Billings Beta
notes from the tech lab
Independent Project Spotlight: Thomas
Mar 19th
6th grade student Thomas recently finished an interactive animation using Scratch, a free application that introduces programming. Use the space bar to begin and the arrow keys to interact with this cool creation:
Top 100 websites
Mar 18th
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
Mar 12th
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.
Independent Project Spotlight: Gray
Mar 10th
6th grader Gray recently finished an independent project using the Phun 2-D physics engine. His goal was to “make a magnetic accelerator cannon or a railgun sort of thing to fire very fast destructive projectiles,” and “it was achieved through balancing properties of mass and density.” Nice work, Gray!
Independent Project Spotlight: Rowan
Mar 5th
My name is Rowan, and I am a 6th grade student doing an independent tech project about important issues around the world. My website has links to other websites that are helping to solve these issues.
Check out my website to see how you can help too. You can leave comments right here on the tech blog. Thanks.
Computer Engineer Barbie
Mar 4th
Barbie has been around for 51 years and there are 126 different versions of the doll! While popular around the world, there are many people who don’t like this toy because they say her body is unrealistic, she perpetuates a stereotype and she doesn’t represent real women.
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?
OK GO followup
Mar 2nd
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
Mar 1st
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.
Apple iPad testing
Feb 26th
Students got their hands on an Apple iPad today – weeks before the product has officially been launched! We did some testing and compared the size of this new device with an iPod and a laptop. Overall impression was that the screen seems small for web surfing, but it is a fun gizmo.
If you are interested in trying out the iPad for free, follow this link for access 
2010 digital identity survey results – cell phones
Feb 20th
The 8th grade Community class has been analyzing the results of their 2010 Digital Identity Survey. 88 students (out of 103) completed the request for information. There is a lot of information to work through – from social networking accounts to gaming consoles to parent perceptions of tech use. Below is a small sample: student cell phone ownership and texting trends.
