Today Mrs. S. led the class in an Internet Safety activity.  In groups, students created Internet Safety charts.  When the students were finished the students and Mrs. S. combined all the group charts to create one class chart.  I am pasting the contents of the chart here as well as posting a PDF file of the chart.

Internet Safety

Things We Should Do:

• Always ask a parent to use the computer.
• Say nice things to people using the same website.
• Once we read something bad on the computer tell a parent.
• Keep user names and passwords secret.
• Ask your parents to make an online accounts for you.
• If someone sends you a bad message don’t reply.
• Make sure you tell your parents about an email in case there are virus.
• Tell parent if someone wrote something bad.
• Don’t write bad things on other people’s accounts.
• Log off when finished.
• Ask a parent before you go online.
• Ask mom or dad before singing up for something.
• Be polite to others’ online.
• Tell your parent if someone wrote something bad.

Things We Shouldn’t Do:

• Don’t use other people’s accounts.
• Don’t go to “over rated” website- ones that aren’t for kids.
• Don’t give your user name and password.
• Don’t ask your parents to sign up for an unknown account. (Find out what the account is for)
• Buy something without telling parents.
• Do not give out personal information about yourself on the internet.
• Don’t watch bad things on the internet.
• Don’t give out your user names and passwords for your accounts.
• Don’t hack on an account
• Don’t send bad stuff or viruses to other people.
• Don’t log in someone else’s account
• Don’t say bad words online.
• Don’t write email addresses with a bad  word.
• Don’t type mean things on other peoples websites.
• Don’t make your own email account without permission.

This is an excerpt of Room 18′s first Skype Chat. We Skyped with a young woman who is finishing up her teaching program at the University of Regina, Canada. We chatted with our guest for about 30 minutes. It was great fun! I have been wanting to do this with my students for a while and now that our network has been upgraded (kind of), I gave it a try. For the most part, it worked well.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Students of room 18,

I was glad I had an opportunity to visit your class a couple of weeks ago and share my experience with Scratch and computer programming. All of you accomplished a lot in just a couple of hours. You surprised me with the broad range of projects that you elected to do. I think you can begin to imagine the limitless potential of computer programming. You should spend some time browsing the programs on the scratch website and see how they were written. One of the big attractions of Scratch, aside, from its simplicity, is the collaborative ecosystem that has been developed. You can learn from the scripts others have developed, just as they can learn from you.

I was really overwhelmed by you letters of appreciation. I am pleased to hear that some of you have already created your own scratch accounts. I hope you will upload projects that you create on your own. Add me as a friend on the scratch website and I will look at them and review them. I hope you all have a great summer.

Keep on scratching!

Mr. Becker

Here is the web-page that I created for my presentation.

http://www.geocities.com/barrybecker4/scratch_intro.html

A big thank you to Mr. Becker for working with our class all day!  Mr. Becker joined our class to introduce students to computer programming using MIT’s free software Scratch.

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create and share Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.

I encourage all students to download the Scratch program, create some games or programs, and then post them to our online gallery.

This link will take you to the page Mr. Becker created for our class.  

Here is a video about Scratch:
 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Learn more about Scratch and how to use it here.

I look forward to seeing everyone’s projects!  I will try to post some pictures and videos this weekend.

I discovered this video recently and thought it was a humorous look at how students (right or wrong) view textbooks.  I like how the student in this video referred to his textbook as a “foreign tool”.  

In class this year, we are learning about the different parts of a textbook: index, table of contents, glossary. We are also learning about different types of resource books: Dictionary, Encyclopedia, Almanac, Atlas, Thesaurus.  

In addition, we are learning about text features: headings, sub-headings, captions, tables, diagrams, etc.  These are all important things to understand about non-fiction books and knowing these features and parts helps us become better readers and researchers.  

At the same time, it is important to understand (as adults) the world has changed and is continuing to change rapidly. Students are often much more comfortable using online resources and will often turn to these before a textbook or other text reference book.  I think it is important that students know how to navigate both traditional text resources and online resources effectively and safely.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I am encouraging the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) whenever possible.  

If you don’t have a copy of Microsoft Office no problem, Open Office is a wonderful, powerful free office suite available for Windows, Linux or Mac.  I have also listed links for Mac and PC FOSS.  If you have a need, there is probably a great FOSS application available.  

Check this list out and let me know what you think in the comments area!

Open Office

OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-sourceoffice software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on allcommon computers. It stores all your data in aninternational open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of chargefor any purpose. 

http://www.openoffice.org/

Free and FOSS software for Macs

• http://www.opensourcemac.org/
• http://www.freesmug.org/

Free and FOSS software for Windows

• http://www.theopendisc.com/
• http://www.djohnson.info/freeopen-source-software-for-windows/

This week and last week we have been spending time in class and during homework time learning about living things.  This science reading is in preparation for some projects the students will be doing in the upcoming weeks.  Our science series has some additional resources, games, and activities online.  I’m sure these are interesting things to check out at home!  Please leave a comment and let me know what you think about the online resources!

The Free, Cross-Platform Sound Editor

Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

We will be using Audacity this year because its easy to use and we can use it at school and at home for free!

If you need some extra help, check out these Tutorials.