom. So far, students have figured out how to have their robots stop at the tape and change direction, but no solutions yet on how to the the robot to decide which way to turn.
- Create a whisper bot, a robot that will only move when it is quiet in the room. If noise reaches a certain threshold, the robot will stop until it is quiet again. As an added challenge, if the robot receives an extremely loud noice (“STOP!”) then it will cancel it’s program and remain stopped forever.
- Send your robot directly at a wall and have it stop without bumping into anything and then react using sound or movement.
Playstation Network hacked
276 days
7th and 8th grade students this week are examining the timeline associated with a recent hacking of Sony’s Playstation Network. The story is evolving daily, as Sony releases information about the incident which may have caused over 77 million customer accounts to be compromised.
As a result of the hack, there is a class-action lawsuit filed against Sony and the U.S. government wants answers too.
Sony’s stock price has dropped as a result of the intrusion, and on Monday they announced that another 25 million older accounts have been hacked as well.
While some students felt this story didn’t pertain to them personally because they don’t have a Playstation Network account, we quickly realized that there are many online locations that have similar databases of customer information.
Here is a list of places that students shop online, places that keep records of our address, name, birthday, credit card numbers, phone numbers, etc:
- iTunes music store
- Amazon.com
- XBOX Live
- eBay
- anywhere online that we shop!
Every time we buy from an online location, we are trading the convenience of instant gratification for the risk of losing control of our personal information. Sony is an incredibly unfortunate example.
Since the database breach occurred, Sony had to switch off their Playstation Network until they can fix the security issues. This means that millions of people can’t play games online with friends or buy new games. This results in millions of lost revenue dollars for the company and many angry customers.
Will this problem cause Playstation to lose the console battle with Microsoft? Will people be able to trust Sony with their personal information after such a news story?
Spreadsheets beyond spreadsheets
282 days
by Jac de Haan
in 7th Grade
iTunes' media organizer actually looks just like a spreadsheet, complete with a header row.
7th grade took a look at two popular programs that store information in a database and then drew similarities between spreadsheets and databases.
This work follows our previous learning about Spreadsheets and Excel.
Google Earth's databases don't look like a spreadsheet, but it is clear that every entry must include a photo, text, links, supporting organization, latitude and longitude. These are essentially columns in a giant spreadsheet.
While in Google Earth, students realized that the program includes references to the primary sources for photographs, just as we do when writing a research paper.
Pribilof Islands
284 days
by Jac de Haan
in 7th Grade
7th grade students spend the spring learning about the effects of globalism and consumerism. This year, teachers are working with NOAA representatives to use the story of the Pribilof Islands as a case study of the impacts of trade on a culture.
In tech we are easing into the topic by getting a sense of the location of these tiny islands and scoring the primary database of Google Earth for video, articles and photos of the area. NOAA has posted a film that discusses what has happened to the people who live on the Pribilof Islands as the world learned of the seals that live there:
People of the Seal from NOAA Ocean Media Center on Vimeo.
“People of the Seal’ explores the centuries-old connection between the northern fur seal and the
Unangan natives of Alaska’s Pribilof and Aleutian Islands in the middle of the Bering Sea.
Aquilina Lestenkof traces five generations of her own family’s history in this remote part of the
world, weaving together native, Russian and American cultural threads. At the heart of the story
are the fur seals. Like the Unangan, the fur seals are struggling to survive. As Aquilina says, “if
they’re not here, then we won’t be either.”
*Special thanks to community member Pam G. who introduced us to this topic.
Googlers tinker too
284 days
by Jac de Haan
in Projects
Seattle middle school student explores a circuit board designed by the incredible Joe Grand as part of a trip to the Maker Faire.
One of the most exciting places to be at our school is the BricLab – a kinesthetic learning center where students take apart electronics and repurpose them for art projects. The work done in the BricLab is a nice deviation from class and also compliments many of the projects from other subjects.
Turns out Google thinks that hands-on time is important too. The Official Google Blog just posted an article about their Workshop: a place employees go to play with miter saws and plasma cutters.
In the spirit of our BricLab, this year teachers Sarah and Rachel are taking a group of students to San Francisco for the Maker Faire…a 60,000 person celebration of tinkering and do-it-yourself exploration! Click here to read about our 2009 trip to this amazing destination.
Texting frequency among middle school students
286 days
by Jac de Haan
in Digital Identity
Analysis of the 8th grade digital identity survey continues to yield interesting trends. This year we have 3x more power-texters than we did last year…we may need to change the high end of our response options next year to get a sense of how many texts these frequent folks send and receive in a month!
Digital identity quotes
287 days
The 8th grade recently deployed an annual digital identity survey of Billings Middle School students. We are still analyzing the data, but here are some interesting quotes that were submitted:
(more…)
STEM: Lego Mindstorm Movement
288 days
by Jac de Haan
in 6th Grade
STEM students returned from break and jumped back into the Mindstorm NXT programming that we began back in March. Today’s class was presented with 3 challenges:
- Make your robot climb an inclined plane and then traverse a table top, stopping within 1.5 cm of the far edge. Students were encouraged to succeed in this challenge using 3 different variables: wheel rotations, time and distance.
- Send your robot at least 10 feet away from its point of origin and then return to within a 6cm radius of the starting location.
- Program your robot to travel in a figure 8.
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Design week: alphabet improv
296 days
by Jac de Haan
in Projects
This Design Week, one group looked at our theme of PLAY through the lens of musical and dramatic improv. They documented their experience with Flip video cameras and then edited the footage in iMovie. The soundtrack was recorded in Garageband and used only real instruments played by members of the group.
The prompt was simple: Sing the alphabet song in any style you like. Enjoy!
