Topics in SSL, Word and Inspiration

The SSL students used Word or Inspiration to complete their semester assessment, which was a writing assignment appropriate to the SSL level of their class. Some students had to write a biographical piece about someone in their family, and others had to write about an interview that they made. This lesson took three class periods to complete.

Reformation and Word

All the 7th Grade Social Studies students used the publishing layout in Word to create a newspaper report of some of the historical events that took place during the Reformation. The lesson took four class periods to complete.

Mitosis and Powerpoint

The 7th Grade Science students made a seven slide presentation of the different stages of cell mitosis. They used various drawing tools to create the slides. This project took five class periods to complete.

Body Systems and Dreamweaver

All the 7th Grade Science students used Fireworks and Dreamweaver to create a four page website that gave information about a human body system that they researched. This lesson took five class periods to complete.

Persuasive Speeches and Garage Band

Some of the 7th Grade Language Arts students wrote a draft of a persuasive speech. Then they polished that draft and recorded it in Garage Band. Finally they exported their persuasive speech as a podcast and dropped the file in their teacher's drop box. This lesson took three class periods to complete.

Osmosis Lab, Word and Excel

The 7th Grade Science students used Word and Excel to write up a lab they did in class about osmosis. This lesson took two class periods to complete.

Literary Terms and Premiere Pro

The 7th Grade National Spanish students had to identify various literary terms in the context of poems that they were reading in class. Once they had identified the terms, they made a movie where they used different styles to highlight the terms in the poem. Later, the students made the text scroll from bottom to top, added graphics and music. Then they exported the movie and dropped the finished product into their teacher's drop box. This project took three class periods to complete.

Earthquake Research and Filemaker

The 7th Grade Science students used Filemaker and the USGS site to examine earthquake activity around the world. First the students created a data base with Filemaker and then they imported a CSV file with almost 60,000 earthquakes that have been recorded since the 1970's. Later, they used Filemaker to sort and search the data, looking for patterns with the longitude, latitude, magnitude and depth. The lesson took four class periods to complete.

Five Pillars and Powerpoint

The 7th Grade Social Studies students used a webquest to research about the Five Pillars of the Muslim religion. Once they gathered the information, they created a Powerpoint which summarized their learning. This lesson took four class periods to finish.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.