The laptop cart again was buzzing with activity. Mr. Devore, Ms. White, Ms. Nieto/Gordon and Ms. Randi used the laptops for various projects. One project that was particularly exciting is a digital storytelling project that I have been working on with Ms. Nieto. For this project, students wrote narrative stories and then the stories were made to "come live" with the help of scanned pictures and narration. Several problems were addressed this week including a backspace key that had fallen off one of the laptop keyboards, a glitch that prevented one of the batteries from charging, a bad video card also a laptop that was re-imaged. Additionally, there was a teacher laptop on which the hard drive failed. A network printing problem is plaguing the computer lab. The problem is still being investigated.
Grade 3: Students returned to the computer lab after 2 busy weeks of testing. Students were introduced to an online piano (http://numbera.com/musictheory/piano.aspx) on which they could play music while at the same time practice their typing. Students also began typing a friendly letter.
Grade 4: Students practiced their typing using the Sponge Bob Typing software. The break from the MicroType Pro typing software was welcomed by the students.
Grade 5: Students used Microsoft Excel to create graphs for their science fair projects. Students also performed an online frog dissection in preparation for their science class frog dissection lab. The online frog dissection was found at http://www.froguts.com/flash_content/index.html.
