Info Tech Digital Literacy Project

We have finished up our unit over digital literacy.  All that we have left is to demonstrate our learning by completing a final project.  Students will create a product of their choice that demonstrates their understanding of the 5 following areas:  1. Information/Digital Literacy,  2. Social Media,  3. Online Safety,  4. Cyberbullying, and 5. Digital Footprint.  For each section students should be able to give a description about each of the listed areas, give information, pictures, and  useful information about each of the areas, and list their sources where they found their information.  These projects will no doubt, be very creative and I'm excited to see the quality of work that we turn out.

Students can go to the classroom digital bulletin boards for links to the information we went over this week, and may use their word document that contains all of their notes.  Students may also use any other sources to find more information to add to their projects.

information literacy

This week we are learning about digital literacy in information technology.  We will start off by learning how to determine if a web site is valid.  Some tools we used today where how to read a web address (identify a URL, domain, and extension), how to find an owner/publisher of a website with easywhois.com, how to find the history of a web page using archive.org, and how to find web sites with external links that take you to a specific web page.  The internet can be a very useful tool when doing research, but it is important to use multiple sources, and to understand that not all information online is reliable.

Above is a quick tutorial showing the basics of google scholar, a useful searching tool when finding journals and scholarly papers online.

Communication, Collaboration, and Google Drive

This week we learned about professional communication in information technology.  We learned how to create business letters and how to select appropriate templates that are available in Microsoft Word.  We also were introduced to Google Drive and cloud computing.  We learned how to use the word processor, and share a document with other people.  Students worked in groups to create a story on one document from different computers at the same time.  We also worked in groups to create technology review newsletters on Google drive. 

Introduction to Business Letters

We are working through our word-processing section in information technology.  We reviewed over the basics of Microsoft Word, and are going over communication with technology.  One way to do this is with the use of business letters.  Here is an example of the format of the Block Style Letter with open punctuation that we are using in class.

We will also discuss forms of electronic communication and proper ways to use it.

First Week Summary

Information Technology classes are off to a great start!  We learned about trends in technology, and finished up today with our human timeline of technology history.  Once we finished we got started with word processing.  We learned how to set up our header and footer.  We also learned how to save this to our network folders and to our network drop box.  We created a wordle, screen-captured it, then cropped it to a word document as well.

Next week we will finish up word-processing, and learn how to communicate professionally through business letters, email, etc...

Here our a couple of brief tutorials of what we used on Friday in case you need to refresh your memory, or if you want to see what was going on in class.

Importance of Technology

Great first day of the school year!  Glad to know the class of 2018!!  We will be learning about the importance of information technology, and how technology has been influenced throughout our lives.  We will then take this information and predict what trends will be showing up in emerging technologies.  This video clip is a great example of showing how our world is always changing, and how technology is a central piece of this change.

Welcome to 2014 school year!

Welcome to the 2014/2015 school year!  Hope you all had a great summer and are ready to start the next stage in your learning here as a BULLDOG!  Wednesday we will be getting acclimated to classroom procedures and expectations, as well as getting our technology and computer accounts set up for class.

Stay tuned to this blog for assignment/homework postings, and also if you are on twitter, give a follow to @np_techbiz for assignment and school activity reminders at NPHS.  I will be looking forward to meeting you all soon!  Let's have a successful year!