Turning Points in Technology: Digital Research and NHD

By Jessica Peng

February 12, 2024

For this year’s Jericho History Day (JHD), Jericho Middle School students were assigned to create a slideshow on this year’s National History Day (NHD) theme, Turning Points in History. 

Each JHD project included different sections, including the Thesis, Right Before, Heart of the Story, Right After and Long After. It allowed students to build their research skills and put together their findings on a topic of their choice. With the guidance of social studies teachers and librarians, students who wished to compete for NHD also had the opportunity to create a more elaborate project for the competition where they were able to work in groups or individually.

During their research process, many students found themselves interacting with GoGuardian, a web-filtering software installed on school-issued Chromebooks. Although students and teachers believe that Go Guardian is useful, it sometimes poses a challenge when trying to access resources and websites for research/educational purposes.

Patrick Fogarty, Director of Educational Technology at Jericho, oversaw the installation of GoGuardian on school devices before the pandemic to ensure safety for students and prevent them from accessing potentially harmful websites. While some students believe that GoGuardian is useful and can help prevent deleterious or distracting websites that may disturb their education and learning, some also believe that it poses a challenge during the research process because it blocks websites related to their research and academic work, specifically NHD.

Dr. Fogarty stated that “most of the stuff that’s blocked is blocked because if you gained access to it we couldn’t verify that they're not selling your data.” GoGuardian allows students to use school-issued devices with safety and protects students from obtaining access to harmful websites. It “allows us to have granular control over what students can access both inside the building and outside the building when they’re logged into their Jericho apps account,” Dr. Fogarty explained. 

National History Day is an important part of the academic experience at JMS. Participating in Jericho History Day can boost student performance across all subjects and improve literacy, writing, research, and critical thinking skills. While GoGuardian seems to provide some challenges to the research process, it ultimately protects students from potentially harmful websites and allows them to make smart decisions in finding their source material.