Class Notes: Lower Elementary

This week, lower elementary classes started the Internet Safety unit.  Students from Beth's, Katie's and Keri's classes watched a video featuring Faux Paw the Techno Cat!  We learned that we should always guard personal information; things like our name, phone number, school, picture, or address should never be posted online or given out to Internet friends.
We will continue our adventures with Faux Paw throughout the month of December.  We will learn how to prevent cyber-bullying, how we can all be good digital citizens, and why we should never download files from unknown sources.  

Fall Festival Photo Project

In the weeks following Fall Festival, Middle School students have been working on multimedia presentations.  Here is a video a Seminar student created using Photo Story, using pictures taken by students at Fall Festival.

Class Notes

October was a busy month in the Computer Lab!  I apologize for the delay in getting a new post up.

This month the classes have been focusing on our Photography project! Students from all classes (Beth's through Seminar) have had a chance to use the cameras, take some great photos, and tell stories using their own pictures.

Here are some of our students' great photos!

Each class will complete a story-and-picture based project related to Fall Festival.  Samples from Beth's, Katie's, and Keri's classes will be displayed at our Fall Open House in November.

Class Notes

It's been a busy week in the computer lab!

• Beth's class watched amazing Animal Diaries from the Australia Zoo! We learned about koalas, turtles, and tigers!  We practiced our mousing skills and hand-eye coordination by helping Blue play hide-and-go-seek with some friendly ghosts on NickJr.com.  
• Katie's and Keri's classes continued learning about peripheral devices: input devices, output devices, and storage devices.  We also played Plants vs. Zombies to practice our mouse skills!  
• Betsy's and Kim's classes started an Online Scavenger Hunt, and learned how to search for answers on the Internet! We also learned about the hardware inside a computer, and even got to touch and feel some motherboards, hard drives, floppy disks, and CPUs!  Today we are continuing our keyboarding lessons, adding 6 keys to our typing repertoire.  
• Middle school classes learned about the hardware inside the computer.  We identified them both on-screen and in a real computer used here at Community School. Middle schoolers had their first Computer Lab quiz - many did very well!  We started an Online Scavenger Hunt to hone our research skills, and discussed the importance of using credible sources. This lesson will continue into next week, when we will discuss verifying information and fact checking.  We will also begin discussions of how to cite our sources.  

Class Notes

As of today I have had class with each class here at Community School at least once.  It was wonderful meeting each and every student, and I appreciate their enthusiasm and hard work!

Here's a quick review of what we did in our first week of classes: 

• Beth's Class learned what the Internet is.  Then we practiced our skills (mousing, following directions) playing games at SesameStreet.org.
• Keri's and Katie's classes played review games, and learned some basic computer terminology (CAPS LOCK, monitor, etc.).
• Kim's and Betsy's classes have had two classes this week.  We did a fun review game (in which the classes won $1 million!) and started keyboarding.  Ask them about their score in Typer Shark (found on Yahoo! Games)! 
• The middle school classes played a fun review game, and started making posters to share their computer know-how with the younger students!  Seminar students will edit and display their posters this week! 

This has been a great first week.  I look forward to many more weeks filled with learning! 

Meet the Teacher

Hi!  I'm Karen, and I'm the new technology teacher here at Community School.  I'm super excited to get to know everybody!  I would like to thank every single teacher and student for giving me a huge, warm welcome this week!

Here  are some topics I'm looking forward to covering this year:

• Proper keyboarding procedure/ergonomics
• What is the Internet and how does it work? 
• What's inside the computer
• Multimedia presentations
• Using the Internet for research
• Communications technology 
• Web 2.0 Tools
• Robotics

Keep checking back here for more updates!