Innovation in the Age of Discovery

The 8th grade Social Studies students created an iMovie commercial that explained why a certain invention was better than what had existed before. The students had to promote either a galleon over a caravel or a musket over an arquebus. First, the students created an Inspiration diagram to outline the characteristics of the items that they were comparing. Next, they created a storyboard for their commercial in Google Docs. Finally, the students used their storyboards to create the iMovie, which had to be approximately 70 seconds long and contain two audio tracks. This lesson took nine class periods to complete.

Los Cretinos y Powerpoint

The SSL 1 class created powerpoint presentations about the short story The Twits or Los Cretinos in Spanish. The students accessed an image bank from a shared folder on the server. This lesson took two class periods to complete.

The Coordinate Plane, Functions and Geometer's Sketchpad

The 6th grade Math students used the Geometer's Sketchpad software to construct the four quadrants of the coordinate plane, in which they plotted several points. In a second document, the students plotted two linear functions, and then placed points on those functions. Next, the students moved the points up and down the lines and checked to see how the X and the Y coordinates of the points changed in relation to each other. From these observations, the students drew conclusions about the functions.