Spring Tech News!
Spring is here and the third trimester is upon us. The next several weeks will include a variety of new lessons and review of the skills covered in technology this academic year. Below are grade level descriptions of what we will be working on:
Fourth grade is currently shopping around for their dream rooms. They have been going online to find products, prices and pictures of items they would put in their dream room and entering the information into an Excel spreadsheet. Upon completion of the “shopping trip”, students will learn to insert addition and multiplication functions to calculate the prices of items with a quantity of more than one, the sub-total of all the items, sales tax and a grand total of their items. Students will then create a graph to represent their dream room spending. Following the Excel unit students will begin work on a travel Newsletter using Microsoft’s Publisher. Mrs. Shaw’s class will research and create newsletters about an assigned state in conjunction with their core classroom studies. Mr. Ownsworth’s class will select travel destinations. The final technology project of the year will be an original storybook created in PowerPoint and presented to the student’s Pre-K/Jr. K buddies as slideshows and hard copies.
Fifth grade will continue work on family history newsletters for the next several weeks. Students are gathering information through interviews and writing up articles in MS Word, which they copy, paste and format into a MS Publisher newsletter template. The newsletters will also include family pictures that students will crop in Adobe Photoshop Elements and a family tree created with Inspiration. Concurrently, students will soon begin work on a PowerPoint slideshow based on their “Decades” history unit. The year will end with some special projects created with Adobe Photoshop, Google’s Sketch-up and Pivot Animation.
Sixth grade is making use of technology classes to complete their Greek god and goddesses reports for English and creating animated backgrounds for their oral presentations using PowerPoint. Upon completion of these projects students will be introduced to HTML and webpage design through an exploration of source code and Publisher. The year will end with student-designed websites based on the medieval characters they will research during their history class.
Seventh grade will complete an Excel unit during the first several weeks of the trimester based on how they spend their time. Students collected data, based on their busy schedules, which they will enter into a spreadsheet along with functions to calculate personal totals for each activity and the percent of time spent on each activity. Students will then compare information, calculate class percentages and represent those percentages in a graph representing how they spent their time for one week. Following this unit students will explore object oriented programming with the help of “Alice” a fun animation program created by students at Carnegie Mellon University. (Read more here! http://www.alice.org/index.php?page=what_is_alice/what_is_alice )
Eighth grade covered a lot of tech ground this year. For their third trimester they will revisit JavaScript to learn about the “if” statement and “for “ and “while” statements to create fun and simple computer games. Students will also help videotape and edit interviews and other video segments for their 8th grade video.
Please contact me with your questions and comments at Vicki.knickerbocker@lcds.org
