Advisory Class and Photoshop

Some of the 6th Grade Advisory students used Photoshop to edit advertisements that entice young people to smoke or drink. The students changed the ads so that they showed what really happens to a person who smokes or drinks in excess. This lesson took about four class periods to complete.

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.

Menu Masters

The House Program presented a technology problem as part of its end of semester activity. The problem focused on different aspects of communication. A team of students from each house had to prepare two menus, one in poster form and another in brochure form, informing potential customers about the food for sale. Additionally, the team had to send one of its members to observe all the other activities occurring that day and publish a report in a movie format.

Bullying Projects

For the first two weeks of November (during the 6th grade trips) the 6th grade students who were not in Lagunillas worked on a seven day project that addressed the issue of bullying. During the first two days of the project, they did collaborative research in Google Docs, gathering information from teacher-approved web sites. Once they had information that addressed their research question, the students had three different choices for presenting their solutions: a poster made in Photoshop, a slideshow presentation made in Google Docs, or a podcast made in Garageband.

One of the research templates that students worked on collaboratively when preparing for their presentations.

One of the Bullying posters made in Photoshop.


This is a slide from a presentation prepared collaboratively by one of the student groups in Google Docs, and then downloaded as a ppt document.

A sample podcast about bullying made in Garageband.

Improving Your Academic Performance

During the week that the 8th Grade students were not in Los Pellines, they worked on a project from the Advisory curriculum. This project examined a survey that the students took and asked them to research an area that they needed to improve in order to do better in school. Once the students had gathered enough information, they created a Powerpoint presentation which they later shared with their classmates.