More Hype for School

I've been using Google Sites as my teacher website for a while, and it works pretty well, but I'm planning on switching to a more dynamic, animated HTML5 site created with Hype (by Tumult). I have a skeleton of a site hosted through DropBox here you can check out in the meantime. The current Google site can be found here. Maybe the new layout is frivolous, but I like the animation.

Classroom Signs

I designed these hoping to cut down on the "I didn't know..." excuse for chewing gum or bringing food. Plus I just love symbols and signs. Then I got carried away and kept making signs.

Soda, Sugar, and Subsidies

(My altered version of this lesson plan from PBS. For use in the agriculture or economics unit.)

I start with a can of sugary soda that they're all familiar with and probably crave. How much would they pay? We read the ingredients. Which ones come from farms? (They should recognize 'corn' in 'high fructose corn syrup.') How much of their money do they think makes it to farmers? Would they pay more for a healthier soda? Would they pay more so the farmers get more money?

Because of subsidies, no matter how much they pay for that soda, the farmer gets the same. Subsidies do two things: they help farms out in a bad year, and they put a cap on crop prices. It's almost like an insurance policy that the government creates for the farmers and consumers.

Sounds good, right? Unfortunately, subsidies (and the farm bill in general) only help certain crops, and ignore others. For example, let's say you play the guitar, and your brother plays the piano. Do you think it's fair if your mom pays for your brother to get piano lessons, but tells you that the guitar just isn't as useful as the piano, so you have to pay for your own piano lessons.

This leads to a debate among students. Maybe the piano is a more useful skill to have. Maybe corn is more important to our country.

Another thing the farm bill does is discourage sugar imports. Corn syrup is incredibly cheap vs cane sugar, so soda manufacturers and candy makers use it almost exclusively. Is this a problem? Is cane sugar any better? This is where the taste test comes in. The whole class tastes the same soda, one has real sugar, the other has corn syrup. Which do they prefer? Which do they think has the real sugar?

In the end, students may only remember getting to drink soda in class. Or they might accidentally retain information about the farm bill. Maybe sugar is a moot point, since we're trying to cut down on any sort of sweetener, but nevertheless it introduces a whole world of politics, agriculture, and economy into their previously ignorant lives.

Music Production for Communications Class

When I was in high school my ancient-and-mostly-clueless video teacher somehow had the foresight to get something called ACID Music for the computer, so we could make original songs for the news. It was ages before Apple's Garageband came about. I liked it so much, I went home and told Mom to buy it for me for Christmas. I did, however, use the phrase, "Have you used ACID?" around the wrong people...

ACID Music is still around for those of us stuck with PC's. (The one plus to using PC's is Home Designer, which is still a Windows-only program.) But at the moment it's just a little too expensive to put on 35 computers. So I went looking, and stumbled upon MusicLab, by LoopLabs. (The former link brings you straight to the regular editor, where I send my students. The latter takes you to their home page, and you'll quickly see why I bypass it when dealing with my demographic.) The biggest thing that I love about their site is that you can start making music without ever giving away an email address. Granted, you'll have to sign up if you want to save what you make, but it means I can use it as a filler, or as an optional project.

The biggest downside, on the other hand, is that you can't download your songs without paying some fee or selling your soul, or something like that, which is why I still want to buy ACID eventually. (The music software, people.) Oh well.

Teaching Architecture in Junior High

I used to use FloorPlanner to give students a quick taste of designing houses. And it's perfect for that, but no more. Plus it's free, and a lot of software out there is just too expensive to put on a whole classfull of computers. Then I heard about Home Designer by Chief Architect. They have amazing pricing for schools, the software works on my crappy old computers, and it's powerful enough to really engage students and teachers alike.

If you're simply looking for some decent architecture software without wanting to go all full professional CAD-type stuff, look no further. I just wanted to mention how valuable I think it is to design and technology students alike.

First, technology. We have a construction unit in the class, but I don't really have a shop to give them experience constructing anything besides spaghetti-mallow towers. So I offer them a little experience on the other end of the process, in architecture. As it is an introduction class, and each unit can only take up a week, I think a few days with this software is perfect to give students a taste of what goes into the design and construction of a house. There's really no need to grade anything; the kids love working with the software. So I just give them credit for working with it, and chances are, they'll all go home to tell their parents (a) to buy the software at home, and (b) to sign up for my class that goes more into detail.

Which brings me to how I use this in a design/communications class. Aside from state and federal standards saying that I should include drafting in my curriculum, I think playing with the software really exposes students to visualizing things in new ways. They have to design in a pretty abstract setting: looking straight down on the house plans, using a bunch of symbols to represent ideas. Then they get to look at their designs in 3D and find out what they did wrong and come up with ways to solve the problems. It's like a self-perpetuating education, where problem-solving is its own reward.

Plus, I used the grandfather of this software when I was their age, when I wanted to be an architect. (I still want to be an architect.) Whether or not any of these kids becomes an architect, I'm telling you, this software is worth it.