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Turning Foundation gives grants to Valley teachers
By Denise Dick
AUSTINTOWN
Teachers at four Mahoning Valley schools earned Turning Foundation minigrants for creative and innovative projects in the classroom.
The foundation, the nonprofit arm of Turning Technologies, Youngstown, offered grant funding of up to $1,500 to classroom teachers who demonstrated practices that included collaborative partnerships with other teachers or community members. This year’s awarded grants total $5,386 and will affect 233 kindergarten through 12th- grade students.
Funding for the grants came through donations from Turning Technologies.
The minigrants were awarded to Robyn Fette at Hubbard Elementary School; Samantha Nappo at Girard’s Prospect Elementary School; Danielle Mrofchak at East Liverpool’s La Croft Elementary School; and Steven Ward, Gina Cardillo and Seth Bastista, all at Austintown Fitch High School.
Ward, a 12th-grade English teacher; Cardillo, the television production teacher and general manager of Austintown Community Television; and Bastista, who teaches innovation, creativity and design thinking, collaborated on the grant application and their students are collaborating across their departments and classrooms on the project using technology.
Learning is no longer linear, so two departments and three classes are working together on the project, Ward explained.
Students in Bastista’s class are redesigning an existing product, trying to improve its usefulness and its aesthetics.
“They’ll be filmed in video journals discussing their product,” Ward said.
Ward’s students will develop a marketing campaign to accompany those products, explaining how to market it and how the public will react to it.
Cardillo’s students then will film commercials for the products or interviews with students talking about the products.
IPads will be used to communicate through the use of FaceTime, messaging, video and audio files.
Bastista said some of the products his students have come up with so far include a waterproof, more-durable iPhone 5 case with integrated headphones, a computer desk with a motor-operated retractable computer and a device that allows a shopper to carry multiple grocery bags in one trip.
Students will be able to print their designs using the school’s 3-D printer.
Cardillo said that people from the community may come in to critique the products, campaigns and commercials after the project is completed.
“The overarching idea is when you look out at the diversity of a community, you have a lot of skills and talents,” Ward said.
Why not utilize the skills and talents in the schools and tap into the student talents and resources to let them be creative, he said.
First-graders in Fette’s class at Hubbard Elementary School will use iPad minis to increase reading and writing achievement.
“With differentiated instruction, we can meet needs of all students,” she said.
Some students may be working on letter sounds while others are writing paragraphs, so setting up the iPads minis in the learning centers enables students to work where they are.
Work centers will be set up around the devices, each based on the small groups of students’ skill level. They’ll read books and then write book reports that will run in the weekly community newspaper The Hubbard Soaring Eagle.
Students in Mrofchak’s class at La Croft Elementary in East Liverpool will use iPads to promote peer modeling and active learning within the classroom.
In Nappo’s class at Girard’s Prospect Elementary School, Kindle Fire devices will be used to motivate and challenge all levels of readers. The project involves teachers in all six second-grade classrooms.
The Turning Foundation says its Innovative Teacher Mini-Grants are “an effort to promote and support creative and innovative classroom practices in local schools,” according to a news release.