Word Count and Excel

The 8th Grade Social Studies students used Excel to analyze how they were progressing with their short essay answers. They related word count to fluency and evaluated whether they were answering their Think and Write questions more completely, as time went on.

Medieval Fair with Google Docs, Photoshop and Sketchup

The 7th Grade Social Studies students began this project by spending two days in the lab doing research. Team leaders from each group received guidelines from their teachers by accessing the teachers' shared folders. From there, the team leaders used Google Docs to share the documents with their team members and then proceeded to complete the research.



Once they finished, students used Photoshop or Sketchup to create graphics that would serve two purposes: decorate their booth, and explain to visitors how their medieval group lived during that time. This part of the project took three days.

Band Progress and iMovie

The Middle School Band students used iMovie to record their music and their playing technique in class one day. The purpose was to see where each student had progressed by the end of the semester and to set goals for the next semester. The students made use of the laptop cart and finished their movie in one class period.

Menu Masters

The House Program presented a technology problem as part of its end of semester activity. The problem focused on different aspects of communication. A team of students from each house had to prepare two menus, one in poster form and another in brochure form, informing potential customers about the food for sale. Additionally, the team had to send one of its members to observe all the other activities occurring that day and publish a report in a movie format.

Persuasive Essays and Google Docs

The 8th Grade Language Arts students used Google Docs to prepare their persuasive essays this quarter. Once the students created the document and shared it with their teacher, the teacher was able to follow the writing process from start to finish, providing comments along the way. The students also had the possibility to share the essay with a classmate, which facilitated peer editing. Finally, the students realized that when they were using Google Docs, they had access to their essay wherever they could access the internet.

The Evil Deceiver and Powerpoint

The 8th Grade Social Studies students continued their study of the Scientific Revolution by examining the work of Rene Descartes. The students did research on how we perceive the world about us and what limitations do we have in gathering information. Once students had a notion of Descartes' famous quote, "I think, therefore I exist," they prepared a Powerpoint presentation that analyzed a picture that might lend itself to more than one interpretation. The students took four classes to finish this assignment.

Climate Change and Excel

The 6th Grade Pre-Algebra 6 class did a project in Excel that examined temperature change in certain cities over the span of the last 50 years. They used a formula to convert the Fahrenheit readings to Centigrade and then applied several other formulas, such as mode, median and average (to arrive at the mean). The students graphed the temperature change and then added a trendline. Later on they inserted a histogram from the Data Analysis Tools. Finally, they went to Google Earth, found the city that they were researching, showed the latitude and longitude grid, and took a screenshot, which they inserted into their Excel worksheet. The lesson took four class periods.

Meiosis and Flash

The 8th Grade Science students expanded their understanding of meiosis by creating a model of the main stages of the process. Students had to use motion tweens to create the movement of the chromosomes and chromatids and shape tweens to simulate the deformation of the cell. They also created symbols to represent the chromosomes and chromatids, which they reused in different scenes of the animation. Students who finished early had the option of adding navigation buttons for extra credit. Four visits to the lab were necessary to complete the lesson.

Theories of the Universe and iMovie

The 8th Grade Social Studies students used iMovie'08 to create a video that explained the differences between the theories of Ptolmey, Copernicus and Kepler. In the video they were required to use still clips, video clips, background music, text, as well as record their own voice narration of the video's content. Upon completing the lesson, the students had to export the movie to a more portable format and then drop a copy into their teacher's drop box. The students took four days to complete this assignment.

The Six Traits of Writing Published in Powerpoint or Word

Seventh Grade Language Arts students used one of these two applications to publish a piece of writing that was developed in the classroom according to the Six Traits of Writing guidelines. The assignment took one class period, and if students needed more time, they emailed themselves the document and finished at home.

Essay Writing with Six Traits and Garage Band

Some of the 6th Grade Language Arts students used Garage Band to record their written essays, so they could be evaluated from a different perspective. After the students recorded their essays, they exported a copy in mp3 format to their public folder. At that point, another student accessed the public folder, opened up the essay, did peer editing, and recorded suggestions on a new track in Garage Band. The peer editor exported the copy with suggestions as another mp3 file to their own public folder. Finally, the author listened to the comments, made any necessary adjustments in a new audio version of the essay and added appropriate sound effects before exporting again and dropping the final work into the teacher's drop box. This assignment took four class periods to complete.

Essay Writing and Google Docs

The 8th Grade Language Arts students worked on thesis statements by applying what they learned from a teacher-made Powerpoint to their drafts in Google Docs. Students took three classes to finish this assignment. The students took two class periods to finish this assignment. They also worked at home.

Fractions and Excel

The 6th Grade Math class used Excel to examine concrete graphical representations of the abstract concept of fractions that they were studying in class. Students made two worksheets: in the first sheet, they constructed a calculator that could add fractions (as long as the sum was less than one) and display the addends and the sum with pie charts. On the second sheet, the students made a slider that showed the difference between pairs of fractions which added up to 50/50. The students took one class to finish this lesson.

Carbon Footprints

The 6th Grade Science classes used the web site called Carbon Footprint to calculate the greenhouse gases produced from air and car travel. The air travel figures are all calculated from Santiago (SCL) and the students could choose whatever make of cars that they wanted. The students used an Excel worksheet to gather their data. Once they made the corresponding graphs, the students dropped the assignment into their teacher's drop box. Most students needed three days to complete the assignment.

Exploring Isosceles Trapezoids in Geogebra

8th Grade Geometry students used an open source program called Geogebra to explore tech integration possibilities with their geometry lessons. The students constructed points, lines and angles. After studying the relationships between the length of the lines and the measures of the angles (as Point D varied along line b), they attempted to formulate rules about the diagonals of the isosceles trapezoids. The students needed one class to complete the assignment.

Battle of the Books and Filemaker Pro

Some of the 6th Grade Language Arts students remotely accessed a Filemaker Pro database that was designed to store information for a contest. Once the students had logged on, they created records that were basically questions about the different Jerry Spinelli books they had read over the semester. Once this question database was compiled, the teacher was able to evaluate the individual students on how well they each completed the assignment, as well as conduct the Battle of the Books contest with 100% student made questions.

Sales Analysis with Excel

The 8th Grade Algebra 1 students used Excel to analyze the factors of cost, sales and profit in one of their assignments. Once they input the formulas, they used the fill down tool to discover at what point the business would become profitable. Then they graphed their results, saved their work and dropped the document into their teacher's drop box.

A Vocabulary Lesson with Excel

Students in some of the 6th Grade Language Arts classes created a crossword puzzle in Excel with their vocabulary words of the week. Clues were added as comments and students used conditional formatting with the first letter of each word. They programmed Excel to make the first letter display green if the word entered was correct and red if the word was incorrect. Once they finished with the formatting, they saved a copy as lastname_key.xls and dropped it into their teacher's drop box. Then they saved the document under a new name: lastname_puzzle.xls, and proceeded to erase the answers so that another classmate could actually work out the puzzle. The students took three classes to finish this assignment.

Bullying Projects

For the first two weeks of November (during the 6th grade trips) the 6th grade students who were not in Lagunillas worked on a seven day project that addressed the issue of bullying. During the first two days of the project, they did collaborative research in Google Docs, gathering information from teacher-approved web sites. Once they had information that addressed their research question, the students had three different choices for presenting their solutions: a poster made in Photoshop, a slideshow presentation made in Google Docs, or a podcast made in Garageband.

One of the research templates that students worked on collaboratively when preparing for their presentations.

One of the Bullying posters made in Photoshop.


This is a slide from a presentation prepared collaboratively by one of the student groups in Google Docs, and then downloaded as a ppt document.

A sample podcast about bullying made in Garageband.

Improving Your Academic Performance

During the week that the 8th Grade students were not in Los Pellines, they worked on a project from the Advisory curriculum. This project examined a survey that the students took and asked them to research an area that they needed to improve in order to do better in school. Once the students had gathered enough information, they created a Powerpoint presentation which they later shared with their classmates.

Greek Gods and Goddesses

The 7th Grade Spanish classes used Photoshop Elements to create a poster of one Greek god or goddess. They included information about the deity's physical description, supernatural powers and a brief summary of one myth in which he or she played a role. As for tech skills, the students became more familiar with layers, feathering images and formatting text.

Physical Fitness and Filemaker Pro

The PE department is working on a pilot project where the students keep track of their physical fitness goals by means of an online database that they access from on or off campus. At the moment, the database has been tested successfully by a class of 8th Grade PE students while in the computer lab.

Save the Planet, Ecology Project

When the 6th Grade students were not on their outdoor education trip in Lagunillas, they were working on two tech projects and one was the iMovie ecology project. The students spent seven days researching in the EBSCO online data base for an environmental problem and some possible solutions. The movie that they created was supposed to show the problem, and promote the solution. The students used still images, transitions, text, background music, and recorded their voices on a second audio track to fulfill the tech requirements for this project.

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Ear Anatomy in Flash

This project was made by 7th grade Science students. It is an animation that shows what happens when sound waves enter the human ear. Students used motion tweens to animate all the different parts of the ear. To represent the transfer of impulses along the auditory nerve, the students changed the brightness of the auditory nerve graphic.

Hottest Color Lab and Excel

The 7th Grade Science students did a lab that explored how different colored paper absorbed heat. In the Excel document they created, the students had to use formulas such as average, minimum and maximum to analyze their data.

Language Arts and Criterion

The 7th Grade Language Arts students have come to the lab on three occasions to write responses to teacher prompts that are loaded into Criterion, an online writing evaluation software. Sometimes students are given just the class to write and other times they are given several chances to resubmit their work for a higher score.

This is an example of the essay already evaluated by Criterion.


This is an example fo the type of feedback that Criterion can give a student or teacher. If the student follows these suggestions, he or she may raise their score.

Ancient Egypt Webquest

Some of the 6th Grade Social Studies students used the web browser and a Word document to complete a webquest about ancient Egypt. The students had to access the document from the teacher's shared folder, and then rename it and save it in their own account. After completing the assignment, they dropped the document into the teacher's drop box.

Zorbas and Photoshop

The 6th Grade Spanish students used Photoshop Elements to create a poster which described one of the characters in a story they read in class. First they created a background with the gradient tool. Then they made a border by adjusting the settings for the brush tool. Next they added an appropriate picture for the character they were describing. Finally they made two text layers: one for the title of their document and a second for the description. Once the students finished, they used the save for web command which compressed the document so it was easier to send it over the network to their teacher's drop box.

Idioms in Photoshop

All of the 6th Grade Language Arts classes used Photoshop Elements to create posters that illustrated some of the idioms that they had been studying. The students worked with a variety of different tools that included the magic wand, the text tool, the move tool, the zoom tool, and the gradient tool.

Genetics, Filemaker Pro and Excel

The 8th Grade Science students surveyed 20 people for eight different physical traits. In the computer lab, they created a database with fields for these traits, entered the data from their survey and then exported that information in a file that they placed in their public folder. Later on, they imported all their classmates' data, which totaled more than 400 records. With this sample, they were able to sort the data and determine how frequently these traits occurred in males and females. Afterwords, the students made data tables in Excel and graphed their findings.

This is an example of the database after a two criteria search was performed (Female, White Forelock). As can be seen, in this class's sample, there were 26 Females that had white forelock.

Here is the data, graphically represented in Excel.

Electromagnetic Waves and Filemaker

The 7th Grade Science students used Filemaker Pro to create a database with the seven different types of electromagnetic waves. Once the different database records were created, students could then compare different characteristics of the waves by doing sorts and finds.

The Divisibility Rules, Seen Through Excel

The 6th Grade Math students made extensive use of the IF statement to create a Divisibility Checker for numbers from 1 to 100. Other functions used in this lesson include ISEVEN, MOD, AND, OR and SUM. Later the students used conditional formatting to show if the number was divisible (green) or not (red), and graphed their results. A few students who finished early, extended the test up to 500.

Constantinople Real Estate Project

The 7th Grade Social Studies students made an advertisement that publicized land for sale in Constantinople. They had to include information about why it would be such a good place to live. Students practiced using layers and window management, as they were working with several files open at the same time.

Radio Theater Recording & Performance

The 8th Grade Social Studies continued their project by using Garage Band to record parts of their script. The instructions specified that the narrator, minor characters and sound effects could be recorded and the principal parts would be spoken live during the performance. Students learned to record on different tracks, how to create fade ins and fade outs, as well as how to use ducking effectively.

Plant Photosynthesis and Respiration

The 6th Grade Science students used Flash to model what happens during the processes of photosynthesis and respiration. For this, they used motion tweens and different drawing and transforming tools.

Evolution, PollenPeepers and Google Docs

The 8th Grade Science students used an interactive PBS website to answer questions from a teacher made study guide that was made available in her shared folder. The students accessed the document and uploaded it to their Google Docs account and then shared the document with their teacher. In this way, the document is immediately accessible to the teacher, and now the student can simply focus his or her efforts on answering the questions before the assignment is due.

Excel and Surveys

The 6th Grade Math students used Excel to analyze surveys. First the entire class followed instructions for graphing a survey on Popular Chilean Soccer players. On the second day of the lesson, each student applied what he or she learned to graph and analyze their own survey.