Medieval Fair, Google Docs and Photoshop

The 7th Grade Social Studies students began this project by spending five days in the lab doing research that answered questions to a webquest. Students used Google Docs to share documents with their team members and then proceeded to complete the research.

Once they finished, students used Photoshop 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 four days.

Compost Lab, Word and Excel

The 6th Grade Science students used Word and Excel to write up the results of a lab that they did in class over the course of the semester. The lab write up took two class periods to complete.

Egypt, Fireworks and Dreamweaver

The 6th Grade Social Studies students studied the culture of Ancient Egypt and focused on the Egyptians' view of the afterlife. The students had to imagine how it would be to leave their individual legacies in a pyramid to be viewed by future generations, and, with that idea in mind, they wrote an essay on how their lives might be. Later, they chose different hieroglyphics that described aspects of those lives. Finally the students used Dreamweaver and Fireworks to create a five page website that was built around these different hieroglyphics related to their personality. The tech aspect of the project took five class periods to complete.

Healthy Choices and Photoshop

During the Middle School Health Week, the 7th Grade Science students used Photoshop to create an advertisement for healthy life choices. Students researched healthy and unhealthy choices that they might make, and then followed a model in making their own advertisement concerning the options researched. The lesson took three class periods to complete.

Solving Linear Inequalities and Grapher

The 8th Grade Algebra students used Grapher to graph the solution region for a set of linear inequalities. The lesson took one class period to complete.

Isosceles Trapezoids and Geometer's Sketchpad

The 8th Grade Geometry students used Geometer's Sketchpad to to study different kinds of trapezoids. The lesson took one class period to finish.

Special Parallelograms and Geometer's Sketchpad

The 8th Grade Geometry students used Geometer's Sketchpad to study the relationships between the angles and the sides of different parallelograms. The students took one class period to finish the assignment.

Egyptian Obituary and Inspiration

The 6th Grade Language Arts classes used Inspiration to outline an obituary that they were going to write in class later in the week. The lesson took one class period to complete.

The Outsiders and Photoshop

The 8th Grade Language Arts class used Photoshop to create a collage that explained the personality traits of one of the characters from the novel. The students took three class periods to complete the task.

Optics and Flash

The 7th Grade Science students used Flash to create a model that showed how light rays behave when they are reflected and when they are refracted. This project took four days to complete.

Egyptian Webquest

The 6th Grade Social Studies students accessed a webquest that was made available to them via their teacher's shared folder, and they researched the questions on the internet. Later, the students dropped the completed document into their teacher's drop box. One of the classes shared the webquest via Google Docs. The lesson took two class periods to complete.

Congruent Triangles and Geometer's Sketchpad

The 8th Grade Geometry students used Geometer's Sketchpad to study the relationships between congruent triangles. The lesson took one class period.

Constantinople, Google Docs, Fireworks and Dreamweaver

The 7th Grade Social Studies students did research on the ancient city of Constantinople and kept their notes in their Google Docs account. These notes became the text for the different pages in their website. Later they created graphics in Fireworks, which they added to the website that they constructed in Dreamweaver. The students also used Google Earth to capture views of the area from different altitudes. The lesson took four class periods to complete.

Click on the image below to see an example of the web site that the students had to build.



Click on the play button below to see a high speed version of the last tutorial movie for this lesson.

DVD Sales and Excel

The 8th Grade Algebra students used Excel to examine the relationship between cost, sales price and profit. They entered the corresponding formulas in Excel and then used the fill tool to project how many DVD players a business would have to sell to make a profit. The lesson took one class period to finish.

Sentence Structure and Excel

The 7th Grade Spanish students used Excel to analyze the different parts of a sentence. The students took one class period to complete the assignment.

Meiosis and Flash

The 8th Grade Science students used Flash to create a model that illustrated how the cells and chromosomes regroup and divide to create the sex cells. The students worked with symbol creation, motion tweens and shape tweens to construct the four different scenes of the animation. The project took three class periods to create.

Electromagnetic Waves and Filemaker Pro 9

The 7th Grade Science students created a data base that organized all the different waves in the electromagnetic spectrum. The students had text and container fields, which they laid out to display the data researched. The lesson took four days to complete.

Chilean Environmental Issues and Powepoint

The 6th Grade Science students did research on a topic related to the Chilean environment. They used a variety of sources, including Wikipedia, Google, and the EBSCO online databases to find information. Once they had information, the students built a powerpoint presentation, according to the teachers' rubric. Students who researched a native Chilean animal like the pudú or the vizcacha, were able to include a simple food web exported from Inspiration.

Trendlines and Excel

The 8th Grade Algebra students used Excel to make a scatter graph of certain data. Later they applied a trendline to the data and used the corresponding equation to calculate a new value. This lesson took one class period to complete.

Dominant and Recessive Traits in Filemaker Pro 9 and Excel

The 8th Grade Science students used Filemaker Pro 9 to create a database with their class's data which included information about seven different physical traits. Once the students compiled all this data (which they obtained by importing their classmates' exported data files from the teachers' shared folder on the Middle School server), they used Excel to calculate and compare the percentages of the dominance of the different traits. This project took three class periods to complete.

Sumerian Cities and Sketchup

The 6th Grade Social Studies students used Google Earth and Google Sketchup to create a model of an ancient Sumerian city. They included crop fields, irrigation canals, fortifications, housing and a ziggurat. The students needed to use navigation tools like zoom, orbit and pan in order to construct all the different features of their model. This lesson took approximately four days to complete.

Divisibility Rules and Excel

The 6th Grade Math students used Excel to create formulas that checked the divisibility of numbers from 1 to 200. Using the Formula Builder, they combined several functions including IF, OR, MOD, and ISEVEN to construct the different rules. Later the students used conditional formatting to identify patterns. The lesson took three class periods to complete.

Special Points in Circles and Geometer's Sketchpad

The 8th Grade Geometry students used Geometer's Sketchpad to construct and examine the four points of concurrency and their properties. This lesson took one class period to complete.

Black Death Journal and Google Docs and Word

The 7th Grade Social Studies students did research on conditions in Europe during the Bubonic Plague. They recorded their notes in a document created and saved in their Google Docs account. From there, the students created a Word document that they formatted like a medieval journal or diary. Drawing from their notes in Google Docs, the students wrote about the plague from the point of view of a person living during that time period. This lesson took four days to complete.

Acentuación and Premiere Pro

The 6th Grade National Spanish students created a short movie that explained accent rules for different groups of words. They animated pictures and text, and later added a sound track. This lesson took five class periods to complete.

Short Stories, Fireworks and Dreamweaver

The 8th grade Language Arts students created a five page website that summarized different short stories that they have read so far this semester. The students created a navigation system with rollover buttons in Fireworks, which they later exported into Dreamweaver. The students also created a link to download a PDF version of their own original short story. The lesson took five class periods to complete.

Absolutism, Fireworks and Dreamweaver

The 8th grade Social Studies students created a four page website titled, Understanding Absolutism. The students had to create several graphics in Fireworks, which they later exported to Dreamweaver. Inside of Dreamweaver, the students constructed the pages with text, graphics and links. The lesson took seven class periods to complete.

Short Story Writing and Google Docs

Some of the 8th grade Language Arts students used Google Docs to write drafts of their short stories, which they shared with their teacher. The lesson took two class periods to complete.

Percent Changes and Excel

The 8th grade Math students used Excel to answer word problems that involved percent changes. The students created formulas which allowed them to calculate percent increases or decreases, as well as total increase or decrease of populations over a period of time. The lesson took one class period to complete.

Formal Lab, Excel and Word

Some of the 8th grade Science students used Excel to record experimental data, which they later graphed. Then they reported their findings in a Word document that they used to write their formal lab report. The lesson took two class periods to complete and the students used the portable lab so that they could record the data at the moment they were conducting the experiment.

Absolutism and Word

The 8th grade Social Studies students used a teacher made study guide to do research on absolute rulers in Europe. The students had to answer questions and find graphics, with which they made collages that explained certain concepts that were popular during this time period. The lesson took five class periods to finish.

Spanish as a Second Language and Word

SSL students used Word to write a poem that described a bird they had read about in class. The students practiced how to change the language of Word and how to type in accents. The lesson took two class period to complete.

Riddle of the Bones and Science

The 8th grade Science students accessed a PBS interactive website to read and answer questions about fossils. Their teacher shared the study guide via her class folder on the student server and the students saved a copy of the document to their own server accounts where they wrote the answers. The lesson took two class periods to complete.

Dar and iMovie

The 6th grade Language Arts students used iMovie to create a video. The video was based on a storyboard that they created which summarized the main events of the story. Some of the students used Photoshop to create a title slide which showed some of the flora and fauna that existed in the time of Dar. This project took five class periods to finish.

Surveys and Excel

The 6th grade Math students used Excel to record data from a survey. Later the students graphed the data in different ways to compare the effectiveness of certain graphs. This lesson took two class periods to complete.

Essay Writing and Criterion

The 6th and 7th grade Language Arts students logged on to their user accounts at Criterion, an online writing program and responded to a prompt given to them by their teacher. The teacher can adjust the settings for the due date and the maximum number of submissions that can be made before the final evaluation. If the teacher so desires, the students can receive permission to log on to their accounts at home to continue editing their assignment.

Aleks, the Online Math Program

Some of the 7th grade Math students are involved in a pilot program where they do lessons with an online math program, Aleks, that charts their progress from day to day. The students usually meet in a regular classroom with the laptop cart and after a short introduction from their teacher, they work independently (from the other students) for the remainder of the class in their online account.

Scatter Graphs and Excel

The 7th grade Science students used Excel to graph the relationship between the fluctuations in the prey and predator populations over time. The students used line graphs to display their data and this lesson took two class periods to finish.

El Pozo and Flash

The 7th grade national Spanish students used Flash to create an interactive book report of the short story El Pozo. The report included buttons which linked to a short summary, information about the author, descriptions of the main characters and setting. This project took four class periods to complete.

Spanish Poetry and Illustrator

The SSL2 students used Illustrator to create a poster which had graphics and a diamond-shaped poem. The students also used a scanner to digitize the drawings that they included in the project. This lesson took three class periods to complete.

Parallel Lines, Transversals and Geometer's Sketchpad

The 8th Grade Geometry students used Geometer's Sketchpad to construct a transversal to two parallel lines. Once all those lines were constructed, the students measured the angles formed and then made conjectures about the different types of angles. The lesson took one class period to complete.

Food Webs and Inspiration

The 7th Grade Science students used Inspiraton to create a complex food web that included decomposers, producers and composers. The project took four class periods to complete.

The Water Cycle and Flash

The 6th grade Science students used Flash to create a model that showed how the water cycle works. Students used several of the drawing tools to create the background for the project. Later, they constructed motion tweens to animate the different symbols that represented the water vapor and the rain. Finally they exported the swf file and dropped it into their teacher's drop box. The lesson took three and a half class periods to complete.

Core Democratic Values and Powerpoint

While working in groups of two, the 8th grade Social Studies students used Google Docs to gather research about the core democratic value that they had to explore. Once they had enough information, they created a Powerpoint to accompany their oral presentation. This lesson took five class periods to complete.

Fairy Tales and Indesign

The 6th grade Language Arts students used Indesign to create an eight or twelve page booklet of an original fairy tale that they wrote in class. They formatted the text, added borders, pictures and printed the booklet, using the back to back option. The lesson took about three class periods.

Short Stories and Word

The 7th grade National Spanish students used Word to write a final draft of a short story that they had started in class. The students changed the language option in Word to Spanish and then were able to use the spell checker. The lesson took two class periods to finish.

Geological Layers and Sketchup 7

The 8th grade Science students used Google Sketchup to create a cross-section of different geological layers with examples of formations that they have studied in class. Students used various navigation tools, such as zoom, pan and orbit, in order to complete their assignment. Students took two days to complete the lesson.

Rocket Lab, Word and Excel

The 7th grade Science students used Word and Excel to write up a formal lab report about their Rocket Lab. The students recorded their data in Excel and then made a graph. Later they copied the data table and graph into the Word document they created for their lab report. The lesson took three days to finish.

Guatemala and Photoshop

After the 6th grade National Spanish students read a story that took place in Panajachel, Guatemala, they used Photoshop to create a poster that described the people, places and products of Guatemala. The students used a variety of selection tools to add content to the main document. This lesson took two classes to complete.