technology with intention
7th Grade
Tech class happenings from the 7th grade, including iCLAST (integrated class of Language Arts, Science and Technology).
7th Grade in Central Washington
678 days
This week students will be rafting, rock-climbing, hiking, meeting with union workers and immigrant farmers, cooking and learning about the history of Washington state.
Just because 7th graders are in the field doesn’t mean they aren’t experiencing technology. Students are using cameras to document their experience, and we used a map to plot out our week-long journey. Click on an icon to learn more about each location:
Also, a few photos have been sent home via MMS (cell phone multi-media messaging service):
The girls at their Tuesday campsite.
Passover Seder meal.
Top 100 websites
691 days
by Jac de Haan
in 7th Grade
Some people love to make lists. It can be fun to rank and compare things, but today the 7th grade talked about information graphics: ways to represent data that take advantage of the human ability to compare visuals without having to think to hard about what they mean.
As an example, we took a look at a beautiful new visual representation of the top 100 websites, organized by popularity and category. How many can you guess before visiting the BBC News site to check out the results?
Aviary addition to Google Apps for Edu
697 days
Billings 7th and 8th graders use Google Apps for Edu regularly to communicate with peers and faculty. The Calendar service allows us to keep track of athletics, trips and community events. Docs provides free document and spreadsheet editing and publishing. Sites are used for student, faculty and class homepages.
Today we added a new service to the Google suite: Aviary. Aviary is an online editing suite for sound recording, graphics and vectors. 7th grade students spent Tech this week playing with the new tools – creating custom t-shirt designs, remixing beats and mocking up album covers for an iCLAST identity project.
Our mission: to figure out if these tools are intuitive enough and robust enough to use regularly. While these online offerings aren’t as powerful as their software counterparts (Photoshop, Garageband, Illustrator), they are free and accessible from home/school/library/anywhere with an internet connection.
So far so good, we’ll keep testing and report our findings in future posts.
Billings students: to access Aviary, log in to Google Apps. In the top left corner you’ll see “Documents Calendar Sites more.” Select “more” and then “Aviary” from the dropdown list. Enjoy.
OK GO followup
707 days
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
708 days
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)?
755 days
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
761 days
by Jac de Haan
in 7th Grade
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
766 days
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
771 days
Isaac, Dani and Aranza demonstrate how temperature affects air pressure using only a balloon, a bottle and some water:
Secret Experiment: Pen Cap Subs
784 days
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:
