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Mattel, the company that makes Barbie, is trying to improve her image by creating dolls that give girls a positive role model – mainly by creating versions that have jobs. There newest doll is the Computer Engineer Barbie, a coding woman with matching pink laptop, glasses and accessories.

Students – feel free to respond to this story and answer one of the questions below using the blog “comments” field.

Do you think that Barbie is a role model (good or bad) for young girls?

Do you think this Barbie is dressed for work? Why or why not?

Is this new doll inspiring, insulting, or something else entirely?

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.

If you are interested in trying out the iPad for free, follow this link for access

The engineering section of 8th grade Applied Math Lab (AML) has just finished a unit on structure building. Using a required number of newspaper sheets, students worked in groups to create a structure that could withhold the weight of one small book, two small books, a math book…?!, a dictionary…?!, two dictionaries…?!, all of this combined, and more! Students followed a design process that included building, testing, evaluating, and redesigning.

We started with the official video that greets visitors to the Apple website.  What does Apple want us to believe about the new device?  How do they use music, backgrounds, demonstrations and interviews to convince us?

Next we broke up into groups to figure out if the iPad is a technological evolution or revolution.  Every group clearly agrees that this is merely an evolution – as Abe pointed out, “it’s just an iPod Touch that won’t fit in your pocket.”

Could the iPad be a replacement for your home computer?

“No way,” said Pearl and a few others.  ”There is no way to connect your digital camera or a printer.” Students also pointed out that you need another computer to efficiently upload contacts, calendars and mail.  Without USB, your limited in the devices you can plug in.

“There is no DVD player” pointed out Rowan. Mason thinks this is because Apple wants you to spend money at their stores to get content.

6th graders got behind the scenes today as we learned about hyper text markup language (HTML), a way that computers speak so that webpages show up in a way that humans can understand.  HTML is a foreign language, but we can learn to speak it and therefore have a better understanding of how websites work.

Every time you visit a website, your computer downloads the HTML code before it shows you the images, words and videos you are looking for.  You can actually see this code by right-clicking on a webpage and selecting “view source” or “view page source.” Depending on the browser you use, you may see color-specific code, where tags are one color and content another.  You can even add comments into the code that are for other coders.

We did this with a few pages and saw some similarities:

• at the top of the code, it always says <html>, which tells the computer what language the document is in.
• each page has a <title> tag, which shows up at the top of the page
• HTML tags begin and end with ‘crocodiles,’ which look like this < or this >
• a slash (/) means end/cut/stop

Next we jumped into building our own webpages!  We used a program called Kompozer, which allows you to write actual code, or just write content and have the program turn it into code.  So far we are just getting started, but there were some cool discoveries.  Kallie figured out how to change the background of the entire page, and Eli inserted some images from the web into his page.  Rebecca made one page link to another and Mason got his page open in Internet Explorer so he could see what it would look like if it was really online.

Special thanks to Annaliese (8th grade student), who assisted with icon selection, RSS-feed inclusion and color palette.

This app was created with the new AppMakr.com service.  Hopefully we’ll follow up with an Android app in the near future!

• speed comes with good form – focus on sitting comfortably with fingers on the home row.
• keep eyes on the screen – your hands know where they are because of the tabs on the “f” and “j” keys and the space bar.

This typing practice can happen in the lab or at home.  Time will be provided for all of this work to completed during writing/tech lab or tech class, but it is up to students to use that time effectively.

Once we’d all run through a couple of lessons, the 6th grade helped an 8th grade class with their “digital identity” survey.  Results of this community-wide (students, parents and teachers) survey will be posted once data gathering and analysis is complete.

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)