notes from the tech lab
Posts tagged Google
Doodle 4 Google finalists
May 13th
Over 28,000 students submitted artistic renderings of the Mountain View, California’s company logo. No Billings entrants this year, but several sixth grade students are already asking about participation for next year! 
Hockey skate production
May 6th
Gavin and Isaac recently traced the stainless steel in hockey skates back to its production process. Their presentation included an embedded YouTube video from the Discovery Channel and a historical pictorial of hockey skates through the last century.
The truth about diamonds
May 4th
7th grade students Ella & Brandon just completed a presentation about the social, environmental & ecomonic impacts of diamond extraction. Below is the presentation they shared during iCLAST.
Michael from Google visits Billings 6th grade
Apr 28th
Students had a great time today learning from Michael, an coder from Google who works on the Gmail team.
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.
Googling Google
Apr 21st
6th grade is preparing for a visit from Michael, a Google engineer who works in Fremont. This week we went straight to the Wikipedia entry for information about the company and it’s founders, Larry & Sergey. We talked about a lot of cool things:
- Larry built his first computer when he was 12.
- Larry & Sergey got a check for $100,000 to start their company, but the check was written to Google, Inc (a company that didn’t exist) so they had to create the company to get their money!
- Google was started while the founders were at Stanford, and it was called “BackRub.”
- They’ve given over $1B to philanthropic endeavors (Bill Gates also gives lots of money to charitable causes).
Are Google and Apple friends?
Jan 8th
First day back to tech and the 6th grade tackled what turns out to be a difficult question: Are Google and Apple friends?
Students agreed that Apple is a computing company and Google is an advertising company. They don’t compete for hardware (iPhone, computers, iPod, etc) but they DO fight for software users (Apple sells software, Google gives it away).
Students pointed out that Google’s web browser (Chrome) only works on PC, not on Apple computers. This makes us think that Apple and Google will work together to steal users from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
However, on January 5th, Google released a piece of software called Picasa for Mac, a direct competitor to iPhoto (the most popular free Mac photo organization/editing software). What does this mean? Is Google attacking Apple?
The 6th grade thinks that this will be a tough fight for Google. Apple computers come with iPhoto already installed, and for people that already use iPhoto, there isn’t a lot of reason to switch.
Typing begins & Googlewhacking
Oct 9th
This week was all about building skills that will serve us for the rest of our academic careers.
Typing – every 6th grade student has an online typing account that should be accessible from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. Each student completed this week’s homework in class. Things to remember:
- If you don’t have computer or internet access at home, please contact me so we can come up with a suitable alternative.
- If you have trouble accessing the typing website, please contact me so we can troubleshoot and get the technical obstacles out of the way.
- Typing speed is NOT important! Relax and focus on proper hand placement.
- Consistency is the key! We are trying to build good habits. You are welcome to complete additional lessons every week, but try to space them out so they aren’t done all in one night.
Googlewhacking – as an intro to Boolean searching, we spent some time searching the Google search engine for an elusive 2 word term that returns exactly 1 engine result. So far we haven’t found a winner, but it is still fun to try.
SketchUp & Science
May 13th
6th graders are studying architecture in Science class with Tom. Their big project is to build a dream bedroom out of cardboard, wood and other materials.
For the next few weeks in tech we’ll be mirroring this project, using Google SketchUp – a free 3-D modeling program. Finished products will be posted on the projects page and will be displayed next to their real-world counterparts at the Arts Festival in June.
3-D modeling and animation
Mar 18th
8th grade student Chris has been testing out the animation features of Google SketchUp Pro. Here is a sample movie of one of his latest models:
Search history – the good and bad
Feb 21st
written by Julia D.
Digital identity, you leave one almost every where, it is the identity you can make by just searching the web. Google save your information that you leave by searching about any thing for a total of 8 months, and it’s not that hard to look at them if you know how. Hackers could get your credit card number, phone number, name, age, and date of birth. Sometimes people tracked can be bad, but other times it’s what people need to find the source of a bad use of the internet. If you are tracked by a website and the website is hacked then the hackers can easily access all your info, but if you aren’t tracked and you do something bad with the information you lost an opportunity to stop them.
I think that the idea of erasing things is good and bad, because if someone uses that information for the wrong reason then if it had been there it could have been stopped? Then again if your memory is saved, and people take that information and send you tons of random things about the stuff you search that you don’t really need; that’s a bad feature about saving the information.
The second article is an explanation of most sides of the story about anonymously searching the web. She allows you to see everyone’s perspective of it, which is nice if you want a better understanding of the concept. This makes it easy to make an argument for either side, good or bad.
It would be a good idea for a person with a medical condition, because once they see that you searched a type of medicine then you will most likely get a ton of SPAM that you don’t necessarily want in your inbox.
The idea to an employer wouldn’t be good though because maybe one of their employee’s is using it to look up another rival companies phone/email to switch to that job. If that was one of your top employee’s than the anonymously searching the web proposal might be something that you wouldn’t want to do.
An employee might think of it as a good idea though because if you are working and you are looking up another job you most likely don’t want your employer to see that. So the idea of it erasing all that you searched might be good to an unhappy employee.
There are many different opinions to this concept, and they all have ups and downs. So for right now it is pretty even with deciding whether it is good or bad, but I believe that as long as you are using it for the right reasons and not putting it to bad use it should be OK.
http://lifehacker.com/software/anonymity/search-the-web-anonymously-with-askeraser-332574.php
http://websearch.about.com/od/searchingtheweb/a/anonymous.htm
