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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.

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.

A well-rounded technology curriculum has to address the unique complexities of growing up digital and should leverage this generation’s technological fluency to create meaningful connections to self, environment, and each other. At the heart of intentional use is the ability to recognize how technology allows us to be productive, communicative, creative people with a clear sense of personal and community identity. As technologists, we also have to acknowledge the unintended consequences of adoption.

I recently had an opportunity to share our School’s philosophy of technology with intention with prospective families at an Open House event. Below is one slide from the presentation – feel free to extend this idea, add a comment or send a note to share your adaptations.

Technology with intention

Technology with intention by Jac de Haan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

In the course of 6 hours, I travelled on 8 forms of transportation in order to reach my destination – escalator, light-rail, plane, bus, train, car, shuttle, and horizontal people-mover.  Each of these technologies requires energy and regular maintenance so that I can get where I want to go.  Just because you can get around the world in a matter of hours, should you? What impact do you have on your environment by travelling in this manner?

The amazing folks from the National Wildlife Foundation were organizing this event, and they did a number of things to try and mitigate or offset the carbon footprint of the training: carbon offsets were purchased through Terrapass, food was locally sourced, technology was shut down when it wasn’t in use. Many thanks to the event organizers and to the amazing technologies that allowed me to participate!

At Billings we are lucky, with our proximity to Green Lake and emphasis on environmental awareness. Our curriculum connections and lack of a gymnasium get us all outside significantly more than this average.  Here is a partial list:

• Our 55-minute lunch period happens down at the park and in our new West Hall, with a wall of doors that roll up and connect the inside and out.
• Our expeditionary learning program takes every student out into the field multiple times a year – through overnight experiences and community service projects.
• Our Winter Program includes skiing, snowboarding, nordic skiing and winter camping.
• Seasonal PE offerings include soccer, ultimate, parkour, fitness, swimming and other outdoor activities.
• Our after-school program takes students outside everyday.
• 8th grade students take a period every Wednesday to gather water samples for Green Lake.
• 7th grade students have a weekly GO (Green Lake Outdoors) period with the purpose of moving through our community and experiencing seasonal shifts while getting exercise.
• 7th grade students have Thursday FLEX periods, which remain flexible to take advantage of nice weather or hands-on skills for camping trips such as setting up tents or knot-tying.
• 6th grade science students keep journals requiring them to get outside and note seasonal changes and weather patterns.
• 6th grade students have 2 extra PE periods per week, above the regularly scheduled school-wide PEs.
• Advisory periods are flexible – groups can decide to meet outside when it suits them.

• Privacy and security settings exist for a reason: Learn about and use the privacy and security settings on social networks. They are there to help you control who sees what you post and manage your online experience in a positive way.
• Once posted, always posted: Protect your reputation on social networks. What you post online stays online. Think twice before posting pictures you wouldn’t want your parents or future employers to see. Recent research (http://www.microsoft.com/privacy/dpd/research.aspx) found that 70% of job recruiters rejected candidates based on information they found online.
• Keep personal info personal: Be cautious about how much personal information you provide on social networking sites. The more information you post, the easier it may be for a hacker or someone else to use that information to steal your identity, access your data, or commit other crimes such as stalking.
• Know and manage your friends: Social networks can be used for a variety of purposes. Some of the fun is creating a large pool of friends from many aspects of your life. That doesn’t mean all friends are created equal. Use tools to manage the information you share with friends in different groups or even have multiple online pages. If you’re trying to create a public persona as a blogger or expert, create an open profile or a “fan” page that encourages broad participation and limits personal information. Use your personal profile to keep your real friends (the ones you know trust) more synced up with your daily life.
• Know what action to take: If someone is harassing or threatening you, remove them from your friends list, block them, and report them to the site administrator.
• Be cautious about messages you receive on social networking sites that contain links. Even links that look they come from friends can sometimes contain malware or be part of a phishing attack (attempts to collect personal information: log-on and password and other identifying information by pretending to be a message form a friend or a business). If you are suspicious, don’t click contact your friend or the business directly to verify the validity.

Goals of the new system:

• easy to use – teachers are busy, we need to enter an “A” or “T” and move on
• ‘live’ view of attendance – once a student is marked absent or tardy, all teachers have access tot he information
• student trends – an alert system that uses color-coding to spot absence or tardy trends by student
• grade trends – an alert system that uses color-coding to spot absence or tardy trends by grade
• daily trends – an alert system that uses color-coding to spot absence or tardy trends by day
• accessible – from anywhere on campus or from home
• automatic backups – version history is important for record keeping
• levels of access – summary pages should be locked down, daily records should be editable by teachers

We found an answer in Google Spreadsheets.  Beyond meeting the above requirements, the solution is a free one.  After creating a few formulas, it was just a matter of copy & paste.  Some of the more interesting formulas:

=countif(L3:BC3, “a”) + countif(L3:BC3, “e”) – this counts up all “a” (absent) and “e” (excused) marking across a row (for an individual student)

=countif(P2:P31, “a”) + countif(P2:P31, “e”) – this counts up all “a” (absent) and “e” (excused) marking down a column (for an individual date)

=SORT(FILTER(’7th grade’!C2:E ; FILTER(’7th grade’!K2:AZ;’7th grade’!K1:AZ1=G1)=”a”), 3, TRUE) – this formula was created with help from Ahab, a Google Groups community member who volunteers to assist others with Google Spreadsheets.  The filter figures out today’s date, searches all columns for that date, and then returns all students absent in that column.  Definitely a nice feature…with this formula our Spreadsheet Sheet 1 displays all students absent for the day along with the number of previous absences each has.

Lego Robotics @ Billings: Billings Middle School has our very own Seattle Lego Robotics camp, presented in conjunction with the amazing educators at EdLab.  2 sessions – August 2-6 and 9-13.

iD Gaming Academy: Held at the University of Washington, this 2-week overnight game development camp is a great opportunity to learn about video game creation.  6th grade student Gray says “you get to make your own unique game and play it as well as play other peoples games.”

911 Media Arts: Classes in making movies, digital storytelling, website design, and more.

Reel Grrls: Get hands on with animation and video production day camps – girls only!

TechReach: SeaBots – Dive into science. This girls only one-week camp is a great intro to programming and Lego robotics.

Youth in Focus: Intro to digital photography classes are offered 2x a week. Applications are due end of May.

• Who: Facebook and advertising partners
• What: changes to how Facebook shares their information about you (photos, videos and information)
• When: now & forever (unless courts or public advocacy shuts it down)
• Where: not just on Facebook but on the websites of anyone that wants to use Facebook’s info
• Why: benefit to Facebook and partners: money, supposed benefit to you: personalized experience.  It’s easier for Levi’s to sell you a pair of jeans if they have a list of 5 of your best friends that have already purchased them.  Levi’s can even tell you how much your friends spent and what size they bought!
• How: Facebook partners can store your information and share it with your network. There are currently no limits on how long they can keep the info or where they can use it.

To protect yourself from this new system, follow the screenshots below:

1. Login to your account. From the dropdown list under “Account” (top right corner), click on “Account Settings.” (screenshot below)

2. There are a number of tabs at the center top of the screen (settings, networks, notifications, etc).  Select Facebook ads. On the next screen, change “allow ads of platform pages…” to “No One” and hit “Save Changes”. (screenshot below)

4. Click on “Applications and Websites.” On the next screen (screenshot below) you’ll see “Instant Personalization” at the bottom of the list.

6. You’ll get a pop-up that tries to convince you not to uncheck this box.  Click “Confirm.” (screenshot below)

7. Head back to “Accounts>Privacy Settings” (step 3 above). Click on “Applications and Websites”.  From the screen, choose “What your friends can share about you” and uncheck everything. Click “Save Changes.”

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 to begin writing but are comfortable sharing ideas verbally.  To use the app, you need to be connected via wifi or 3G.