Billings Beta
technology with intention
Teen digital identity – Rebecca Black follow-up
318 days
7th grade students continue to follow the story of Rebecca Black, a 13-year-old singer who has recently risen to fame via YouTube.
Since our first introduction last Wednesday (6M views, like/dislike buttons disabled) to today (39M views, 1:10 ratio of like to dislike) she has been:
- interviewed on national news programs, including Good Morning America
- appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
- been the topic of an interview with Lady Gaga
- is rumored to have made $25,000 in iTunes downloads.
Today students wrestled with the question is this fame worth the criticism she is receiving?
We spent most of the class looking at her production company, Ark Music Factory. This group of producers, choreographers and marketers seem to have a specific musical and visual idea of what might be successful online. They’ve drawn a lot of criticism in the last few weeks for charging families to make music videos for their children.
Finally, we watched another video from one of Ark Music Factory’s artists. Student debated the quality of the music in comparison to Rebecca Black, noted the guest appearance of one of the producers in the video again, and looked at ratings and viewing history for Alana Lee:
Teen digital identity – case studies
320 days
7th grade students spend mid-year focused on the theme of identity. In Science they study genetics and evolution, in American History they look at the formation of the US through the Revolutionary War, and in Language Arts they read and write stories of personal growth and awareness.
In technology we take a deeper look at the idea of digital identity - who we are based on electronic information that exists in the cloud. One person’s DI can look quite different depending on what type of information a viewer finds: text messages, social networking profiles, search engine queries, gaming stats, etc.
We spent class looking at 2 young people who are intentionally shaping their digital identity with the help of adults. We also looked at the consequences of this process.
MattyB
Matty B is an 8-year-old rapper. He has a large YouTube presence (over 46 million channel views), a schwag store (do-it-yourself t-shirt print-on-demand storefront), and a Twitter handle. Matty B raps to popular songs and takes opportunities to interact with music and dance stars to gain attention and promote himself.
Students can’t find any proof that Matty B is making money off the project so far, but they theorize that as he grows up, his digital identity might turn into a recording contract.
Rebecca Black
Rebecca Black was a regular 13 year old until about 10 days ago when her music video was uploaded to YouTube. The next day a couple of comedians sent out links to the video along with disparaging remarks, and she is now up to over 30 million views!
Rebecca’s video has spurned tens of tributes/copycats, most of them mean-spirited. Is fame worth the price of people asking you to end your life? Students doubted the ability of themselves to stay strong under such overwhelming criticism. We also discussed her ability to turn this experience into a positive one – she has already been interviewed by Good Morning America and been labeled the “next Justin Bieber.”
AT&T to buy T-Mobile
320 days
by Jac de Haan
in 6th Grade
6th grade students discussed the possible reasons and outcomes of a T-Mobile USA takeover by AT&T.
The conversation was wide-ranging…some of the topics discussed:
- what is the history of AT&T?
- how would the purchase of T-Mobile help AT&T provide service to it’s users?
- how would T-Mobile’s customers experience the change?
- how do cell phone companies marketing departments claim colors to represent their company?
- why does the US have more than one cell phone technology (CDMA, GSM, etc)?
- what is a monopoly?
- why is competition important for the US?
- what is the electromagnetic spectrum?
Facebook streams video & iPad 2
332 days
by Jac de Haan
in 7th Grade
7th grade today analyzed a couple of big tech stories:
Facebook begins streaming video – we discussed how brick-and-mortar stores compete with mail or instant download/streaming video services, the death of the DVD, and how many BluRay DVD player owners don’t actually own BluRay DVDs. General consensus was that impulse purchases are most likely to occur when streaming video. Facebook’s approach to streaming video is a little different than Netflix because you can use US currency or Facebook currency. Students point out that once you invest in Facebook currency you are bound to their service – a clever and scary proposition. Also, watching movies in Facebook will drastically increase some people’s Facebook time…this provides more time for Facebook to advertise to the viewer, thus increasing their profits.
Apple announces iPad 2 – we compared the features of Apple’s new offering to the iPad 1 and the iPhone. Students decided this is clearly an evolution, not a revolution. Even though the technology might not be ground breaking, students think that the tablet in general is fairly revolutionary because it is increasing the amount of screen time a person engages in. Tangential conversations turned to the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Google’s Android OS.
STEM: getting to know 101 neighbors
333 days
by Jac de Haan
in 6th Grade
With winter program over, students are eagerly back into Friday STEM experiences. We revisited our learning of binary code from back in December and took our knowledge out to explore the community.
Students were presented with 100-year-old photos of Green Lake businesses. Each photo included its street address written in binary code. Students were tasked with decoding the numbers and then visiting each location to take a photo.
In each photo, students are standing either facing the camera or away from it, representing ones and zeros. Their body language spells out the street address in binary!
*Historic images from “Seattle’s Green Lake” by Brittany Wright.
Spanish scripting in Scratch
334 days
by Jac de Haan
in 6th Grade
Another amazing Spanish version of true/false. This game was created by 6th grade student Gus:
Cache in, trash out
336 days
Geocaching club this week had two amazing finds. Using global positioning satellites we hunted down a multi-step cache south of school and then searching out a decommissioned Seattle bomb shelter.
As we get more comfortable with the guidelines of geocaching, we’ve decided to add another level to our experiences, in keeping with the EcoSchool’s Global Dimensions Pathway that we aspire towards. Students picked up garbage while we hunted for caches: a concept referred to as Cache In, Trash Out.
GoogleFinance function
337 days
by Jac de Haan
in 7th Grade
6th and 7th grade students have kicked off their 12-week stock market exchange competition, sponsored by math teacher Pam.
This project ties in nicely with our advanced spreadsheet functions. We’ll use spreadsheets to pull in information and analyze trends. Today we played with historical stock data using a new formula:
=GoogleFinance(“TICKER”, “ATTRIBUTE”)
Available attributes are:
- price: market price of the stock – delayed by up to 20 minutes.
- priceopen: the opening price of the stock for the current day.
- high: the highest price the stock traded for the current day.
- low: the lowest price the stock traded for the current day.
- volume: number of shares traded of this stock for the current day.
- marketcap: the market cap of the stock.
- tradetime: the last time the stock traded.
- datadelay: the delay in the data presented for this stock using the googleFinance() function.
- volumeavg: the average volume for this stock.
- pe: the Price-to-Earnings ratio for this stock.
- eps: the earnings-per-share for this stock.
- high52: the 52-week high for this stock.
- low52: the 52-week low for this stock.
- change: the change in the price of this stock since yesterday’s market close.
- beta: the beta value of this stock.
- changepct: the percentage change in the price of this stock since yesterday’s close.
- closeyest: yesterday’s closing price of this stock.
- shares: the number of shares outstanding of this stock.
- currency: the currency in which this stock is traded.
A few students also pulled in weekly or daily data for a stock using:
=GoogleFinance(“symbol”, “attribute”, “start_date”, “num_days|end_date”, “interval”)
- “symbol” – stock symbol
- “attribute” – high, low, open, close, vol, or all (quote also works, and defaults to close).
- “start_date” – the date for the historical data. When only the start_date is specified, the historical data is just for that day.
source: http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=54198
JeopardyLabs and Winter Camping
349 days
by Jac de Haan
in Reference
8th grade students just returned from an incredible winter camping experience at Blewett Pass. They employed all the winter camping skills that they have practiced for the last month (snowshoeing, winter tent set-up, snow sculpture and more), along with their research on avalanche awareness and winter first aid.
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.
Google Apps Script tutorials
354 days
by Jac de Haan
in 8th grade
8th grade students are working through self-paced tutorials to learn more about using advanced Spreadsheet functionality.
A few students are opting for independent project work to support their 8th grade project. Toby just captured some footage of his baseball pitching form and will be using iMovie to analyze and compare his release with professional athletes.
Halley is interviewing a program director and is learning to convert and combine .wav files in Audacity after mounting a digital voice recorder and accessing it as a hard drive.
