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.

Current Events in Science

6th Grade Science students used the EBSCO online data base, (to which Nido subscribes) to research about any current event in Science that interested them. The students practiced choosing appropriate keywords and narrowing down their topic with a directory search. The students also searched by the lexile scores of the articles to eliminate documents that were beyond their reading level. Once they had found an article they liked, the 6th Graders used Word to write a short summary that they later presented to the class.

El Pozo and Powerpoint

The 7th Grade National Spanish students read the short story, El Pozo, and then did an analysis of the different elements of a short story. For this unit, the Spanish classes used the mobile lab and did all the work with Powerpoint inside their classroom.

Characterization and Inspiration

The 6th Grade Language Arts students used Inspiration to create a graphical representation of how a character expresses his or her personality throughout the story. This lesson took one class period.