Posts tagged Microsoft

How would you spend one MILLION dollars?

1122 days
by in 6th Grade

Buy the moon? A Ferrari? A hamster named Fred? A mansion with a moat? Invest in a stock or two?

These were some student suggestions in response to the challenge we faced today in Tech class, when we began Part I of the “Million Dollar Assignment.” Using a mind-mapping/outlining program called Inspiration, students worked either in pairs or independently to figure out a way to spend one million dollars. There were a few strings attached:

1. Taxes on the full amount must be paid.

2. Only one of any one thing (car, house, etc) can be purchased.

3. 25% of money (after taxes) must be given to charity.

Using an online tax calculator, students got to work, and were somewhat horrified to discover that $328,597 of their hard-won cash would be gone before they would have a chance to spend it. The new subtotal? A mere $671,403.

But wait! What about that 25% earmarked for charity? Subtract $167, 850.75 and the new subtotal is a paltry $503,552.25.

Gulp. Scratch the plans for the Ferrari. Maybe a house is more important than a car after all.

Next class, we will spend more time on researching the actual cost of the things they want to buy – rather than just creating a mind-map – and students will explore the financial feasibility of their current expenditure plans.

All of this is leading up to creating a balance sheet in Microsoft Excel, where they will create formulas to calculate costs, and hopefully, find an equitable way to spend their remaining half-million dollars.

6th grade Winter plans

1142 days
by in 6th Grade

For Winter term, the 6th grade will be enrolled in 2 tech classes, running concurrently: Tech Tuesday & Working Wednesday.  Typing will continue to be required, 3 days per week.  Students can get ahead on these assignments by typing over Winter break.  For each day over break that a student completes an assignment, they receive a day’s credit (up to 10 days) for the Winter term!!

Tech Tuesday

Jac & the 6th grade will work in a seminar style to research, hypothesize and deconstruct tech companies that are having a huge effect on our lives. Students will be expected to work in small groups and participate in full class discussions.  There will be some homework – mostly reading short articles in preparation for class discussions.

Working Wednesay

Kasha will introduce the 6th grade to the Microsoft Office suite of applications.  Students will become proficient with Word, Excel & PowerPoint this term through a series of creative and practical lessons designed to introduce program functionality and teach students when such tools are appropriate.  There will also be time for students to use these programs beyond their “intended” use, for instance, making art with Excel or creating Mad Libs using Word’s mail merge feature!

Safety Online and on Phones for Kids

1377 days
by in Digital Identity

by Nava

A digital identity is who you are online, on your phone, on your credit card, anything digital. Maybe it’s your real name, maybe a nickname. It’s what computer you use; what sites you go on. It’s your phone number; your AIM screen name, anything you have that’s digital. I think that young children, differing in age from child to child, should have their parents know what sites they go on, who they are calling, to keep their digital identities, and real identities, safe.

I think having a list is a useful thing to do, especially for things like keeping people safe. On one site I went to, there was an actual guideline for keeping yourself safe, for kids! It had some ten useful rules, and here are three of them

  1. I will not give out personal information such as my address, telephone number, parents’ work address/telephone number, or the name and location of my school without my parents’ permission.
  2. I will tell my parents right away if I come across any information that makes me feel uncomfortable.
  3. I will never agree to get together with someone I “meet” online without first checking with my parents. If my parents agree to the meeting, I will be sure that it is in a public place and bring my mother or father along.’

It’s a good guideline, for children and parents both, for teens and toddlers. It can help young kids know what’s safe, and it can remind the older kids of it, too.

With a device that can be installed on phones, called Radar, parents and others can make sure that their kids are safe. If anyone calls who isn’t on their approved list, they are sent a text message. This could be a good thing. For example, if their children were being harassed and didn’t know what to do, their parents would know about it and they could help.

However, Radar could also not be a good thing. Kids should have a bit of privacy, without their parents completely running their lives. If they get interrogated about every one of their friends that their parents didn’t know, it would get very tiresome to keep telling their parents, who called; what they knew that person from, and all that. Their parents should trust them a bit, and maybe not have such an extreme grip on them, as to monitor their phone calls.

In conclusion, kids should get some freedom, and some safety. I believe that as you get older, your parents should give you more freedom, especially if you use that freedom responsibly. From cell phones to using the internet, you need some privacy, but some safety.

Articles:
Here are two very similar lists of Kid Online Safety Rules:
http://www.safekids.com/kidsrules.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/protect/family/age/upto10.mspx
Here is a site about parents being able to track their children’s phone calls.

Yahoo!: Microsoft v. News Corp.

1451 days
by in 7th Grade

Tech in the News
Microsoft, owner of one of the top 3 search engines in the world, is interested in buying Yahoo! (it’s closest competitor) in an effort to bulk up for a head-to-head competition with Google.

Today News Corp. (Rupert Murdoch’s company that owns Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal, FoxNews and more) announced that it is in talks with Yahoo! to buy a stake in the company.

The 7th grade spent our class together discussing the implications of both of these potential events. For the Microsoft merge, we discussed why MS would be interested in buying Yahoo!, how search engines generate revenue from advertising, and the implications of having less choices for search engines.

When talking about the News Corp. deal, we went discussed freedom of the press, the building of communications conglomerates and the effect of monopolization on competition and freedom of choice.

Students ended class in small groups. Each group chose an industry (fashion, booksellers, ski resorts, to name a few) and imagined what things would look like if a single company took over that entire industry. Some discussion highlights:

  • Maya and Becky suggested that if there was only a single clothing retailer, people’s economic status wouldn’t be reflected in their clothing but that people would lose their ability to express their individuality through dress.
  • Owen pointed out that if Barnes & Noble were the only bookseller, they could drastically reduce the amount of stores needed in any geographic area, thus reducing costs.
  • Nava, Savannah & Isaac hypothesized that if Papaya made and sold all the clothing in the country, the price of clothing could be reduced and garment workers could be paid a fair living wage.
  • Sam, Tristan & Stephan said that if all the ski areas were owned by a single company, then that organization could raise and lower the prices of lift tickets at all resorts simultaneously knowing that there weren’t better deals in the area.

Choose your own adventure – PowerPoint & Inspiration

1458 days
by in 6th Grade

This week students undertook a 4-day project creating their own “Choose your own adventure” stories.

This project was a great opportunity to revisit the concepts of “design” and “content” that we discussed when building web pages back in November. PowerPoint was a great tool for this lesson – we used hyperlinks that allow the viewer to choose what path a story should take.

On day 1, students were introduced to PowerPoint. We pointed out similarities and differences between the program and others in the Microsoft Office suite. We learned to save documents, add new slides, insert hyperlinks and add content.

On day 2, students learned to make global design changes (background, font selection, etc) and how to change individual slides while fine tuning their story content.

On day 3, we took a step back and created a visual representation of our PowerPoint slides using Inspiration, an inexpensive brainstorming/outlining program. This program teaches us to input our thoughts and ideas in either a word-based or graphic-based manner and swap back and forth between the two views.

Day 4 was used for finishing touches and catch up.

Overall a fun time was had and we learned some great tech skills in the process! Next week we’ll look at different methods of presenting our work using file export functions, and also how design and content fit into the Berlo’s SMCR model of communication.

MS Student Scavenger Hunt

1524 days
by in 6th Grade

Microsoft Student 2006 is combination encyclopedia, web search, graphing calculator, fact checking center, atlas, homework helper, video & photo searching tool. Today we are going to explore the atlas & maps portion of the program.

Your assignment is to go on a scavenger hunt, using ONLY Microsoft Student – no Internet access needed! You may need to take advantage of the different map types in the right column of the program. If you don’t understand a word in the assignment, please use the search tool in the top right corner of the program to find a definition.

Please copy & paste (using keyboard shortcuts) the following questions into an email and send to Jac when your work is complete.

Let’s get started:

Map Types in MS Student

Questions about the USA

What are the 2 closest airports to Seattle?

How far (as the crow flies) is it from Seattle to Ft. Flagler (where the 7th grade students went on their Fall trip)?

What tectonic plate is the USA located on?

How many births (per 1000 people) per year are there in the USA?

How many time zones are there in the USA?

Questions related to the USA

Name a country with less births (per 1000 people) per year than the USA.

Name 3 countries (each on a separate continent) that contain an ecoregion similar to the one Seattle is located in.

World Questions

What is at the very top of the atlas (use the comprehensive map or the political map)?

What large desert is there in India?

Name 9 countries that border the country where Darfur is located.

Name 7 countries crossed by the prime meridian.

Name 3 continents crossed by the equator.

Name a country that has a portion which has less than 5 degrees of temperature fluctuation in a year.

Approximately how far is it by plane from the North Pole to the South Pole? How many miles is it all the way around the world?

Questions about Population

Most people in China live in what portion of the country ( state your answer as a direction – North, the SouthEast, etc)?

Which city has more people (in 2001 when the maps were made), Saint Petersburg, Florida or Saint Petersburg, Russia?

What type of Islam is practiced in oil-rich Saudi Arabia? Is it the same religion as the predominant religion in Iran?

What country will have the biggest population in 2025? How about in 2050?What country uses the most electricity?

What country has the most miles of paved roads?

What country should you move to if you want to have a life expectancy of over 80 years?

What country has the biggest labor force?

OLPC presentation (Week 11)

1527 days
by in 7th Grade, Projects

This week the students that have been studying the One Laptop Per Child program presented their finding to Ted, our Head of School.

The groups began by education Ted about what the OLPC program is and described the specific hardware and software configurations in the XO laptop. They then discussed the problem of the digital divide and how the OLPC is trying to offer a solution.

Finally, both groups recommended that Billings participate in the limited G1G1 program, in order to help a student in a developing nation and also to get an XO laptop for the school, which can be used to further educate our community on the program and our learning. Emiko suggested that the laptop could be taken to Billings open houses to show prospective students the types of programs we engage in here at school and also to raise awareness of the project.

The OLPC students also researched the latest news related to the program, and found quite a few stories:

Apple introduces Leopard (Week 9)

1559 days
by in 6th Grade

Today we focused on Tech in the News. The two biggest stories of the last week are:

Microsoft buys stake in Facebook for $240 million dollars. We used this topic to learn about social networking services, how they rely on large adoption to be successful and how they leverage their customer base to create revenue from advertising.

Apple releases new operating system. From this article, we defined the term “operating system” as software that has a set of instructions that tells a computer’s hardware how to talk to each other and tells other software how to talk to the computer. We talked about Apple’s marketing, how they focus on the uses of their products (not necessarily just the hardware specifications) and how they work to generate “coolness”. We watched clips from a 20 minutes introductory video, produced by Apple, and discussed whether the new features were revolutionary, evolutionary, or just good-looking.

Students in one class had enough time to actually play with Leopard and tested Spaces, explored Safari 3 and looked at the new finder, dock and Coverflow features.

Easy Email (Week 6)

1579 days
by in 6th Grade

Office 2007 logoOn Monday, the 6th grade was introduced to the mechanics of email. We discussed the similarities, differences, advantages and disadvantages of web-based vs. program-based email access.

Students set up MS Outlook 2007 to display their email inbox and explored some of the advanced functionality of the program.

We also reviewed for an alleged quiz that may or may not take place this Thursday.  Topics for review include the OLPC project, ENIAC, lab guidelines and anything else referenced on this 6th grade lab tech page.

Our School Online (6th Grade – Week 3)

1598 days
by in 6th Grade

Billings has an evolving digital presence designed to provide information to prospective families, students, parents and other schools. This week, the sixth graders looked at and discussed 3 different Websites designed for the Billings community:

  1. Billingsmiddleschool.org -The school’s public homepage
  2. Billingsmiddleschool.org/start – Student start page with quick links
  3. Billingsmiddleschool.net – TechLab sharing site

We also talked about Microsoft (located in Redmond, Washington), its founder (Bill Gates) and the company’s effect on our city, the Northwest and the entire world.

We reinforced last week’s learning by logging in to their personal computer accounts accessing their network storage folder and then learned to access our school email account from anywhere using Internet access. Students were also introduced to the various send options (To, Carbon Copy, and Blind Carbon Copy).

Using their email accounts, students delivered their first assignment to Jac via email.

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