In Dawn’s classroom today, students were working on pairs on Macs. Here’s a photo of her lab (the kids had already left when I took the photo):

She was leading a lesson that was projected at the front of the room, so all of the kids could see what she was doing. (She was standing off to the right side of the room, working on her own Mac.)

Dawn had the kids learn how to do safe searches by including the phrase “Creative Commons” in your search. She told them this will provide images that they’re allowed to use in their apps—even if they want to sell them in the Google Play store! She gave them an example of “creative commons pizza,” which produces results like this:

Yum—when is lunch time!

Then she showed them how to right-click on an image and save it to the students’ project folders. This was trickier than it sounds, because most of the computers had that Apple mouse with the scrolly-wheel and no obvious right button! So students had to Control-click to get the pop-up menu with the “Save Image As…” dialog!

Dawn made a worksheet for kids to follow. It looked like this:

Previously, Dawn had done a session with students where they brainstormed about what makes a good partner. Here’s what the class produced:

Overall, today’s lesson was skill-building for when kids move on to making their own apps.