Spanish Webquest and Word

The 6th grade national Spanish students used this teacher made webquest to research for information about a particular poet. The students accessed this file from a shared folder on the server, renamed and saved a copy of the webquest into their own home directory, and upon completion, they dropped a copy of the webquest into their teacher's drop box. This lesson took one class period to complete.

Cultural Universals and Indesign

Some of the 6th grade Social Studies students used Indesign to create a booklet on cultural universals. They added text, graphics, page numbers and page borders. The students also created a title page with a gradient. This project took three class periods to complete.

Flash CS3 and Chemical Reactions

The 8th grade Science students used Flash to create models of different chemical reactions that they studied in recent lab activities. First they created symbols of the elements they needed and then made motion tweens to illustrate how the atoms recombined. The students also added buttons to navigate between movies. Finally, they narrated one of the movies with a recording that they made in GarageBand. This assignment took three class periods to complete.

Earthquake Statistics and Excel

The 7th grade Math students used Excel to analyze data from two different countries which experience high seismic activity. They used formulas to calculate the mean, median and mode. Later they compared different graph types to see which ones were more effective at displaying the data visually. They also created a box and whiskers graph and a histogram. After the statistical analysis, the students had to write formal letters that tried to convince a foreign investor to begin business operations in one country instead of the other, based on the analysis. This lesson took five class periods to complete.

Lab Reports, Powerpoint, Excel and Word

The 6th grade Science students used a teacher prepared template, which they accessed from a public folder, in order to write up a formal lab report about magnesium with hydrochloric acid. They used Powerpoint to make a diagram of the atomic structure of the elements involved in the lab. The students used Excel to graph their findings. Once they finished the assignment, they had to drop the completed work in their teacher's drop box. This lesson took two class periods.

Different Types of Faults and Sketchup

The 7th grade Science students used Google Sketchup to make models of three different types of faults (slip-strike, reverse and normal) that they have studied in this unit. The students created components that they were able to copy, which saved them time in completing the overall project. This project took approximately one and a half days of class.

Choose Your Own Adventure and Inspiration

Some of the 6th grade Social Studies students worked in teams to create a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story that they saved in their Google Docs account. Once they finished with the story, they created pages in Inspiration. When all the team members were finished with their parts of the story, they saved copies of their pages in their public folders. From there, all the team could access the pages that they were missing, and they saved a copy of the other pages into their own Choose Your Own Adventure folder. Once all the documents were obtained, then every team member, linked all the pages together so that it read like a "Choose Your Own Adventure". Finally, when all the links were working, the students exported the project as a web site into their sites folder, and from each student's individual sites folder, their teacher can evaluate their efforts. This lesson took about five days to complete.

Story One (Once you arrive to the page, scroll down to the text)

Story Two

Story Three

Un Cuento, Word and Indesign

The 7th grade National Spanish students used Word and Indesign to create an eight page booklet about a story that they wrote. The story had to begin or end with a phrase that their teacher gave them at the start of the project. First the students typed the final draft of the story into Word, and changed the language to spell-check their document. Later, the students copied and pasted their text into an eight page booklet template that they configured in Indesign. The students created a title page, page borders, body pages with their text and graphics, a drop cap, and a final page with their name and the date published.

Persuasive Essays and Word

The 8th grade National Spanish students used Word 2008 to write an essay. They became familiar with the program's new interface by adding a cover page, footnotes and graphics to their essay. They also reviewed how to change the language to Spanish and use the Spanish dictionary and spell-checker. This assignment took one class period to complete.

Earthquake Resistant Buildings and Sketchup

The 7th grade Science students used Google Sketchup to create a model of an earthquake resistant building. They used various tools to create cross braces, flexible water pipes, and base isolators. They also learned how to configure the mouse so that they could zoom in and out, pan and orbit around their model with different mouse gestures.

Sports Research, Good Health and Google Docs

Some of the 6th Grade Health students did research on the internet about a sport that they wanted to present to the class. As they looked for information, they created a slide presentation in their Google Docs account. This assignment took two class periods.

Chemical Reaction Lab with Google Docs and Excel

The 6th and 8th grade students worked together on a lab that examined how to speed up chemical reactions. Students worked in teams and wrote up their lab report drafts in Google Docs, which they were able to share and edit with their team members. During the actual lab, team members shared the responsibilities of recording their experimental data in Excel and revising the final draft of the lab report in Word. This project used the mobile lab for two days.

Religion vs. Science in Word 2008

The 8th grade Social Studies students have spent two class periods taking notes from teacher prepared documents concerning historical conflicts between religion and science. Their ultimate goal is to write an essay about whether science and religion are reconcilable or not. The students accessed these documents from their teacher's public folder.

El Folleto Turístico y Word

The students in the Spanish as a Second Language Level 2 class spent five class periods researching a location where they could go on vacation and then they prepared a travel brochure that invited people to visit the place. In the travel brochure, they included pictures and a map. They also wrote about day trips that could be made in the area, restaurants. lodging and directions on how to arrive. The students also learned how to change languages in Word and how to spell check their work in Spanish.

Bad Advertisements and Photoshop

After spending two classes surveying the different publicity techniques used to influence consumers, the 7th grade students spent two more class periods to create their own ad. They made their advertisement by employing irony to communicate some of the consequences involved in using tobacco or alcohol. Students added layer masks, text and a background layer to create their ad, which they later exported as a jpeg or gif file.

Researching Alcohol and Tobacco with Word and iMovie

The 7th grade students spent three days in the lab researching about the dangers of alcohol and tobacco by completing a webquest for each topic. On the fourth day of the unit, they were given two class periods to create a one to two minute iMovie that focused on one of the key questions that they needed to answer during the webquests. The students had to combine text, graphics and transitions (music was optional) to communicate their response to one of the key questions.

Renaissance and Dreamweaver CS3

The 7th grade Social Studies students created a website that explained the beginnings of the Renaissance. They used a Dreamweaver template, which they duplicated and customized to satisfy the lesson requirements of a thesis statement and three supporting arguments. In the end, students created four different webpages, all with text, graphics and a navigation bar. The navigation bar had rollover buttons and links which connected all the pages to one another. This project took about four visits to the lab to finish.

Angle Bisectors and Geometer's Sketchpad

The 8th grade Geometry students constructed triangles in Geometer's Sketchpad. Then they studied the relationships between the line segments that were created when an angle bisector divided the opposite side of the triangle into two segments. The students calculated proportions and made conjectures about these proportions as the vertices of the triangles were moved. This lesson took one class period.

Covalent Bonds and Flash

The 6th grade Science students used Flash CS3 to create an animation that showed the covalent bonds present in the H₂O molecule. They imported a movie clip with the oxygen atom (minus two electrons) and from there on they used guide layers, graphic symbols and motion tweens to reproduce the two hydrogen protons and the four missing electrons.

Trigonometric Ratios and Geometer's Sketchpad

The 8th grade Geometry students constructed an angle, CAB, and a line perpendicular to ray AB. Then they compared the ratios of certain line segments of the figure. They created a table in which they recorded the changes in the lengths of the line segments, every time they moved a certain point, D, up and down the perpendicular. Later they moved point C, which changed the measure of angle CAB. Later, the students moved point D again, and recorded the changes in a table. They also observed what happened to the different ratios, and from these observations, they wrote conjectures about the ratios.

Superhéroes y Illustrator

In the 6th grade national Spanish class, the students wrote a short character profile for a superhero that they created. Then the students went to the computer lab and made a poster with a logo for their superhero. Later they added information for characteristics that included the superhero's real name, their superhuman powers and their origins. The students worked on this assignment during two class periods.

SSL1 and Word

The students in Spanish as a Second Language 1 (SSL1) created advertisements or posters, and in the process they reinforced their understanding of the verbs: buscar, vender, and comprar.