New School Tech Blog

Here at New School every student contibutes a page to the yearbook. This year we are doing it all on Microsoft Publisher. I’m starting the students with learning to paste images from the Internet, and how to manipulate those graphics once they’re on the page. I’ve decided to share the lesson here, because this collage activity has so many applications for those non-linguistic, more kinesthetic and visual learners. Here you go:

Electronic Collage

1. Open Microsoft Publisher. The icon looks like this: (hmmm..if you must have it, find the icon in Google images where I did, won’t copy from Word into this blog).

2. Click on Blank Publications.

3. Select Full Page

4. Open the Internet. Type www.google.com in the address bar. Click on Images.

5. Find an image you want by typing words into the search box. Click on it. Get to the webpage where your graphic is at full size.

6. Right click on the graphic. Select Copy.

7. Return to MS Publisher. Right click on the document. Select Paste.

8. Play with the graphic manipulation tools. Resize your graphic by pulling on the dots on the edges. Rotate your image by pulling on the green dot, or by selecting the Free Rotate icon found on the Menu bar. Try the Brightness, Contrast, Crop, Set Transparent Color and Color tools on the Picture Toolbar that pops up when you select your graphic. Move graphics in front of or to the back of each other with Arrange>Order in the Menu Bar. Experiment and learn how to use these and other tools.

9. Keep adding and manipulating graphics until you are happy with your collage. DON’T FORGET TO SAVE ALONG THE WAY!

10. Print it and turn it in.

HEY – IS YOUR NAME ON IT?

A week or two ago David Slavin (see if you can find him!) sent out information on the Time website and suggested its use. I looked around and found a multimedia presentation on the United States population. We are integrating its content across our Math and Language Arts classes in order to have the students use data from graphs to draw conclusions, work with statistics, and to write a mini-research report.

The link is here:

who we are

In the last two weeks we have had Renaissance Learning’s Math Facts installed in one of our classrooms, and soon there will be another classroom that has it, too. New School has a few goals in using this program. First, reduce the student-teacher ratio during direct instruction; second, allow the students to move at their own pace; and third, accelerate the learning of our students who have somehow missed acquiring math basics during their academic career.
We hope that having some students work on the computers while others are working with the teacher will allow for more individualized attention. We also like the ability for students to receive instant feedback from the computer, and that they can learn individually without the stress associated with trying to keep up when they are behind, or being bored when they are a bit ahead of the class.

This last week in our Language Arts classes we began teaching our students about using the Internet as a resource, how to paste graphics, and layout a page in MicrosoftWord. Oh, and they learned vocabulary, too!

The lesson is pretty simple. Take your vocab word and look it up on dictionary.com. Copy and paste into a word document. Type your vocab word into google images. Choose the best image for your definition. Copy and paste. Add a sentence of your own. Format the page using different fonts and colors. Arrange your text and graphics so it looks balanced. Print. Finally, present your word to the class as they write down the definition in your words, not the dictionary’s. Also, explain to the class why you chose your graphic and how it represents the word.

We found that classroom management was easy during this little lesson, and all students learned more vocabulary words when tested than from previous vocabulary lists. Word documents are put on the “Word Wall” for the duration of the unit, until the next unit’s vocabulary is added.

We believe that the use of the computers, student delivered content, and graphics all contributed to higher levels of comprehension and retention.

Well, we’re going to be doing out yearbook purely electronically this year. Currently I plan to use Publisher for individualized page lay-outs, since all of our students write their own yearbook page. We’ll see how it goes! First, I want to check if we have the same edition as used in Recipe4Success, so I can try and incorporate the tutorials. My yearbook class will learn all they need to know to create a page, then I plan to have them teach others. Wish me luck!

This is our first year with brand new hp computers. We have wonderful fast Internet access, fast computers, and mini-labs in each of our four classrooms.
We plan to use SuccessMaker, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Publisher in lessons really soon. Who knows where we will go?