1/20/2014 January 20, 2014The second quarter has come to a close, and due to holidays and weather issues seventh graders will have only two scores making up their technology grade this quarter. The first was our preliminary exploration of infographics in which students found an infographic of interest to them, evaluated it based on a set of criteria, and then shared their findings with the class. We also participated in the Hour of Code activity to inspire students to experiment with coding and consider it as a potential career, or even a high school elective. You can find my post about the activity on our CougarTech 7 blog page. Featured posts for this assignment were Julia, Gianna, Joe, Connor, Paxton, and Magdala. At the conclusion of the coding activity students saved a screen shot of their progress and then we "optimized" the image for use on the web but cropping and re-sizing it. We began the post to write up the activity before Christmas, and some students had it finished before the holiday, but those who did not were asked to have it completed by December 31. Too many students had to be called into the lab, even after January reminders, to finally get the very short post completed. Assignment details for the post are found here. High school is not so far away, and I know of many situations where teachers will not accept a late assignment at all; it is either on time or the grade is a zero. Time to pay more attention to deadlines, especially for assignments that are not labor intensive sch as this one! Tying together our study of infographics and the Millennium Goals earlier this year, and the topic of Africa in social studies class, research is now under way to develop an infographic on an assigned African country, comparing economic and health conditions with other countries and also the country's progress on the Millennium Goals. The first part of the assignment for technology is to create the first 3 slides of a PowerPoint presentation using embedded Excel charts. Details on part one are found here. I am also building a project of my own as we go through the steps so students have a concrete example of what the expectations are. We will be turning these finished slides into jpegs and then into one long infographic. It is a step by step process. You will be amazed with the results! Comments are closed.
|