Technology News: October 2013

It has been a great start to the year in 2/3 technology so far! In our first session, we started with the question, “What is technology?” Students learned about our iPad cart, and used the iPads to do a video recording of each other answering that question.

 

We’ve also done some more work towards building an understanding of what technology is by doing a drawing with pencil & paper, then doing the same drawing with a computer program. This allows us to compare & contrast between the two sets of tools and experiences.

 

4/5 Technology

4/5 Technology has seen our students growing and learning about the various types of technology we use here at Honey Creek. The 4/5 classes have started using a service called ClassDojo, which is a system for keeping track of students’ behavior and participation. Students got a chance to see it in action, and created their own logins and avatars. It was a lot of fun!

Our 4/5 students have also been getting up to speed with their Google Apps accounts, which allow them to use Google Drive and other services. They’ll be using these throughout their work in 4/5s during this year.

We’ll be starting our first major project in the next few weeks after doing a quick overview of using iMovie on the iPads, which makes for an extremely useful and easy way to shoot and edit video on the fly.

Middle School Technology

The Middle School technology classes jump straight into their first major project for the year in week 1. Each student is creating their own video diary based on their experience at Camp Tamarack (or, for those who did not attend camp, based on another memorable experience). This project is done in conjunction with the autobiographical/narrative writing unit in Language Arts, since there are major themes that overlap.

During the first week of class, students learned about the project and did a quick engineering design activity. While we were at camp, we shot a total of 2,143 photos and videos, the majority of which were taken by the students!

Each student is now using Google Drive and iMovie to sort, organize and edit these video clips and photos into a cohesive narrative describing their experience. We’ll be working on this for the next month or so.

MS Technology Elective – Web Design

The Middle School technology elective for Semester 1 is Web Design. Students enrolled in this elective will be learning the basics of designing and programming a Web site.  So far, we’ve started learning HTML and CSS, and students will be continuing to grow these skills as we progress further.