2009 Award Winners

Remembering Our One-Room Schoolhouses

200 Years of Education and History in a Small Town

Anna Graffam and Donna Okrasinski

Franklin Elementary School, Franklin, CT

The 50th anniversary of our school (1958-2008) provided the impetus for a multi-layered, inter-generational, school-driven, town-wide exploration of more than 200 years of local history. All anniversary projects represented the entire school, K-8, and were student initiated. Middle school students utilized the school's new Macintosh computers to create podcasts, movies and DVD's, computer games, board games, timelines, and animation projects. Younger students explored letterboxing, interpreted colorful town legends through original pictures that were scanned and turned into books; other classes made site visits and recreated the styles of some of the town's more historic homes including it's extant one-room schoolhouses. Intriguing activities spotlighted the long history and previously untold mysteries of these one-room schoolhouses -- the first being erected around 1721. Antique maps uncovered at Town Hall indicate as many as eleven schoolhouses scattered throughout the town's 19.6 square miles. Incredibly, five schoolhouses were operational through 1957.

Element Space Social Network

Kristin Leibrock and Thomas Foley

Amity Middle School, Orange, CT

This project will require students to design a social network site on our project wiki based upon popular sites such as Facebook.com, MySpace.com, etc. In pairs, students will research an assigned element located on the periodic table, learning that each individual element has its own properties and characteristics. They will then show how these elements interact with each other in the real world and the laboratory based upon those same properties and characteristics. At the same time, students will demonstrate an understanding of various elements of literature and grammar to meet the tasks of the project. Finally, students will interact with each other in two ways. First, they must choose other elements with which to be friends based upon similar chemical and physical properties, uses, and element family members. Secondly, they will blog with their partners and other groups using the discussion tab on the project wiki. www.amityelementspace.wikispaces.com

iPod Interactive Learning Project

Trevor Charles

Middletown High School, Middletown, CT

Students will visit, view, and research exhibits from the Mohegan Tribe Museum. With the help of a Mohegan Tribe Representative, students will design and create a virtual museum tour for the Mohegan Museum with particular note to government, economy, medicine, technology, rituals, and ceremonies. Students will upload their virtual presentations, which include audio and visual complements to existing museum exhibits, to Ipods for students to easily share and distribute. The entire virtual tour will be compiled to create a useable tool for visitors to the Mohegan Tribe Museum.