What’s behind that website?
Jan 25th
We use websites every day to do all sorts of things: watch video, communicate with others, research and explore. How is it that computers know what a website should look like to the viewer?
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.
Billings Middle School iPhone app released
Jan 20th
Billings Middle School has released an iPhone/iPod Touch app – available free from the iTunes store. This app contains news and information gathered from various parts of the School’s digital identity: the public news feed, the Head of School blog, the Tech Lab blog and our YouTube channel.
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!
Typing kicks off
Jan 17th
It’s that time of year – 6th graders created typing accounts to begin regular practice. Students are expected to start with 2 days of practice a week, for 5 minutes per session. The goal is regular, incremental improvement through repetition. A couple tips for improvement:
- 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.
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)
Revolution v. Evolution – C.E.S. 2010
Jan 8th
The International Consumer Electronics Show (C.E.S. 2010) is going on right now in Las Vegas. Today the 6th grade took to YouTube to learn about some of the cool new gadgets that have been released or demonstrated.
In looking at these new devices, we had conversations about the idea of technological evolution vs. revolution. There is some amount of opinion when it comes to using these labels with tech – and we had some great debates.
- Evolution - a natural next step for a device. (E.g., more megapixels in a camera)
- Revolution - a completely new gadget that has never been seen before and does something totally new. (E.g., the first satellite)
Our favorite new device of the day: Microsoft’s Project Natal
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:
Fix Facebook for your Friends
Dec 19th
Welcome to your Winter break!
This post is a follow up to last week’s discussion about the new Facebook privacy policy that is in effect. Many of you mentioned that you tried to read the explanation by the CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but didn’t really understand what it said. This is a big deal – so big that the government might be getting involved (http://mashable.com/2009/12/17/ftc-asked-to-investigate-facebooks-new-privacy-settings/).
To be brief, if you accept Facebook’s “recommended privacy settings”, you are opening your digital identity up to anyone who cares to look for you. Parents, teachers, high school admissions counselors, advertising companies and search engines. As you know, once a search engine has a cache (copy) of your info, there is no way to get it removed…as Brian says, “Google is forever.”
If you haven’t already done so, please take 5 minutes to access your account and do these things:
8th grade project spotlight: Cillian
Dec 18th
8th grade student Cillian is working on an independent project with Passports with Purpose, a fundraiser that is using online donations to build a school in Cambodia.
Cillian is using his skills as a programmer to help out with this project, which was recently featured online by the New York Times. Take a moment to enjoy an interview with Cillian:
