7th Grade
OK GO followup
Mar 2nd
On Monday, the 7th grade talked about the band OK GO and their inability to post embeddable videos due to the record contract they have in place. State Farm Insurance stepped in and gave the band money to make a new video that falls beyond the EMI agreement. Enjoy this massive Rube Goldberg machine:
OK GO coming to Washington state
Mar 1st
7th grade time in the lab is split between two lessons today – bridged by digital identity:
1. OK GO is a band that became popular through some awesome YouTube videos. Instead of signing a recording contract and spending millions on advertising, they made a couple of low-budget, hilarious films and posted them online. The videos were so popular that they got signed by EMI. You can see the famous “treadmill” video (more than 49 million views) at YouTube because embedding has been disabled at the request of the record label.
The band recently made a new video and posted it on their website for all their fans, but EMI (the record label) was not happy and made them remove it. This is bizarre because the internet made them famous but now their bosses asked them not to use this tool to connect with fans. To watch this video, you have to go to YouTube so that EMI can get paid by the advertisers.
OK GO has a great online presence, using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and their own website to promote their brand (band). We took a look at their Facebook page and found out that they are performing at the Sasquatch! music festival in Washington in May. That took us to the second part of our class…
2. We opened Google Earth and searched for the The Columbia Gorge, where the music festival takes place every year. From there, we prepped for the upcoming Washington State History quiz on notable locations around the state. We used Google Earth to locate the Coulee Dam (pictured below), Adams and other mountains, major freeways, lakes, tribes and more.
Who are we (according to search engines)?
Jan 13th
In conjunction with the new iCLAST unit on “identity,” 7th grade students explored the concept of “digital identity” today.
Searching our own names online (Bing, Google, Ask, Yahoo, Pipl.com, Spock.com), we found that unless you know someone in the real world, it can be impossible to figure out what results are accurate and which are about someone completely different. This can become important when it is time to apply for high school, college or jobs, as well as with friends and parents.
A few students, like Aranza and Deividas, have unique enough names that there wasn’t any misinformation associated with their searches. Others, like Forrest, learned that there are thousands of results that have little to do with their own lives.
Some highlights of the class:
- Aaron is an all conference 2nd baseman who hit .351
- Sophie S. went to The Giddens School (true fact)
- Veronica lives down in Grenada Hills, CA
- Toby died during the war of 1812
- Isabel stars in 2 teenage novels
- Dani is a broadway star-quality singer and dancer
- Amanda works at Parliament
- Rachel L. has 2 children
- Augie’s dad’s name is Chris (true fact)
- Aselya has her own radio station
- Sophie L. is a honey farmer
- Curtis won the 2008 stock market game (true fact)
- Nicholas has a 5-star film
- Alex is a DJ
- Nicole has a boyfriend named Steve
- Twig is a florist
- Halley is a 43 year old Englishman
- Abbey is a 70 year old Australian
- Nova volunteered to feed kids (true fact)
- Forrest is a 3 out of 4 star doctor
- Rachel R is a supervisor at Netflix
- Isaac is a black male who died in South Carolina
- Drew is an actor
- Ronan is a Facebook friend with someone named Ilya (true fact)
- Reyna is a business analyst from Toronto
- Nick is a realtor in Mount Vernon
- Sophia gets her hair cut in Queen Anne (true fact)
- Aranza is mentioned in a webpage about brain research (true fact)
Data Analysis
Jan 7th
The 7th grade is back in the tech lab, ready to go in 2010. We spent our first period together reflecting on Fall Semester.
On the last day of school in December, students took an online self-reflection survey to share their experience with the first 3 months of iCLAST (integrated class of language arts, science and technology).
Today we took the anonymous quantitative data from that survey and explored trends between student submissions. Students were also given a data set from the 08-09 school year for comparison.
The QOD (Question of the Day): Based on student ratings, was last school year’s iCLAST more difficult than this year?
Smoke is heavy
Jan 2nd
Reyna, Rachel & Lewis put together this film that explains how to use vinegar and alka-seltzer to make smoke stay inside an open-topped glass:
Water balloons and air pressure
Dec 28th
Isaac, Dani and Aranza demonstrate how temperature affects air pressure using only a balloon, a bottle and some water:
Secret Experiment: Pen Cap Subs
Dec 15th
The 7th grade students have been working on a synthesis of this year’s learning from Science, Tech and Language Arts. The results – some amazing short films that explain scientific concepts. Below is a secret experiment by Augie, Aaron and Nicholas:
Q.O.D. – WolframAlpha to the rescue
Dec 10th
Question of the day: online research skills
Which of the current President’s daughters’ nicknames was more popular in the last public record of U.S. baby names?
Students quickly recognized that this was a “think and search” question…and there were multiple puzzles to solve:
- current President: Barack Obama
- daughters’ nicknames: Sasha & Malia
- last public record: 2008
So the question became, “Which name was more popular in 2008, Sasha or Malia?”
There were quite a few ways of finding this answer using search engines. Most students ended up at babynames.com or the Social Security Administration website. Some employed the Control+F keyboard shortcut to search for names in a list.
Once the dust settled, Halley, Elijah and Twig took top prize for cracking the code! We then took a few minutes to get familiar with WolframAlpha, a computational knowledge engine that is built specifically for mathematical and statistical analysis. Typing in “sasha, malia name 2008″ quickly netted a clear answer:
Tech in the News – Verizon v. AT&T
Dec 3rd
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 to have this cool device on their network only. Verizon has the best customer satisfaction rating for service (according to Consumer Reports) as well as a much larger 3G network in the USA. AT&T is mad about Verizon ads that point this out, so they are suing Verizon and they also made some new tv commercials starring Luke Wilson that say “AT&T is better”.
We talked about tons of interesting marketing ploys, competitive negotiations, and operating system constraints. The most lively discussions focused on:
- Cell phone companies have claimed colors as their own – Sprint=Yellow, T-Mobile=Pink, Verizon=Red, AT&T=Blue&Orange
- Cell phone companies are really becoming data service companies – most people use their phones for way more than just making calls
- Verizon just introduced Droid, a new phone that is supposed to compete with the iPhone. It runs Google’s Android 2.0 operating system.
Verizon attacks AT&T’s 3G service coverage
AT&T fights back
Lab Report Films – iCLAST
Dec 2nd
All Billings Middle School 7th grade students are enrolled in a year long integrated class of language arts, science and technology (iCLAST).
In December, students will be working in groups of 3 to create a photo video that documents our favorite Science labs of the year so far. We’ll be using collaborative document editing to create the perfect lab report that covers the Scientific Method. We’ll use that report to write a narrative with a specific audience in mind, learn to use the digital cameras and tripods to photograph the experiment, introduce ourselves to PhotoStory so that we can stitch the photos together on the computer, and then record our voices over the photos.
- orange text – tech skills
- blue text – language arts skills
- green text – science skills
