What's Happening in the Middle School?
St. Luke’s Launches High Tech Humanities Conference
History teacher Abby Abbot and Academic Technologists Matt Bavone and Eli Fendelman created a first-of-its-kind conference for educators curious about classroom innovations.
The team reached out to the Director of Programs at the Connecticut Association of Independent Schools (CAIS) with their idea, and she quickly came on board to co-sponsor the inaugural St. Luke’s High Tech Humanities Conference.
Abby Abbott provided the below overview of the day:
On June 18, 26 teachers and administrators from the tri-state area gathered to share their most innovative technology-based lessons. St. Luke’s faculty Carrie Meatto, Tom Owen, Hunter Martin, Matt Bavone, and Abby Abbott presented on a variety of topics including the creation of video games, stop motion animation, online poetry forums, and military simulations. Guest faculty from Greenwich Academy and Miss Porter’s School also presented. Judging from the turnout, engagement, and productivity—the High-Tech Humanities Conference will be an annual event.
Check out the summaries of the various sessions that were run. Feel free to touch base with any of the St. Luke’s faculty presenters if you are interested in their projects:
Empathy Machines: Portals and Global Education
Presented by: Kristen Erickson, Greenwich Academy
Learn how an independent school in Connecticut, a refugee camp in Iraq, and a community center in Milwaukee became unlikely partners in a global education phenomenon called Portals. Through a network of gold shipping containers repurposed as immersive environments, Portals connect individuals in far-flung locations for face-to-face conversations. At Greenwich Academy, an emphasis on global citizenship led us to embrace the Portal, an innovative space for storytelling, poetry reading, dancing, and painting.
The “Inevitable” Slide to World War I: Great Powers and the Limits of Peace
Presented by: Hunter Martin, St. Luke’s School
Cast yourself into the fray of Great Power rivalries in the run-up to World War I by growing your economy, extending your empire, building your military, and forging alliances with other nations. Test the limits of peace in a world of finite resources and competing national interests, where your gain might necessarily come at another’s expense -- or vice versa. This game allows students to explore the complex nexus of factors that gave rise to and shaped the relationships among the world’s major powers during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It teaches collaboration, strategic thinking, and the art of diplomacy, all set against the backdrop of the slide to war in 1914. Students learn about the combatant nations and their empires, along with the (mis)calculations that sparked the Great War and fueled its escalation into one of the largest conflicts in history. The interactive nature of the Google Sheets in which the game plays out enables students to track their progress in real-time, as well as to create and analyze statistical renderings of their -- and their cohort’s -- performance over the course of the game as a whole.
Advanced Google Sheets and Forms
Presented by: Matt Bavone, St. Luke’s School
Learn how to turn Google Forms into choose-your-own-adventure quests. Whether for an in-class game, to create scaffolded homework, or to collect robust data from various constituents, you can do so with a little up-front work. Likewise, learn how to bend Google Sheets to your will. Learn how to create spreadsheets with a range of functions from conditional formatting all the way up to live-updating graphs that can be embedded into the web.
Millennial Technology for the 1st Millenium BCE.
Presented by: Abby Abbott & Matt Bavone, St. Luke’s School
This presentation will display hands-on projects that meld humanities curricula with makerspace technology, innovative software, and other low-tech tactile methods while simultaneously leveraging students’ interest in pop culture. Abby Abbott will share out several projects that she has done with students over the past two years including smelting period accurate coins, using simple 3D printing software to recreate Ancient Rome, program Mario-like video games inspired by the Epic of Gilgamesh, and use social media platforms such as Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram to immerse students in the ancient world. Matt Bavone will share how these projects were made possible on the academic tech end, and both will discuss the pedagogy behind using such projects, especially at the non-honors level.
Using Tech to Step into the Past
Presented by: Erica Washburn, Miss Porter’s School
In this session, I will share my challenges and learning moments in creating a walking tour project with my US History class. This is my first year assigning the project where students did extensive research about historic buildings on our school’s campus and in the town’s local library, wrote a short research paper, and then worked together to create a shared narrative about our school’s historic sites using technology in a meaningful way. Students learned about virtual and augmented reality, practiced coding by developing a class website for the project, and utilized a 3-D camera to create a virtual tour of their school. I am excited to share my learning with you and how I was able to amplify student voice and choice during this project and have my students see the “real world” applicability of history.
Medium Online
Presented by: Tom Owen, St. Luke’s School
When humanities scholars engage in research, they publish their findings in order to share their new knowledge with others. In contrast, when high school humanities students write papers, the typical audience for their essays consists solely of their teachers (with grading pen in hand). It’s no wonder, then, that high school students frequently view a humanities project as a roadblock between them and a good grade rather than as an exciting intellectual enterprise. This workshop will focus on using Medium, an online publishing platform, to help students develop a “researcher’s mindset” in which the goal of their work is to contribute to a shared body of knowledge. By using Medium publications as the final stage of inquiry-driven humanities projects, educators can create learning experiences for students that are more intrinsically motivating and more authentically meaningful.
Stop Motion Animation and 3D Modeling
Presented by: Carrie Meatto, St. Luke’s School
Design your own project-based unit to answer essential questions in the humanities classroom, using truly engaging technology. In this session, you will learn the basic elements of a project-based unit and how to leverage both Google SketchUp 3D modeling software and the Stop Motion animation iPad app to help students create beautiful work. You will leave with the beginnings of your next unit!
Throughout, the presenter will share two projects as models: 1) How can a community be truly inclusive? Spanish II students realistically redesign urban areas in the Spanish-speaking world to best accommodate cultural practices and changing demographics. 2) How does culture affect the environment and vice versa? Spanish IV students create stop-motion animation short films that depict their research-based prediction for the future of the environment in a Spanish-speaking community.
Mastery-Based Blending
Presented by: Matt Bavone, St. Luke’s School
St. Luke’s is in its 5th year of blending world language courses and is excited to share both the evolution process of the program as well as many helpful takeaways for other schools looking to blend or tweak their current blended language programs. In addition to offering a signature level one 50/50 blended experience in all modern language courses, the entire sequence of levels 1-3 of Latin is built in a self-paced, mastery-based structured called “Latin Omnibus.” From tips on technology to scheduling pitfalls to creative self-evaluation tools, I will share all that we have gleaned from the past half-decade of work.
St. Luke’s School is a secular (non-religious), private school in New Canaan, CT for grades 5 through 12 serving over 35 towns in Connecticut and New York. Our exceptional academics and diverse co-educational community foster students’ intellectual and ethical development and prepare them for top colleges. St. Luke’s Center for Leadership builds the commitment to serve and the confidence to lead.
