Technology @ Hebron

Many years ago, my husband and I read Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth before we traveled to England. That book gave us an excellent background on gothic architecture and it helped us gain a better understanding and appreciation of these man-made marvels. When I traveled to France for the first time in 1988, my visit to Chartres Cathedral was the high point of the trip.

When I began teaching French in the 1990’s, I decided to teach my students about gothic architecture so that when they one day visit France, they, too, will look knowledgeably at these miraculous skyscrapers of long ago. They will recognize the cruciform floor plan where the north-south nave is crossed by the east-west transept. They will appreciate the flying buttresses giving support to the vaulted ceiling. They will admire the pointed gothic arches surmounting the tracery of the stained glass windows, including the magnificent rose windows.

And it worked! I received this e-mail last summer from a previous student of mine:

“I am in Malta on vacation and doing sightseeing. I’ve visited three different neo-gothic cathedrals and the knowledge from our project helped alot and it was great.”

While the French III students were reading an excerpt of Les Misérables,“The Bishop’s Candlesticks”, in class, they each researched a gothic cathedral. They were required to draw and define a number of architectural terms, research the history of their own cathedral, and do an oral presentation, partially en français, to their classmates.

This year, with the help of Mr. Crofton, we added something new and exciting to the project! The students used Tinkercad and the 3D printer to make models of their cathedrals. To do this, each student had to look carefully at the cathedral – Where do the flying buttresses intersect with the roof? – Are both of the towers exactly the same? – How does the interior floor plan compare to the exterior design? By the end of the design phase, the students really knew their cathedrals. I so hope that someday these students will visit these cathedrals!

Mrs. Reedy, French Teacher

Digital Citizenship is a concept which helps teachers, technology leaders and parents to understand what students/children/technology users should know to use technology appropriately. Digital Citizenship is more than just a teaching tool; it is a way to prepare students/technology users for a society full of technology. Digital citizenship is the norms of appropriate, responsible technology use. Too often we are seeing students as well as adults misusing and abusing technology but not sure what to do. The issue is more than what the users do not know but what is considered appropriate technology usage. [1]

Technology is a major part of everyone’s life and with the Middle School Chromebook program (and previously the MacBook program) technology is a also a major part of the classroom at Hebron Academy. With this is mind we have recently started a digital citizenship curriculum in the Middle School, with classes held once per semester during advisories. The main aim of this new program is to get students thinking about how and why they use technology, as well as how it overlaps with all aspects of their everyday lives.

For the first introductory class, which took place last week, students watched a quick video to start them thinking about what kinds of things make up digital citizenship, and then completed a number of practical tasks to work out just how many internet-connected devices they used on a frequent basis and the sites, apps and services they access – with the end goal being meaningful classroom discussion on whether they thought they were actually digital citizens and what that meant to them.

The slideshow the faculty advisors worked though can be seen below:

And future topics we are going to be exploring in these sessions include:

• Digital footprint, social media awareness, screen time
• Permission to share photos and videos of others
• Appropriate use of technology tools in class and study hall
• Cyberbullying, phishing, viruses
• Fake news, appropriate online content

Students in the Elements of College-Level Literature and Composition class wrote serial stories over the two and a half weeks between fall term finals and winter break. These were tales told in the style of Mark Twain, who wrote stories in chapters ending with dramatic cliffhangers each week as a way to sell periodicals. The students included four parts for each story, three with cliffhangers and one with a twist, that could be on any subject they wanted. The work of all the seniors was exceptional and expressive of their individualism, ranging from murder mysteries to romances to daring international adventures. The works are being published digitally with custom layouts created using Pages on the iPad, and artwork from the title pages of each story will be on display in the art gallery in Sturtevant Dorm soon!

Mr. Paul, English Teacher

The students’ complete comics are embedded below as an ebook through ISSUU. Click on the full-screen button to enlarge the document or view it in a new browser tab from this link.

For the past two weeks the grade 6/7 art class has been working on a digital landscape art project using the web app Sumo Paint and their Chromebooks. This is a great painting app that tries to mirror paint and paint brush effects in software, allowing students to create digital artwork with strokes on the trackpad.

The students started off by experimenting with the different brushes and effects in Sumo Paint, and then used these skills to create their interpretation of a black and white landscape provided to them. We also discussed how a digital image is composed of layers, how to work from the back most layer forward when creating their artwork, and to try and use a different brush style for each layer.

Next, they had to select their own color landscape image, break it down into layers and recreate it building on the skills and techniques they had learned from drawing the previous image. The final reflective step was to create a gallery-style poster in Google Drawings complete with their final image, the photograph they had chosen, their black and white practice image and an artist statement describing their work.

Here is a selection of their black and white and color landscapes, as well as some of the gallery posters they created (and some of the students working on their Chromebooks):

The eighth graders recently read The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury in English class. After discussing motifs and themes in the novel, the students chose a chapter or section of the book to portray in the form of a comic strip. Character, plot, motif and theme were required literary elements in their stories along with narration, dialogue, and at least one onomatopoeia. The process was started with a storyboard to plan out the strip on paper. Mr. Crofton then provided guidance in the technical aspects of building the comic strip using Google Drawings. The students spent several class periods building their comics from scratch and the finished results were then published into an ebook using ISSUU. Talent and creativity merge here to show us how difficult it could be to get humans civilization established on Mars! Enjoy the eighth graders interpretations of Bradbury’s futuristic ideas.

Mrs. Drown, English Teacher 

The students’ complete comics are embedded below as an ebook through ISSUU. Click on the full-screen button to enlarge the document or view it in a new browser tab from this link.

A recent addition to the classroom resources provided by the technology department is a full set of Google Cardboard kits. These are cardboard viewers that you can slot a smartphone into and then hold up to your eyes to experience virtual reality.

There are multiple different ways to use VR in education, and we are currently running teacher professional development sessions looking at:

• YouTube 360 degree videos, which are recorded with special cameras to provide a completely 360 degree view of the movie content. There is a wide selection of educational content that has been recorded using this technique, from Planet Earth documentaries to science experiments
• Google Street View, which allows students to virtually visit most locations on earth, using Google Maps street view images and data
• The Google Arts and Culture app, in which a range of museums and galleries have created virtual exhibitions and street view style tours of their collections
• The Google Expeditions app, which allows an entire class to go on a virtual field trip, from places like Machu Picchu to Antarctica and to the International Space Station. Each location has multiple points of interest and provides the teacher with detailed content and Q&A for their class.

We recently trialled Google Expeditions in Mrs. Bryan’s Spanish classes. Her students had recently been studying the location and history of Machu Picchu and as a culminating event for the project she took them on a virtual field trip to the site. Mrs. Bryan lead them on a tour of the complete area, looking at the overall layout of the structures, how the buildings had been constructed, as well as stopping by the local mountains and rivers.

A selection of photographs from one of her classes’ expeditions can be seen below:

In English class the seventh graders are working on writing mini-autobiographies. These are inspired by the novel, The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros. To serve as a springboard for memories about their own lives, the students have created their own personal timelines. For this the students used a web app called Timeline JS which uses completed Google Sheet template to generate the timelines, so students also gained experience using spreadsheets in a different way.

They started with their date of their birth and then recorded important milestones in their lives so far. They composed a headline and a brief description for each event. Photos, maps and video could be added to enhance their descriptions. These unique, individual timelines will become an integral part of each student’s autobiography project. So far, the theory is working and the students have many ideas for writing short personal narrative “chapters” about their lives.

Mrs. Drown, English Teacher

The seventh grade students read Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol and attended the performance at The Public Theater in Lewiston. They chose a character and completed a web to explore the personality and attributes of the character. Each student then wrote a speech, in the character’s voice, to recall his or her experience with Ebenezer Scrooge. The character’s perspective on Scrooge’s remarkable change from a tight-fisted curmudgeon to a magnanimous, benevolent man was the focus of the speech. Next the students put together costumes and practiced their speeches. On Friday, December 16, these characters came to life long enough to video record their speeches with a green screen background. The students then selected a background to reflect a setting appropriate to the particular character and added this to the video. The resulting compilation, “The Christmas Miracle,” tells how Scrooge was transformed from many perspectives.

Students worked on both their writing and public speaking skills to produce this end product. They have used quotations and specific details develop their stories. Costumes and background images lend visual support to these fine speeches.

Mrs. Drown, English Teacher

For the final part of the Conceptual Physics project based around car design, students had to prep their 3D printed cars for the test ramp and were then given three chances to record their fastest speed down the ramp (recorded with a radar sensor) and longest distance travelled off the ramp. Any car that did not make it down the ramp was disqualified for that turn.

Five students also timed the runs using the stopwatch app on their phones and recorded all the data for all groups into a Google Sheet for later analysis. Everything will then be put together in a written report, including reflections on their own design decisions during construction and testing.

Here are a few shots from the two classes and some close-ups of the different designs the students created using the 3D printer:

Here is a YouTube playlist of all the different cars heading down the testing ramp is embedded below:

And finally here is a YouTube playlist of some of the races in slow motion: