Heights Technology Blog

Today you will research the cultural elements of the Maya, Incas, and Aztecs. Use the links at the Heights Website to gather information about your particular culture and cultural universal. Over the next couple of weeks you will create 2-3 slides with the information, which will be combined with other members of your group to form a comprehensive slideshow of each of the civilizations. For the first slide of your show, create a Wordle with words that represent your civilization. Below is a sample of one culture and one cultural universal.

Today you will take your Everyday Math data from the Grab-It Gauge Reaction Time experiment and put the results into an Excel worksheet. You will learn how to format the cells in the spreadsheet changing size, number type, and borders. Next create a bar graph from the data, formatting the titles, and legend. Remove the plot area of the graph and change the color of the bars.

The Grade 5 building block of character focuses on citizenship, and citizenship also applies to online interactions. Today you will watch movie clips from Brainpop concerning three important topics in digital citizenship: digital etiquette, cyberbullying, and copyright. After watching the movies, you will use Etherpad to collaborate online with members of your group to answer questions about the movie. Click on the picture below to take you to the movie clip. Visit my eboard to learn how to enter the collaborative writing environment.

Today you will key in your writing piece on your hopes and dreams for the coming school year in Microsoft Word. We will review how to use header and footer, tabs, alignment and spacing, first line indent and spelling and grammar check. You will also take a picture of yourself in Photobooth to insert into your finished writing piece.

Open House is right around the corner, so you will create a pretend magazine cover for your parents featuring a student of the year- you! I will bring the digital cameras to your classroom where you and your partner will take pictures of each other with the props you have chosen for your cover. During our next class session we will head to the lab and use the Magazine Cover Maker from BigHuge Labs to create the final product.

Thanks to Kevin Jarrett for this cool idea!

Welcome back to the Computer Lab. Today we will assign seats, review the rules of the lab, make sure everyone can log in, and review the dock and the Heights Technology Blog. We will also learn how to create a folder to store all of last year’s documents.