Quick Start Tech Projects for Any Class

After two years of helping a lot of teachers get started with different tech projects, I finally got smart and combined the many existing tech project resources I've created.

My goal was to save time for teachers. Having everything in one document (or at least linked from one document) can cut out a lot of emails or our initial planning meetings, since now they can find these documents on one single webpage.

Instead of taking me out of the picture, it allows them to ask me the questions that are most relevant to their class a lot more quickly. 

Each of these "Tech Project Packs" focuses on one type of final product, like a blog or an audio recording. It answers important questions such as:

• What is this type of project best for?
• What tools are needed?
• What are some common challenges?
• What tutorials do you have for it?
• What should I include in the directions?
• How can we share it beyond the classroom?

We are a Google Apps for Education district and most students are using Chromebooks.

Here are four packs to start with. More will be added in the upcoming week. 

• Images with Text - A very quick project that can be adapted to any subject
• Infographics - Create informational "digital posters" with Piktochart
• Blogs - Good for getting started using Blogger
• Audio Recordings - A simple process for creating audio recordings on a Chromebook or laptop

If you have any suggestions or requests or if you see problems with the documents or links, please let me know.

Website Design Lessons for High School Digital Media Class

We started some basic website design lessons this week in Digital Media class at the high school.  We use free accounts at Weebly.

These lessons get the students thinking about the area of interest that they will focus on for the site.  They will get a chance to write some initial content, but the idea is we will continue to develop the sites as a place to show finished products as the semester continues.

The first three assignments are:

• Creating graphics for the site - We use GIMP.
• Writing the initial content
• Setting up the three main pages of the site in Weebly

If you're interested in modifying those documents, let me know and I can share them with you in Google Docs format.

Student examples will be posted in the weeks ahead.

GIMP Photo Editing and Graphic Design Lessons for High School and Middle School

I posted some links to my GIMP tutorials recently.  Here are the assignment PDFs that I gave the students.  These, along with the tutorials linked to below, provide a nice introduction to the program.  It was a great improvement over how we started last year.

The assignments might have different names, but these are the topics 

• Introduction
• Drawing with the Selection Tools
• Layers and Text
• Filters and Effects
• Combining Images
• Final Project - Comic Strip

All of the tutorials for these lessons can be found in this post.

Classroom Game Lesson - Critical Thinking and Writing

I dug up a lesson this week that I used to use in my Pre-Calculus classes. The seniors would graduate a few weeks before school was out, so for those remaining juniors I would set them loose on this very popular lesson where I attempted to teach critical thinking using a variety of board and card games. It would last about five class periods.

Here's a PDF of the last version of this assignment that I used. (It was about this time that I left the math classroom to work as the Instructional Technology Coordinator.)

While the students loved these days and we all had fun, I worked each year to improve the focus so that they were objectively thinking about the games and what they were doing. You'll note in the handout above that I continually emphasize thinking, clear communication and analysis of what was going on in the game. I have to admit, though, that I never got very far in that endeavor. Even with the excellent students that ended up in that class, the fun got most of the attention.

This served to alert me to the importance of setting game lessons in context. Now when I introduce a game design lesson (usually involving computer games) I start by downplaying the games and emphasizing the knowledge and skills that we want the students to leave with.

Here are the games that I used in this lesson, with links to their pages on the Boardgame Geek. I'm sure a lot of other games that would be perfect for this lesson have come out since 2008 when I last assigned it, but reading up on these pages will certainly draw your attention to additional options. (Some titles have different names at BGG than the editions I used on the worksheet. They are essentially the same games.)

Deduction

Coda
Clue Card Game
Top Secret Spies

What's That On My Head?

Strategy
Hey! That's My Fish!
Loco
Ingenious
Durch die Wuste (Through the Desert)

Probability
Fill or Bust
Double or Nothing
No Thanks
Last Chance

Party/Social Games
What's It To Ya? (Oh, Really!)
Thingamajig
What Were You Thinking?
Balderdash

Holiday Interactive Game Assignment - Part 3

The final stage of this project is to create a Christmas or holiday game playable with ActivExpressions or AcdtiVotes. The directions are available here.

Two of the three sample games referred to in that document are available on Promethean Planet. I haven't finalized the third one yet.

• Wits & Wagers - U.S. History Edition
• This or That?

Most students had little trouble transitioning from the second assignment to this final project. Many of them just did a quiz game with multiple choice questions. A few went with very creative games based on random draws and personal preferences. It has been encouraging watching some of them go well above the minimum requirements of the assignment.

I worked with students most days while they finished this project. Additional tips I taught to some students who wanted to use them were:

• Using the Camera tool to take pictures of graphics created in other programs
• Adding the Another Page action to link pages
• Adding the Hidden action to make objects disappear to reveal other objects

I posted some of the best examples of the students' work here at Promethean Planet. 

Holiday Interactive Game Assignment - Part 2

For the next step in this assignment we required students to make a short, simple quiz game with three questions. Two could be multiple choice and the third had to be a number question. The directions we posted for this assignment are here.

Since students were at various points in this lesson on the day that some were ready to start part, I did nothing in the way of introduction other than tell them were to find the directions. I made myself available for questions and I helped them progress through the assignment that way.

We shared the best flipcharts from this part of the project with the elementary teachers. Since we kept them in the district, I allowed students to copy and paste from the internet as long as they cited their sources.

A half dozen good examples resulted from this, but we found students were confused about the differences between putting the questions and answers on the screen versus putting them in the Question Manager. It would have been simpler if the Question Manager worked like I think it is supposed to. As it is, we had questions and choices on the flipchart and we just set the number of options and the right answer in the Question Manager.

One thing I struggle with when making directions is that if I put an example early in the document, students will look at it and just forge ahead without reading the directions. If I don't put a detailed example there, though, they can't always get their brains around what the directions are telling them! I suspect the solution is to grade mercilessly with a clear rubric on all projects until they learn to read directions.

Holiday Interactive Game Assignment

I have been working with the computer teacher at our high school to take students through a unit on creating interactive holiday games. Here is the page at Promethean Planet where we posted some results.

We started out by showing students how to use basic shapes in ActivInspire to create holiday graphics. This document shows the first images that we used.

After they practiced that for one class period, I showed them how to set the background color, how to use the Text tool and how to copy their graphics with the Camera

Then the next stage was to have them create some holiday slides. Here are the directions that we posted in Blackboard for that part of the assignment. It requires students to create a couple more graphics and then the slides in a flipchart.

I'll post the directions to the first round of simple games and I'll provide some samples in a day or two.