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Vince LoTempio
Seamus McCarville
Marc Rinow
08 09
Project
Summary II
Lancaster
Historical Society Website
1. General
Overview of the Proposed Project:
___After finding
out that our local Lancaster Historical Society had no web page, we
decided to remedy that situation. Three other teachers and myself
decided to start the Lancaster Middle School History Club and offer
students the opportunity to develop a web presence for them. Our
volunteer services have been gladly accepted by the officers and
town historian of the Lancaster Historical Society. The club will
not only design and maintain the web page in future years, but will
also assist in the preservation of materials at the Lancaster
Historical Society (converting all records and photos into a digital
archive).
2. Clear Purpose
and Objective:
The purpose of this project is to preserve
Lancaster history.
3. Stakeholders:
grade level, who will benefit, who will participate in this
project.
The Stakeholders
are the Seventh and Eighth graders of Lancaster, and the Lancaster
community. The preservation of local Lancaster history along with
student involvement are the two main goals. The formation of the LMS
History Club and volunteering our services to the Lancaster
historical Society are the vehicle to accomplish our goals. The
beneficiaries are obviously the Lancaster Historical Society (and
their community members) and the students (who hopefully will have
their appreciation and love of history enhanced by this project).
4. U.S. History
Content Area
The areas of
content that will be addressed are local history, citizenship, and
service to the community.
5. Outline
Describing Content
I. The
Lancaster Historical Society Web page: consisting of links to
upcoming events, visitation, interactive map and historical maps, a
history of Lancaster, the on line newsletter, and an interactive
time line of events.
II. Some
students will be creating original graphics and artwork.
6. Software to be
used, internet materials, contacts, etc.
Dreamweaver (to
create the dynamic and interactive web files). Other graphics
utilities such as Paint and Adobe Photoshop and scanners will aid in
the creation and editing of custom original graphics. Digital
cameras to photograph historic sites around Lancaster.
Contacts at the Lancaster Historical Society are the President
(Terri Wolfe) and the Lancaster town historian (Ben Maryniak).
7. Level of
Student Involvement
Students from both 7th
and 8th grade will be involved in this project. They will
be performing almost all of the work (hands on). Only the most
technical part of web construction and posting will be handled by
the teachers..
8. Evaluation
process (include students when possible)
This work will
count as an extra project grade for students in my social studies
class. The criteria for a grade will include:
·
Did students accomplish the goals and meet
deadlines on their assigned tasks?
·
Did students perform the required editing so that
their portion of the project could be posted to the web?
·
Peer and teacher review during the editing process
at all stages of production
·
Was the final product made ready and suitable for
posting on the Internet?
9. Timeline: how
you envision the project being carried out between start up and
conclusion
The timeline for this project is
December 2008 through June 2009. The History Club will be working in
teams to accomplish the various parts of the project. Students will
be alternating between the Lancaster Historical Society and
Lancaster Middle School to work after school.
Vince LoTempio, 8th
Grade U.S. History
Lancaster Middle
School
Lancaster
Historical Society Project
November 2008
through June 2009
June 8, 2009
After
discovering that our local historical society had no internet
presence, Marc Rinow, Seamus McCarville, and I took it upon
ourselves to remedy this problem. We had an opportunity to do two
things here: give students with an interest in history an outlet to
expand their horizons in the subject and perform a type of community
service project for our town.
The
first thing we had to do was get the green light from the Lancaster
Historical Society (LHS). We set up a meeting before the school year
started to offer our services and find out exactly what they would
like us to do for them (that was the emphasis, for them). We
explained that we wanted to involve Lancaster kids in Lancaster
history and they were thrilled. We settled on two services we could
perform for them. The first was the development of a web page for
the Lancaster Historical Society. The second task, which would
greatly aid the first, was to help the town historian organize and
digitize their collection of photos and documents. By doing this,
students could then develop on line exhibits for the web. The idea
was to eventually get the community involved by putting a call out
for anything in the form of photos or documents that could be
showcased in an exhibit. For example, the history of our Lancaster
Middle School could prompt a call in the local paper for old photos
and school musical programs for use in an exhibit. Since the school
was originally built in 1929 for the Lancaster High School, the
students felt they would get a great response.
Once an
agreement was in place with the Lancaster Historical Society, we
needed to figure out how to bring the students together. We hit on
the idea of starting the Lancaster Middle School History Club. Our
school principal supported the idea, and off we went. Initially we
had a large turnout, but as with many service-oriented endeavors,
membership dwindled to less than 10 students when it came time to do
actual work. After the first few meetings, we made our first trip to
the LHS to introduce the students to the curator and the town
historian. They were quite excited after getting a tour of the
building and learning just how much history their town had, and what
materials were available to them to search through for construction
of articles and on line exhibits.
With a
laptop on loan from Jamestown, we were able to secure Dreamweaver to
design the web page. As teachers, we decided that the actual design
should be done by us. This would allow students to concentrate on
doing the “history,” meaning allowing them to concentrate on
learning how to do the research and writing of a real historian for
the town. They would have input into how their individual pages
produced would look, but would not be bogged down with the technical
aspect of web design (that is not what we wanted to teach them!).
Just as
things were getting on a roll, we were informed that our town
historian had been diagnosed with a terminal illness at the end of
April, 2009. Sadly, he passed away near the end of May. Suddenly the
project did not seem as important as trying to deal with this loss.
One of Mr. McCarville’s students was the son of our town historian.
It was a difficult time for us at Lancaster Middle School. Needless
to say, the most vital resource for the students and this project
was lost.
Another
problem we encountered this spring was where to post the web page.
Our school district could not accommodate us. We contacted the
Village of Lancaster history web master, but did not get a positive
response there either. We are on the verge of getting web space
provided by the town board as of this writing.
Our
goal now is to get the basic web page we have designed posted, and
then add to it over the course over the next few years. Many of our
history club students have expressed a desire to come back to the
club and work on the web page as well as help to digitize the LHS
collection. We absolutely will accommodate them! We viewed this as
an ongoing, multi year project, so we now await the appointment of a
new town historian. When that happens we see the project and the
Lancaster History Club really taking off.
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