technology with intention
Jac de Haan
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Home page: http://www.billingsmiddleschool.org/beta
Posts by Jac de Haan
STEM: getting to know 101 neighbors
437 days
by Jac de Haan
in 6th Grade
With winter program over, students are eagerly back into Friday STEM experiences. We revisited our learning of binary code from back in December and took our knowledge out to explore the community.
Students were presented with 100-year-old photos of Green Lake businesses. Each photo included its street address written in binary code. Students were tasked with decoding the numbers and then visiting each location to take a photo.
In each photo, students are standing either facing the camera or away from it, representing ones and zeros. Their body language spells out the street address in binary!
*Historic images from “Seattle’s Green Lake” by Brittany Wright.
Spanish scripting in Scratch
438 days
by Jac de Haan
in 6th Grade
Another amazing Spanish version of true/false. This game was created by 6th grade student Gus:
Cache in, trash out
439 days
Geocaching club this week had two amazing finds. Using global positioning satellites we hunted down a multi-step cache south of school and then searching out a decommissioned Seattle bomb shelter.
As we get more comfortable with the guidelines of geocaching, we’ve decided to add another level to our experiences, in keeping with the EcoSchool’s Global Dimensions Pathway that we aspire towards. Students picked up garbage while we hunted for caches: a concept referred to as Cache In, Trash Out.
GoogleFinance function
441 days
by Jac de Haan
in 7th Grade
6th and 7th grade students have kicked off their 12-week stock market exchange competition, sponsored by math teacher Pam.
This project ties in nicely with our advanced spreadsheet functions. We’ll use spreadsheets to pull in information and analyze trends. Today we played with historical stock data using a new formula:
=GoogleFinance(“TICKER”, “ATTRIBUTE”)
Available attributes are:
- price: market price of the stock – delayed by up to 20 minutes.
- priceopen: the opening price of the stock for the current day.
- high: the highest price the stock traded for the current day.
- low: the lowest price the stock traded for the current day.
- volume: number of shares traded of this stock for the current day.
- marketcap: the market cap of the stock.
- tradetime: the last time the stock traded.
- datadelay: the delay in the data presented for this stock using the googleFinance() function.
- volumeavg: the average volume for this stock.
- pe: the Price-to-Earnings ratio for this stock.
- eps: the earnings-per-share for this stock.
- high52: the 52-week high for this stock.
- low52: the 52-week low for this stock.
- change: the change in the price of this stock since yesterday’s market close.
- beta: the beta value of this stock.
- changepct: the percentage change in the price of this stock since yesterday’s close.
- closeyest: yesterday’s closing price of this stock.
- shares: the number of shares outstanding of this stock.
- currency: the currency in which this stock is traded.
A few students also pulled in weekly or daily data for a stock using:
=GoogleFinance(“symbol”, “attribute”, “start_date”, “num_days|end_date”, “interval”)
- “symbol” – stock symbol
- “attribute” – high, low, open, close, vol, or all (quote also works, and defaults to close).
- “start_date” – the date for the historical data. When only the start_date is specified, the historical data is just for that day.
source: http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=54198
JeopardyLabs and Winter Camping
453 days
by Jac de Haan
in Reference
8th grade students just returned from an incredible winter camping experience at Blewett Pass. They employed all the winter camping skills that they have practiced for the last month (snowshoeing, winter tent set-up, snow sculpture and more), along with their research on avalanche awareness and winter first aid.
In lieu of a final test before leaving, students played a grade-wide game of Jeopardy to show off their understanding of the content. In the past teachers have used Powerpoint and created cumbersome, time-intensive Jeopardy boards, but this year Meredith found a great resource in JeopardyLabs, a quick game-builder complete with built-in scoring. This resource is free to use and you can select the number of teams playing.
Test your winter camping skills by playing the same board our students used by clicking this link.
Google Apps Script tutorials
458 days
by Jac de Haan
in 8th grade
8th grade students are working through self-paced tutorials to learn more about using advanced Spreadsheet functionality.
A few students are opting for independent project work to support their 8th grade project. Toby just captured some footage of his baseball pitching form and will be using iMovie to analyze and compare his release with professional athletes.
Halley is interviewing a program director and is learning to convert and combine .wav files in Audacity after mounting a digital voice recorder and accessing it as a hard drive.
Tech Tuesday kicks off
458 days
by Jac de Haan
in Projects
Declan and Ben C. Have been looking for extra time to engage in independent programming. Their solution was to start a Tech Tuesday lunch club – and today was the first meeting!
11 students showed up and worked on projects that ranged from HTML, JavaScript, Alice, FLStudio and Scratch. Next meeting is scheduled for March 1st.
Intro to 3D programming
459 days
by Jac de Haan
in 6th Grade
6th grade students have graduated from their 2D programming in Scratch to 3D. Today we ran through a couple of tutorials in Alice and learned about objects and methods. As with most of the programs we use, Alice is a free download – there is a link on our student programs homepage.
Take control of your online you
463 days
8th grade students at Billings are always involved in helping younger students and each other keep digital identities protected. In the past they’ve conducted surveys, presented to our parent community, built a webpage and created video.
Staying up-to-date with Facebook’s changing privacy policies can be daunting. An 8th grade parent recently wrote in to let everyone know about the new https option for logging in. Mashable just published a new guide to staying in control with Facebook. Follow their advice to stay in tune with the latest Facebook settings, including the https change.
Egypt’s use of digital tools and social media
465 days
by Jac de Haan
in Digital Identity
The lesson of Egypt is that the tools themselves are not as significant as the changed role of the individual in society that they reflect.
إن الدرس المستفاد من أحداث مصر هو أن الأدوات نفسها ليست بنفس أهمية الدور المتغير للفرد في المجتمع الذي تعكسه هذه الأدوات.
It took the unbelievable act of closing an entire country’s access to knowledge and communication to teach us that the power of new media is not found in Google’s algorithm’s or Twitter’s feeds or Facebook’s walls – it is more fundamental than the platforms, more fundamental than the internet itself. The power of new media is ‘lower in the stack’- to invoke a geek metaphor- it is in the recognition that we the digital generation have come to regard society itself as a read/write medium. We are all authors now, and the privilege to collaborate and revise is not simply a web protocol, not simply a human right, rather, it has become a human attribute.
لقد تعلمنا من خلال انقطاع أجهزة التواصل والمعلومات عن البلاد أن قوة الإعلام الجديد لا تُستمد من الحلول الحسابية التابعة لجوجل أو التعليقات على موقع تويتر أو الرسائل على الفيسبوك، بل هي أكثر رسوخًا من هذه المنصات ومن شبكة المعلومات نفسها. إن قوة الإعلام الجديد تأتي من المستويات القاعدية، وتُستمد من الاعتراف بأن الجيل الرقمي بات ينظر إلى المجتمع على أنه وسط يستطيع من خلاله قراءة وكتابة الأحداث. كلنا كُتاَّب الآن، ولعلنا تعلمنا بأن شرف التعاون والمراجعة لا يقتصر على كونه بروتوكول لشبكة المعلومات أو حق إنساني، بل هو سمة إنسانية بامتياز.
author:Ed Bice
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