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.

Exoplanets, Excel and Filemaker Pro

The 6th grade Science students created a database, into which they imported information about exoplanets that they accessed from an online database. The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia The students did various sorts and multiple criteria finds in order to analyze which exoplanets were most similar to the Earth. Later on, they went to another online database Catalog of Nearby Exoplanets and downloaded a text file that they cleaned up and then imported into Filemaker. With this data, the students compared the mass of each exoplanet with the amount of wobble its star exhibited and from that, they were able to draw conclusions about the relationship between these two factors. This lesson took five class periods to complete.

Research with Online Databases and Google Docs

The 8th grade Science students accessed the EBSCO online database in order to gather information for their presentation on global warming. They also looked for information in Newsbank and SIRS. Each group created a bibliography document that they shared in Google Docs. The students also used Google Docs to take notes and collect images during their research. This lesson took four class periods to finish.

Probability and Excel

The 6th grade Math students used the randbetween function in Excel to generate different sample sizes of random numbers from one to three. They used conditional formatting to get an idea of the percentages of each number. In addition, they used the countif function to tabulate the frequency of each number and then graphed the breakdown in a pie graph. The students were able to compare the graphs and see that as their sample size increased the probability that a certain number would be chosen got closer and closer to 33.3%.

Individual Geometric Designs and Sketchup

The 6th grade Pre-Algebra students used Sketchup to create a 3D scene from a notebook draft of a 2D scene. The scene needed to have 20 different geometric figures, such as hexagons, obtuse angles, parallel lines, etc. The students had to label the different geometric figures in their 3D scene. Once they finished, the students created different scenes and exported their work as a movie. This assignment took four class periods to complete.