Billings Beta

This Saturday (May 17^th from 11-1) the City of Seattle is having a free open house for its new Emergency Operations Center located at 4^th and Washington. This is a great opportunity to see all of the technology our City uses in emergencies to help keep people informed, safe and healthy.

I got to go on a super sneak preview on Tuesday night as part of the Citizens’ Telecommunications and Technology Advisory Board. Here is a photo panorama taken with my cell phone of the EOC main floor.

They have biometric identification scanners that control security!

They have lots of flat screen televisions!

They have lots of cameras and a sophisticated monitoring system!

They actually let me control the entire facility!

6th graders are studying architecture in Science class with Tom. Their big project is to build a dream bedroom out of cardboard, wood and other materials.

For the next few weeks in tech we’ll be mirroring this project, using Google SketchUp - a free 3-D modeling program. Finished products will be posted on the projects page and will be displayed next to their real-world counterparts at the Arts Festival in June.

During this year’s design week, one group studied the theme of “cycles” by looking at product cycles. As a part of their exploration, this group examined consumer cycles and the need for the newest, fanciest new products. This often has a big effect on our environment, especially when it comes to electronic devices like cell phones, computer, printers and anything made of computer chips and plastic.

8th grade student Michael created a short video game that illustrates this problem.

Special thanks to artist Chris Jordan for permission to use his incredible photo of discarded cell phones.

For more information, check out the EPA’s “cell phone life cycle poster.”

A busy lab day for the 6th grade!  Many topics were covered in a short period.

Boolify.org - this site is a visual Boolean search engine that looks cool but doesn’t do anything we can’t do using our Boolean operators in a regular search engine.

Homework - in middle school, homework is not optional.  Teachers assign homework to reinforce concepts, look for areas where additional support is necessary, to get boring stuff out of the way so class time can be used to learn and interact and grow.  Not Optional.

Typing - in general, this is the most successful typing term yet.  Almost everyone is keeping up with assignments and, surprisingly, everyone practicing regularly is getting better at it!

Paper, paper, everywhere! - students spend the bulk of class examining our paper usage at this school.  There is an amazing amount of paper left at printers around school - misprints, forgotten documents, and pages with very little ink on them.  We came up with a few different plans of action:

1. If you print a mistake, it can be scratch paper!  There is a repository on Jac’s desk, and also bins in the math rooms.  This can be used for math calculations, doodles, paper airplanes and more.
2. By using “Print Preview” instead of “Print”, we can see how many sheets we are about to print and either alter the text size, or choose specific pages instead of “printing all.”
3. We can copy and paste text into Word, where margins can be changed, font-size adjusted, images and advertisements deleted, and more.

We calculated that if each student at Billings could print ONE less sheet per day, then the school could save 17,460 (1×97x180) sheets of paper a year!!!! This doesn’t even include the teachers’ paper usage. According to Conservatree, 1 tree can make 8,333 pages of paper, so we could easily save 2 trees a year!

No computers today - we sat down to introduce and discuss cyber-bullying. Our conversation began with talking about conventional bullying. Students noted that bullies may act out because:

• they feel bad about themselves
• they have been bullied in the past
• they don’t have friends
• they are unhappy at home
• it makes them feel powerful
• they might make friends by being funny and mean

We talked about how humans usually feel that on the whole they are good, and that even when we do bad things we individually feel that we are more good than bad. This is true even for bullies.

The 6th grade defined cyber-bullying as “being mean or hurting someone using technology.” Cyber-bullies can use many types of technology to pick on someone; students noted the following ways:

• text-messaging
• instant messaging
• emailing
• building a website that makes fun of someone
• posting mean pictures or videos about someone
• saying mean things on MySpace

We talked about different ways that messages can be delivered. In a one-to-one format, bullies send a message to their recipient (email, instant message, text-message, etc). In a one-to-many format, bullies send a mean message about a person or people to many, usually in an effort to recruit more people to make fun of the victim (building a webpage, posting a video, etc). In many-to-one instances, a group of people will pick on an individual (incoming messages to a MySpace account, online petitions, etc).

Finally, we pondered why so much bullying goes on at social networking sites (e.g., MySpace, Facebook). The main reasons (according to students) are:

• there aren’t many adults to monitor things
• it’s easier to make fun of someone you don’t know or can’t see
• other people might be doing it so it seems okay

Overall, this was a really interesting class - we’ll be following up on this discussion in another week, before the summer starts.