Mahopac High School Life Teaches Freshmen to Navigate High School
Jason Zides stood in front of a class of ninth graders and pointed to a white board as Google Earth zoomed around the world and landed at the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
“Your social studies teachers would be seriously impressed if they got a presentation with this in it,” said Zides, the secondary educational technology specialist for the Mahopac Central School District. “Social studies teachers love this because you can travel around the earth without leaving the classroom.”
Zides was the guest speaker in a Mahopac High School Life class that all freshmen are required to take. He was speaking to Global History teacher Kerry Price’s class about Multimedia Technology Options, including all the Google tools available to the students to use on their district-issued Chromebooks.
He ran through tools for making slide presentations, templates to make interesting layouts, audio recording sites and links to copyright-free photos that the students can use to augment their projects.
The skills can help students, whose work is often presented via the Chromebooks, to use technology to be highly creative.
“On a scale of one to useful, where are we at?” Zides asked the class. The students, busy zooming around the earth on their own, said the lesson was very useful.
The MHS Life class promotes a positive school culture, while boosting the social, emotional and executive functioning skills that support academic development in high school. The class aims to help students develop self-awareness and self-management skills while building relationships and learning to resolve conflicts, said April Ljumic, the MHS assistant principal who oversees the program.
Zides’ gave his technology demonstration to each section of MHS Life class. His was just one session of the MHS Life curriculum, which includes a variety of guest speakers throughout the year.
Over in Amy Mahoney’s MHS Life class, students were learning to question their own preconceptions. Mahoney, a 12th grade English teacher, gave her class a new phrase to think about – a “paradigm shift.”
“It’s good to question your own mindset,” Mahoney said. “The objective here is to analyze negative paradigms high school students might have and adjust them to reflect positivity.”
Mahoney gave her class three scenarios and asked them to recast them in a positive way.
Ninth graders Kelsi Thimm and Giovanna Angrisani took the example of feeling ignored by a friend who was too busy with sports and other activities to hang out. Instead of looking at it in a negative way, they celebrated the girl’s achievements.
“I really admire my friend Cameron,” they wrote, of the fictitious friend. “She helps her mom with her siblings … works really hard in school … is dedicated to her sport … and babysits. I hope I can balance my life like she does.”
From technology to empathy, the skills MHS Life teaches will last a lifetime.
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