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.