Technology @ Hebron

To wrap-up the academic year here is a compilation video showing off the breadth and depth of technology integration projects completed this year using the iPads, Chromebooks, the two computers labs and the 3D printer. Most of the projects included in the video have been written about on this blog and you can browse the different Tech in the Classroom posts using this link.

Students were assigned a decade beginning with the end of WWI to the modern day. With that specific time period, students gathered information on specific people, places and things (actual things or events) that had a significant impact at that time and made a significant contribution to the people, places and things to come in future decades.

They then turned this research into a multimedia timeline using the Timeline 3D app on their iPads. This was presented to the class in 3D with the students scrolling through their events, but you can click on the images below to see a couple of examples of the completed timelines as one large document.

Ms. Hanby, History Teacher

Throughout the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Behavior course students examined, discussed and attempted to rationalize horrendous events in human history. Genocide, ethnic cleansing and slavery; racial, religious and gender supremacy, terrorism and collateral damage. The goal was to encourage students to reflect on these elements in the realm of Patterns of Human Behavior and Portraits of Human Greatness.

Having taken the time to separate the victims from the perpetrators, analyze the bystanders as well as highlight the characteristics of heroes in all manners of definition, students then created a digital, interactive poster incorporating these overarching themes.

Ms. Hanby, History Teacher

Using the new Google Sites, for their end of year exam Spanish I students created cultural websites based around a Spanish speaking country of their choice. The sites had to contain a page covering the basic information about their country, a specific topics pages highlighting one specific area about that country, a day in the life of page and a grammar lesson video page. And using the different tools and options inside Google Sites they had to customizes the design of each page and neatly layout their text, images and multimedia objects.

Screenshots illustrating the different page layouts and designs can be seen below:

Inspired by a previous post, for their culminating project American Literature students had to create a class portfolio of their writings from the year. Using a WordPress blog students had to submit ten pieces of class work complete with an inline image, write an about me post for their roster entry (a separate tab on the site to allow anyone to see just a specific individual’s writing) as well as write a number of reflective comments on their classmates’ writings. Each class also had to decide on a header image for their site.

Links to the finished portfolio sites that contain all the students’ posts for each class are listed below as well as a couple of screenshots of the two designs:

• American Literature (C) Portfolio
• American Literature (G) Portfolio

During the last couple of weeks of school Biology students’ final project was to design and plant a digital garden. Students designed their garden as a means to learn about plant structure and function. They produced a detailed 2D design of their garden using either the sketching tools in Notability or the shape tools in Pages. They then created a presentation to pull all of their research together using Prezi and its zooming features, including additional detail on at least 3 plants that mature per growing season. Students also created a 3D sculpture of a plant which they could then screenshot and label within the presentation. For the 3D work we used the Sculptris app on the library iMacs.

A couple of their finished presentations are embedded below, as well as some photos of the students working on different areas of the project:

Honors Geometry students spent the latter part of the winter term working through a unit on similarity. As an extension of this unit, they worked through a project on 2-dimensional scaled floor plans and 3-dimensional models during one of the two experimental schedule weeks. As pairs, students were assigned to find the actual measures of one of the floors of the Science Building or the Library. Each student was then charged with drawing a to-scale floor plan of the area, complete with accurate measures. To conclude the unit, we moved to the computer lab and built 3-D models to be printed with the 3-D printer.

Ms. Gerrits-Leyden, Math Teacher

Grade 6/7 Art students recently completed a 2D animation project using a combination of their Chromebooks and the iMacs in the library computer lab.

The students started off by storyboarding their ideas to plan out the narrative of their animations. They then created a simple bouncing ball animation in Google Slides on their Chromebooks, practicing the workflow of adding objects to a slide – then duplicating this slide, moving the objects, duplicating it again, moving the objects and so on.  When presented and the slides are changed in quick succession the animation plays out frame by frame.

Next, using this technique the students created their own short animations using their own objects and background images. Most students ended up with around 300 frames in their presentation file, but the largest was over a 1000.

We then moved to the library iMacs, exported their Google Slides deck into iMovie, used the speed tool adjust the frame rate, added background music and then exported and shared the finished movie file.

Their animations are all collected below in a YouTube playlist as well as a few shots of the students working on their Chromebooks: