Grade 8 Computer Applications Course - Share your ideas

I am putting together curriculum for a grade 8 advanced computer applications course in our middle schools. Students will take a basic computer apps course once in either grades 6 or 7. In the advanced course i am looking to bring more project based learning in. I am looking to utilize web 2.0 tools. The students who take this course will meet one period a day for half of the school year.

I am considering creating projects that will utilize one or more of the following tools:

a. a digitial story on a global or controversial issue.
b. Scratch - As an intro to programming
c. A Hyperlinking Narrative
d. social bookmarking
e. Rss feeds and feed aggregators
F. Collaboration using wiki's.
G. Podcasting & Audacity
h. Creating google earth tours
i. Webpage Design
j. Internet Safety, Information Literacy

I would love to here about your experiences, project ideas or current curriculum.

Tags: Computer Course, Curriculum, middle school

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Permalink Reply by Diane Leon on June 9, 2009 at 8:07pm

I know you are looking for answers and feedback, but I had a question for you. Does your school have all the equipment necessary for the students who take this class available or what do the students have to have on their own in order to be successful in this class?

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Permalink Reply by Doug Walker on June 10, 2009 at 10:18am

We have a lab with 30 PC's. 1 scanner, digital cameras, video cameras and access to a tv studio, microphones, tables for group work, color and b&w printer, LCD projector, Vision 6 software for demo and monitoring.

For Software we have:
MS office 2003
Adobe Creative Suite 3
Inspiration
MS Photostory
MS Movie Maker
Audacity and the Lame MP3 plugin
Scratch
Google Earth and Google Earth plugin
Itunes
Access to wikispaces
A class blog with student accounts
Additional web space to publish

All students have their own login accounts and home folder on our network. We have shared folders as well for collaboration.