Welcome back!

Mrs. Allegood will be teaching Middle School Technology this year. Most of you already know her because she is your media specialist and spent time helping us out last year. You can find Mrs. Allegood in the Media Center for any questions or email her at sallegood@mtparanschool.com. Have a great year!

I pray that each of you spends an amazing summer connecting with family and friends! It has been a great year!

7th Grade only - What's inside of a computer?

It's time to take apart computers! First you'll need to learn about what you're going to see. Click on the link below for project instructions and get started.

Instructions for Hardware Project

Google Earth Flight Simulator

Fly a plane in Google Earth! Check out these links to find out how -

1. Use Google Earth Flight Simulator
2. Flying Your Aircraft, including Landing
3. Google Earth Flight Simulator Keyboard Controls

serv·ice  

/ˈsərvis/

Noun

The action of helping or doing work for someone.

On Thursday, 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. How do you think serving others helped you?

Weebly & Excel Fast Food project

I hope everyone had a great spring break! Take a look below to see what we will be doing this week in each grade.

6th grade:  Build a website using education.weebly.com. You will create a simple sitemap to show your site organization and research a topic of your own choice. Websites must include visuals and credit sources where appropriate. We will talk in class about how to use weebly and what exactly is required of your site.

7th & 8th grade: You will be working in Excel this week creating a project to compare food from different fast food restaurants. Click here for instructions.

Spring Break!

Praying for a safe, fun, and restful break for all! Enjoy!

Introduce Yourself

Today we're going to work on the Introduce Yourself project. This one is very simple - just follow the directions.

Click here for Introduce Yourself instructions

We will spend the second half of the week playing geoguessr.com in 6th grade and 7th grade due to Iowa testing, and 8th grade will be working in Scratch and/or Gamemaker. 

These are the current GeoGuessr records for this quarter. See if you can beat them!

Highest score for one round: 16,622 pts
Closest for one location: .015 km, 6478 pts
Lowest score for one location: 19 pts

Create a speaking character and add your voice or type in text and choose from many different character voices using Voki.com. This can be a fun alternative to conventional presentation projects.

Try this out! Create your own Flappy Bird game - http://learn.code.org/s/6/level/148 

Photoshop, Hardware, and Digital Citizenship

Next week marks the end of 3rd quarter. In 6th grade, we are working in Photoshop and will spend the remainder of the week on Adobe Fireworks and Moviemaker. 7th grade is in the middle of our hardware unit where they learn about the inside of the computer and will be taking apart computers Wednesday and Thursday of this week. 8th grade did a great job last week displaying their technology projects in conjunction with their World War II Fair projects. This week we'll concentrate on Digital Citizenship and typing.

Parents - check out commonsensemedia.org for some great information to help protect your kids!

Adding audio to an online project

If you would like to include an audio file to your online project, try out soundcloud.com. Sound Cloud allows you to upload an audio file and then gives you an embed code to use on your website. It works great with both weebly (use the custom HTML element) and blogger. Another option is to directly upload your audio into a padlet.com site. You upload it just like any other file and it will play right on your padlet.

 

 

Google Tricks padlet

Click on the link below for a padlet of Google "tricks" made by a student. If you click on a link and it shows a blank screen, click on the word "Source" in the bottom right corner.

Google Tricks padlet

Padlet.com provides a fun project option. You "build a wall" by embedding links, images, web pages, documents, etc. on your wall. Try it out!

Go to padlet.com

Welcome Back!

I hope everyone had a fun break and enjoyed the snow. We will continue this week with the projects we left off with on Tuesday.

6th grade: weebly websites
7th grade: Scratch
8th grade: We're going to look at a new site called Thinglink today.

Excel and Introduce Yourself projects

6th grade: Please complete the Introduce Yourself project and email it to me. Click here for the instructions.

7th & 8th grade: Please work on the Fast Food Excel project. Click here for instructions.

Shooting Star Effect in Powerpoint and View Pure

We've been playing around with some advanced features in PowerPoint in the 7th and 8th grade classes using a video tutorial on youtube. Before I post the link, I also wanted to tell you about a great tool that allows you to watch youtube videos without all of the ads and sidebar materials - viewpure.com. You simply copy the video URL (web address) and paste it in at viewpure.com. You will then get a new viewpure URL, which you can use to watch the video in it's "pure" form.

Click here for the Shooting Star Effect in Powerpoint video tutorial

Computer basics and MS Office

This week we will continue with a few more computer basics and delve more into Microsoft Office applications. Check back later in the week for more specific project instructions. 

Welcome Back!

I hope that Christmas break was fun and restful for all of you. I am excited to get the 3rd quarter started. This week we will concentrate on the basics - email, file management, basic computer troubleshooting - in all of my classes.