Computer Applications Curriculum

I designed this curriculum from scratch.  Middle School students had been learning keyboarding and MS Word formatting; I added all MS Office Applications (including Access), MS Paint (for diagramming), Hardware (disassembling and assembling a desktop computer, without breaking it), Web Development (Mozilla) and Programming (BASIC).  Students met daily for 5-week rotations. I strove to integrate applications as part of inquiry projects, and give students local experiences of empowerment through social publishing. The course was very popular with students, and discipline was rarely an issue.

I strove for student-centered proejcts. The first year was 2001, and in their independent internet research projects, some students asked "Who is Osama Bin Laden?" and "Why did they do this?" Students also created student newsletters, by first writing articles (interviews, local research, or features) and putting these on the file server, then selecting from articles to each produce three-column newsletters with Microsoft Word.  These were printed out and shared with friends and parents.