Merry Christmas!

With only one week left in the semester, and just a couple of days for some of you, we will review and go over anything you need this week. Enjoy your last week of the semester and especially enjoy your time with family and friends this holiday season.

Students learned about this week's Google Doodle about Grace Hopper and created padlet.com walls about her. It was eye-opening to learn what this woman accomplished!

Typing

This week, all classes will work on typing skills. Go to typingweb.com and login with the information I gave you in class. Remember that we care about doing it correctly, not about speed.

Moviemaker and Hardware

This week 6th grade will finish up Google Earth Tours and begin learning Moviemaker. 7th grade will be taking apart computers and also spending some time in Moviemaker. 8th grade will be filming and editing commercials, also using Moviemaker.

Well, it's cold in Atlanta today, but at least we're warmer than these researchers from the Swedish icebreaker Oden! This week we will continue to roll along in each class. 

6th grade: Google Earth Tours of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World and of US/Canada important places.

7th grade: Learning what is on the inside of a computer in preparation for taking a real one apart.

8th grade: Google drive and padlet.com. Students have already worked collaboratively to create a checkers game in the Google Drawing app.

November 6-8

Introduce Yourself

Today you will being working on your Introduce Yourself project in Microsoft Word. Click here for instructions. This is due by end of class tomorrow! Feel free to ask if you have any questions.

Fall Break

This week we will introduce and review MPCS email, including how to create a signature and understanding the appropriateness of what you send. We will also create a contact group for your class and make sure you know how to get into your email from home.

It's a short week with Fall Break. Enjoy your time off and we'll get going on some larger projects next week!

Welcome - Quarter 2 students!

Welcome to Technology! We will begin this week with review/introduction of email and computers basics, along with some trouble shooting tips, and then each class will begin moving into their separate projects.

End of Quarter

It has been a great quarter of learning and exploring everything from email to moviemaker and programming in scratch, and everything in between. Students can feel free to come by with any questions at anytime even after they leave my class.

Here's what is happening in class this week:

6th Grade - 
Students are filming, editing, and producing short movies using the Weber Media Center laptops and Windows Moviemaker for editing 

7th Grade - 
We will be spending some time on typing and also begin research on a technology. Students must have their chosen technology approved and will create a website teaching others about the technology. 
Click here for project requirements

8th Grade - 
Students will be learning about Google Drive and what is available to them with their google login. Students who already have a gmail account will use their own and all others will be able to use a generic account that I have created for the class.

*Parents FYI - Google logins provide not only a gmail account, but access to Google Drive (cloud storage and content creation and collaboration), blogger account for website development, and youtube account.

Inside of a Computer

Seventh Graders - watch this!

Creating a Simple Google Earth Tour

Sixth grade will be starting work on Google Earth Tours soon. Take a moment to look at this cool information about the Streetview feature and how the Streetview camera works. 

Click here to learn more about Streetview

Google Streetview Car driving around in my neighborhood

Websites, Scratch & Inventors

6th Grade:

This week we will complete our personal websites and begin working on Google Earth Tours.

7th Grade:

We will continue with Scratch programs this week. If you have not posted a completed Scratch project to my Scratch gallery, please let me know.

8th Grade:

Inventors! We have completed brochures and everyone should now be working on their Inventor paper in MLA format.

Resource for MLA: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/

August 20th

Each grade will be moving on to a new project this week. Here is a recap of what we've done so far.

6th grade:

Completed Introduce Yourself and Ribbon Hero 2. 

Today we worked on using school email.

7th grade:

Completed Introduce Yourself and personal choice websites.

8th grade:

Completed Introduce Yourself projects, personal choice websites, and 2 days of typing practice on typingweb.com. 

Podcasts

We are going to help out Mrs. Fogg with creating a podcast. Please review the link below and send me more information as you find it.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/create-your-own-podcast-what-you-need-to-know-to-be-a-podcaster

Introduce Yourself

Today we will take a closer look at our computer lab and start on the Introduce Yourself paper. All students, 6th-8th, will be answering the questions asked on the Introduce Yourself document. 

For those who have had my class before, go ahead and complete the document anyway as some things may have changed for you since the last time you answered the questions. Click on the link below for instructions and then email me your completed Word document when you are finished. My e-mail is rterry@mtparanschool.com, or Randi Terry in the MPCS email directory.

Introduce Yourself instructions

Back to School!

Ok, so that Voki isn't the most exciting, but it is an example of the kind of thing you can expect to try out in technology class. We will be covering some of the fundamentals you will need for your academic classes and also some things that might be a little more fun and challenging. This year will be a great one and I can't wait to see you all.

Mrs. Terry

Summer Fun!

School is out for the summer! Here are some fun ideas:

• Video your summer vacation and create a movie in Moviemaker or iMovie. Click here to download Moviemaker for Windows. iMovie is available on your Mac or as an app for the iTouch, iPad or iPhone.
• Set up a blog on education.weebly.com to journal your summer fun. Don't forget that you can add photos and videos if you have them.
• Create a Google Earth Tour of your family vacation. Download Google Earth and check out this page to learn how.
• Try out some photography apps on your iTouch, iPad or iPhone. Go to the App Store and search for photography. There are some free fun ones out there!
• And finally...work on your typing skills at typingweb.com. Not exactly fun, but having good typing skills will allow you to spend a lot less time typing the many papers you will need to write in your academic future! Set some time aside each day to work on this skill this summer.

Have a great time this summer and I'll see everyone in August. Feel free to stop by the Weber Media Center and show me any summer projects when school starts!

Google Earth Easter Eggs

When someone refers to an "Easter egg" in a software program, they are talking about an intentional hidden message, inside joke, or feature in a work, such as a picture, inserted into the software. Here are a few Google Earth Easter Eggs to have fun with:

Giant Bunny 

1.Open Google Earth Search Bar. 

2.Copy 44°14'39.35"N 7°46'11.53"E. 

3.Paste coordinates in Search Bar. 

4.Search 

5.See The Epic Bunny!

Firefox Logo

This is another egg I found in Google Earth: 

1. First, open Google Earth 

2. Copy and paste this in the "Fly to" box: 45° 7'25.87"N 123° 6'48.97"W 

3. Zoom in until you see a Firefox logo. 

4. Enjoy!

Google Headquarters Swimming Pool

1. Open Google Earth and in the search bar type the coordinates: 37 25'20.42" N 122 05'06.07" W 

2. It will take you to the google headquarters in california 

3. Zooming in will enable you to see a hidden image in their swimming pool

Last week of school

It has been a great quarter and summer is within reach. With only a few days left next week, we will wrap up any unfinished projects and review basic skills.

Seventh graders are finishing up their Scratch projects. You can view some of them online on my Scratch student gallery by clicking here. Sixth graders are finishing up their technology research projects. After a brainstorm, each student chose a topic to research and then created a website about their technology. I always learn a lot from this project!

Typing, Glogs and Hardware

All students are now set up with an account on typingweb.com and are practicing every morning. Remember to use correct finger placement. I encourage everyone to continue working on typing at home and over the summer. 

7th Grade - This week we will take apart computers and see what is inside, and possibly start on Scratch.

6th Grade - This week we will create online posters for your business project using glogster.com, and may also begin some technology research.

Adobe Fireworks Animated Gif Tutorial

How do I animate a graphic?

Service Day 2013

serv·ice  

/ˈsərvis/

Noun

The action of helping or doing work for someone.

Today we're going to put the brakes on our other projects and spend some time remembering Service Day. Go to weebly.com, sign in, and start a new website. This one will be simply one page and all you will need to do is drop in the blog widget.

The assignment is to write a blog entry answering the questions below. This should be written in paragraph form - not as if you are answering questions, but as if you are writing to tell something!

1. Provide an example of Jesus serving others, provide the bible verse(s) if you know them (not required), and tell the story in your own words.
2. Tell where you went for Service Day and the work you did, including why it was needed.
3. Choose at least one person who spoke to you during the day – high school devotional leader, person representing the place you served, or even someone in your group – who said something you will remember, had an impact on you, or simply made you think more about the work you were doing. Tell what they said and why it was important to you or what it made you think about.
4. It is fairly easy to see how service helps the people being served, but how do you think serving helped you?

We have now completed our Google Earth Tour of the the Seven Natural Wonders of the World and are also nearly finished with video editing in Microsoft MovieMaker. Here's a pic of the Google Maps Streetview car I encountered in my neighborhood. Very fun and cool. I wonder how it works???

3D Printing TED Talk

NASA Johnson Style (Gangnam Style Parody)

Finishing Weebly Websites

Websites should be finished by the end of class Wednesday. Of course, you may continue to work on the site as the quarter progresses when you have time or with permission, but the minimum requirements for the project should be met by the end of class on Wednesday. If you finish before the end of class on Wednesday, take the time to look over your site for spelling and grammar errors, and to make sure you have met the requirements (see post below).

Once you have checked your site thoroughly and are satisfied, you can try out the critical thinking games on the media center website. After that, you can work on anything from my site. You may want to consider looking at Video Editing, Scratch, or trying out typingweb.com or nitrotype.com.

I am very excited about the progress being made by most students on their websites! Students are creating websites using weebly.com. Websites must have a minimum of 4 pages, in addition to the home page, and contain text, photos and video. The website topic can be anything as long as it is appropriate for school. 

Photoshop

As you become more comfortable with Photoshop, take a look at these tutorials and pick one to try out. Be patient and keep in mind that some of these may be difficult for you. That is ok! Just keep working with it.

50 Great Photoshop Tutorials for Clever Beginners

We will continue working in Ribbon Hero today and tomorrow. Ribbon Hero is a game that was created by Microsoft to make learning Office a little more fun. Go to Ribbonhero.com to download.

Introduce Yourself

Today you will work on your Introduce Yourself project. Click here for the instructions. Be sure to follow the directions and answer all 18 questions. You can print the instructions if it will help you.

Welcome to Technology!

Gamemaker Pacman

Some of the students have been trying out Gamemaker and we have two games ready to be tried out. 

• Grayson created this pacman game. Click to download and play. Use the arrow keys to capture the yellow stars. Stay away from the moving characters.
• Tillman created this hockey game. Click to download and play. This is a two-player game. Player one uses the keys W = up, A = left, D = right, S = down. Player 2 uses the arrow keys. Try to get the puck into the orange goal.

Sixth grade students will create a Google earth tour of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World this week. Please use Gale Student Resources to find the Seven Natural Wonders. For instructions on creating your tour, click here.

Seventh grade students will begin work in Scratch. For more information on this free programming tool created at MIT, go to scratch.mit.edu.

Moviemaker projects should be finished by now and we are moving on to the technology research project. If you have not gotten my approval on your topic, or want to change your topic, now is the time. I will be using a rubric to grade this project. 

Click here for project guidelines
Click here to view the rubric.

MPCS Critical Thinking

Take a look at these critical thinking games posted on the MPCS Media Center website:

https://sites.google.com/site/mpcsmediacenter/critical-thinking

Powerpoint Animations

If you are finished with your Moviemaker project, you can either type or work on making an animation in Powerpoint. Take a look at this video for some ideas:

http://viewpure.com/02A_-3ZwE6w

Typingweb.com

Students in 6th grade should be finishing up with their Photoshop projects today. For those of you who are already finished, I'd like you to try out typingweb.com. I have set each of you up with an account and we will go over it in class. Go to typingweb.com and click on student login at the top of the page.

Students in 7th Grade will begin filming their President's movie today.

Website Development

This week we wrapped up our work on websites. Students created websites using weebly.com. This is a departure from my usual use of wordpress.com for this assignment. Weebly proved to be extremely user friendly, requiring very little instruction to get a real website up and running with plenty of bells and whistles. A few kids would have liked a little more freedom in their layout and design options, but overall, this is a great tool for students to build a website. You can add pictures, videos, documents, and more. This assignment gives students the freedom to create a website on any topic they would like, so websites range from sports to cooking to science. Great work everyone! 

Students are currently working through the game Ribbon Hero, created by Microsoft. Ribbon Hero is a game that helps you learn to use Microsoft Office products and is available online for anyone to use. You can download it for free here!

Your first assignment is to complete the Introduce Yourself project in Microsoft Word. Please follow the directions provided and email me your finished document. 

Click here for instructions.

Welcome to class!

Welcome to Middle School Technology! This quarter we will be sure to cover the basics you'll need to succeed throughout your academic career, and also explore different areas like website development and video editing. Use our class tagline - Explore. Experiment. Excel..., as your guide for class. Do not be afraid to make mistakes! If there is anything that you are interested in learning, I will do my best to help you explore - just ask!  

This week you will complete your first assignment, Introduce Yourself. Please feel free to e-mail me at anytime with questions and suggestions.