Effective Projects Case Study

Integrating Technology: Finding Your Family Heritage at Hampton School District

www.sau21.org/ha

This is a story about a project that started 11/1/2006.

For more information, please contact: Lori Cotter at lcotter@sau21.org.

Students learned to integrate social studies and language arts by using technology to present the history and background of their families, based on the study of immigration. Students researched their family name history and photos thorugh primary source documents, internet access and library studies. Students then presented thier findings in a power point presentation that included scanned family photos, digital representations of family histories, ethnic backgrounds, immigration research related to their own personal histories, relations to famous relatives and graphs that indicated the class ethnic background.

Funding: This project was supported by $500 from NCLB Title II-D (Educational Technology) and $45 in local funds. The project illustrates how federal funding supports “Technology literacy for all students - Implementing systemic changes through robust curriculum integration with technology (includes student work with digital tools, distance learning courses, etc.).” The project addressed the following grades and content areas: 

   Gr6-8    EngLangArts  Math    SocSt   

The Setting: Hampton Academy is a public school set in a rural town. We are continuously renewing our technology applications and ability to accomodate a vast array of technology experience to our 550 students at the middle school level. We would like to say we are proactive in the field of technology implementation and continue to bring this into the classroom on a daily basis.

The plot: During the planning stages, it was necessary to find the time to work with team members to accomodate larege amounts of class time for computer access and research time. The one classroom lab and mobile lab had to be coordinated with other teachers in the building. This is not an easy feat. A rubric had to be made clear and concise with timelines required of our students. The biggest implementation challenge was providing students time to bring in and complete their research of information on their family. Some needed to connect with family members and find old photos and documents. A project such as this was successful over a holiday break where studetns could confer with many relatives. Absences and lost information hindered our ability to use deadlines, as well as snow days and testing days. We learned to allot larger periods of time for some essential research and gave more time after school for make-up sessions.

The teachers: 6 teachers were directly involved. Our six member team in the 8th grade was responsible for some role in this project. The math teacher assumed the teaching of Excel graphing, the science teacher asssited with some parts of immigration research and valuable computer time. The social studies teacher provided historical background and evidence on immigration, research on the influence of various ethnic groups and support in the scanning of primary source documents. The academic support teachers assisted with digitial photography set up as did the computer teacher. The language arts teacher reinforced the above, powerpoint text construction, word documents, spell check, grammatical help, internet research sites and works cited pages.

The students: Students were amazed at their final product. They had a history of their family that they could place into their digital portfolios for ICT purposes and a “gift” to give to a family member as a digital history of the family. As we move towards more technological lifestyles, we find that our history, primary documents, and primary sources are entering the digital stage of preservation.

The data: Evaluating the final projects per the rubric, we collected information on the style of presentations, the difference in creativity, the processing of information and the extent to which the research played a key role.

The difference: The outcome was measured per the rubric assessment piece in two parts. One gain was with the ability to form each slide in the power point with required information in a creative/informative manner, and two, the actual oral presentation.All was measured by the final presentation to the class. A key component was to make sure that students had a good foundation of technical skill at presenting a power point. They needed to know how to scan, how to present historical information, how to make a works cited page, how to use Excel, how to insert digital photography and images, how to use text information. We found that a huge impact on the students was just being able to make a presentation orally!

Essential conditions: The essential conditions to making this project successful is computer lab/mobile lab access when needed, timely researching techniques, availability of student historical information and/or research and a good team of teachers that work together to make this project happen, even after hours!

Changes for the future: We might consider advancing our students, if power points were more readily taught on the lower levels, to a Windows Media or Moviemaker presentation. We are constantly changing and upgrading our expectations to the advanced abilities of our students. As teachers, we find that we change our rubric every year, to accommodate new information, new styles of research, our students abilities and what we look for in a terrific presentation.

Recommendations: Please feel free to contact us as we can give some good insight on how to implement as a team initiative.

Telling our story: Yes. We shared this last year at a staff meeting with our building principal, colleagues and staff. We had a brief write up in the local paper about this activity and we shared the actual presentations with parents.

Documents to share:  We will include a copy of the power point presentation shown to our staff on our Hampton Academy Web site under teams, 8 white.