Online Newspaper in Dreamweaver

The 8th Grade National Spanish students spent two weeks in the computer lab, composing an original online newspaper with fictitious news stories. They used Dreamweaver to organize the different sections and concentrated on efficient networking between team members in order to meet the deadlines. One person in the team acted as the webmaster, receiving and linking the html documents from the reporters/writers/graphic artists who produced the material.

Excel and Frequencies

The 6th Grade Math students used Excel to examine the differences between decimals, fractions and percentages.

Mean, Median and Mode

The 6th Grade Math students used Excel to calculate different statistical measures of different groups of numbers.

Radio Theater Script and Google Docs

The 8th Grade Social Studies students were divided into groups in order to present a play in "radio theater" format which explained different historical events that surrounded the beginnings of the Chilean or the American governments. During the first stage of this unit, the students researched their questions and wrote the script treatment and the actual script collaboratively in Google Docs. Once they finished, they downloaded their scripts as Word documents to photocopy for hard copy scripts. The students took six class periods in the lab to complete this stage of the process.

Spanish Literature and Google Earth

The 6th Grade National Spanish students read a novel about a boy who lived in a small town in Guatemala. Later they located Panajachel, Guatemala in Google Earth and added a screen shot to their Powerpoint portfolio. They used various tools in Powerpoint to create comments about the setting of the story.

Black Death Journal

The 7th Grade Social Studies classes created a medieval diary that described the life of Europeans during the time of the Black Death. Each of the three journal entries had specific formatting requirements that needed to be met.

Sketchup and the Garden

The 6th Grade Science students used Google Sketchup 6 to create a 3D model of the vegetable garden that is located behind the 6th Grade Wing. The students learned to change the settings for their mouse, so they could take advantage of the third button functionality that Sketchup offers. For example, pressing and holding the third button while moving the mouse allowed them to orbit around their garden. The students also learned how to pan, zoom and use the zoom extents tool, which made it much easier for them to control the 3D space in which they were constructing their garden model. Some students who finished the assignment early, were given the option to construct the greenhouse, that stands behind the garden.

Fossils and Google Docs

The 8th Grade Science students accessed a PBS interactive website to do a lesson on fossils. Their teacher shared the study guide via her shared folder on the student server and the students proceeded to upload the document to their Google Docs account. From there, they renamed the document with their lastname and shared the document back to their teacher. From that point on, the teacher could monitor the assignment from start to finish, and the student could work on the assignment whenever they had internet access. Another advantage for using Google Docs at the Middle School level, is that there are no more physically misplaced papers.

Filemaker and Tree Tracking

The 6th Grade Science students used Filemaker Pro to create a database that will organize information about the different tree saplings that they have planted around campus.

Ordered Pairs. Linear Functions and Excel

The 8th Grade Algebra 1 students came into the lab to graphically explore the relationship between different ordered pairs in linear functions. They used the fill command to generate the ordered pairs according to different rules and then they graphed these ordered pairs.

Excel and Percent Change

The 8th Grade Math students examined constant percent changes for different environmental situations and graphed those changes in Excel.

A Problem Solving Exercise with Google Docs

Teams of students from all grade levels put their problem solving skills to the test while attempting to complete different activities in the Middle School House Program. During the afternoon, the five House Groups - Orcas, Pumas, Ñandus, Vizcachas and Condors divided themselves into teams and some of those teams came to the computer lab. The tech-based problem was the following: find out what problems were being tackled outside the lab, document them with text and graphics and publish it all in newsletter format by means of Google Docs. To prove that the problem was finished, the final step was to share the newsletter with the teachers who organized the activity. Google Docs fit this activity well, because it allows several authors to work on the same document simultaneously.

Advertisements in Photoshop Elements

The 8th Grade National Spanish students spent three class periods creating ads for their online newspapers. Each student was required to make three different documents. Each document had a background, one or more images taken from other sources and text. Once finished with these psd files, the students had to export them as jpegs or gifs and make them available to be ultimately inserted into the online newspaper.