iPhone updates:
iPod touch with camera shows up in Vietnam
Apple loses a second 4th gen iPhone, new insights discovered
iPhone Finder Regrets His ‘Mistake’
Police Raid Gizmodo Editor’s House, Confiscate Computers

Facebook updates:
Facebook Users Plan to Quit the Service on May 31
Senators’ letter to Facebook
Facebook and Others Caught Sending User Data to Advertisers

Google Street View troubles:
Google faces U.S., German probes on data collection

Class 6B were lucky enough to spend a class period with Michael, an engineer from Google who works on the Gmail team.  Michael used Google Maps to show a street-view of his middle school in Alabama, and talked about how his life choices resulted in East and West Coast employment through his interest in technology.  He shared screenshots of the code he creates everyday and explained how he spends his hours at work communicating with machines and people.

Thank you, Michael!

We’ve got in depth with the history of Seattle native Bill Gates and learned about how he hacked his way from middle-school mischief maker to Harvard and then beyond.  We followed his empire as it moved from the early days in New Mexico back to Washington state, and how Microsoft has weathered competition to become a worldwide brand with significant market shares in gaming, search, software and hardware.

Today we talked about 2 Stanford guys who changed the way search engines rank websites to help us find what we are looking for.  Their project (called BackRub) became more than just a company…Google is a verb and a website that millions of people use everyday.  We spoke of how Google has tried to compete in various web endeavors that have failed (Google Video, Google Pages, Orkut), and how they’ve bought other companies that do things well (YouTube, KeyHole, JotSpot).

When asked who the people and companies that will make it huge in the next few years will be, students responded with an enthusiastic “we are!”

As part of these conversations, we’ve been using online maps and stock charts to illustrate concepts and we’ve been practicing our listening and participation skills in preparation for the guest speakers that will start sharing their technology experiences next week.

We started by tracking Apple’s stock price this year, beginning with the iPad announcement and following through until yesterday’s report that Apple made over 3 billion dollars in the last quarter.

Using Bing’s finance charts and Google’s time-related search results, we mapped increasing share price and product announcements over the last 3 years.  We found a clear trend – stock prices rise between the announcement of a new product and it’s actual launch.

Also, we realized that much of the pre-launch marketing around Apple products is free – news outlets and bloggers share stories and compete to scoop each other with rumors and insider (mis)information.  This is great news for Apple, since they don’t have to spend all of their money to get the word out.

Now to the rumor of the week – an Apple employee supposedly left a prototype of the new iPhone (to be released this summer) in a California bar.  The device was sold to Gizmodo, which has dedicated an entire portion of their site to stories about this gadget.  This creates more buzz for Apple as other news outlets report on Gizmodo’s reporting.

Students used Google’s real-time “updates” to monitor how many stories are bouncing around the blogosphere and Twitter channels about this story.  While there is a bump in traffic, we don’t think that this story is enough to sustain interest through the summer.  What else will Apple tell us about the new product to keep news outlets interested?

Some students wondered if Apple had “lost” the iPhone on purpose to try and get free advertising from bloggers, newspapers, television and radio.  Some bloggers suggest that Gizmodo got punked by Apple.

One class had an unexpected find during class today, a webpage that simultaneously searches Google and Bing, displaying results side-by-side.  In Firefox, you can actaully set http://www.google-vs-bing.com/ as your default search engine if desired.

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.

]]> http://www.billingsmiddleschool.org/beta/2010/03/12/aviary-addition-to-google-apps-for-edu/feed/ 0 http://www.billingsmiddleschool.org/beta/2010/03/01/ok-go-coming-to-washington-state/ http://www.billingsmiddleschool.org/beta/2010/03/01/ok-go-coming-to-washington-state/#comments Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:15:57 +0000 Jac de Haan http://www.billingsmiddleschool.org/beta/?p=875 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.

Student definitions:

The difference between a web browser and search engine has been murky in the past for some students.  We reinforced our Microsoft Excel skills from STeM class to build a comparison chart:

Today we talked about the mighty battle between Verizon and AT&T.  AT&T has the iPhone, and pays Apple money for the right to have this cool device on their network only.  Verizon has the best customer satisfaction rating for service (according to Consumer Reports) as well as a much larger 3G network in the USA.  AT&T is mad about Verizon ads that point this out, so they are suing Verizon and they also made some new tv commercials starring Luke Wilson that say “AT&T is better”.

We talked about tons of interesting marketing ploys, competitive negotiations, and operating system constraints. The most lively discussions focused on:

• Cell phone companies have claimed colors as their own – Sprint=Yellow, T-Mobile=Pink, Verizon=Red, AT&T=Blue&Orange
• Cell phone companies are really becoming data service companies – most people use their phones for way more than just making calls
• Verizon just introduced Droid, a new phone that is supposed to compete with the iPhone.  It runs Google’s Android 2.0 operating system.

Verizon attacks AT&T’s 3G service coverage

AT&T fights back

Students begin their learning by watching a short YouTube introductory video that will introduce several tools. To get more information, try this link to the sketchup video series to learn more.

Michael told us about growing up in Alabama and how he first got interested in computers.  He said that the 2 subjects he uses most in his job are math (for talking to computers) and language arts (for talking to other people).  Some of his favorite things about his company are:

• 1 day a week he gets to work on projects that he is interested in, not just his assignments
• lots of free food
• well-behaved dogs can go to work!

As part of his presentation Michael used 7 Google products: Docs Presentations, Google Maps, Google Charts API, Gmail, Gchat, Google Image Search and the Search Engine.

Students are definitely getting more comfortable with visitor interaction.  Each class had tons of suggestions for how to make Gmail better and many questions about life at Google.  Some highlights:

• “Is your company friendly with Apple?” – Olivia
• “You should be able to draw pictures for friends in Gmail.” – Augie
• “Shortcuts to add YouTube videos in email.” – Sophia
• “Can you transfer email accounts to/from Gmail?” – Nick R.
• Aranza identified a bug in Gchat that Michael said he will be working to fix.
• Curtis had an idea for an auto-junk address for your account that could filter advertising.
• Lysbeth wants to be able to sign into email with a fingerprint scanner.
• And much much more.

Many thanks to Google’s Michael for his guest lecture today.