Grant Recipient -Paul Blair // Currently, hundreds of national and international museums, and historic and natural sites of interest, provide classroom virtual field trips. Conducted by a docent or staff member of the museum, these field trips utilize cameras and microphones for real-time interaction and viewing with and by the students. The distance learning equipment and programs will open up endless opportunities for students in our community, to take field trips to locations such as the Smithsonian Institute, the Holocaust Museum, and the Great Wall of China, without leaving their classroom. The equipment purchased with this grant can be utilized by any teacher in any building to enrich their curriculum.

Grant Recipient - Richard Allen // The Edugame Student Response System allows teachers to receive instantaneous results of the questions and provide immediate individualized feedback on responses to students in review of any curriculum material and in preparation for any curriculum test. This grant provides for one Edugame system which can be shared and utilized in any middle school classroom.

Grant Recipient - Donna Dennihy // All 4th and 5th grade students in Skaneateles Central Schools participate in a program called “Six Traits of Writing”. Developed to teach mandated NY State Dept of Education standards, “Six Traits” teaches ideas and content; word choice; organization; voice/personality; and sentence fluency. This grant provided curriculum development time to create innovative programming using music to teach these writing fundamentals. Formal lesson plans incorporating various forms of music including podcasts, video of famous musicians, original recordings and NPR segments were created.

Grant Recipient - Rachel Lewis // It is challenging to provide relevant and interesting materials to keep teenage boys engaged in daily reading activities. By high school, many boys have moved away from reading popular fiction and prefer other types of books. This grant will purchase books for an expanded collection of biography, autobiography, survival, sports, mystery, historical fiction, adventure and science fiction titles for the high school library.

Grant Recipient - Lori Usifer // Lori Usifer and Mitch Major have designed “Time Travel” movies for the 6th grade social studies curriculum. These movies allow students to “travel” to Neolithic times, ancient Egypt and ancient Greece. The funding to develop this curriculum was provided by summer grants from the school district. This grant provided funding for Final Cut Express software,to be utilized by both teachers, to expand the level and ability of the “time travelers” to visit unique locations. Final Cut Express provides for a “green screen” allowing “visits” to anywhere they have video (i.e. standing on the Great Wall of China).

Grant Recipient - Gail Calloway // This grant provided financial assistance for 5 eighth grade students to participate in their class trip to Washington, D.C.

Grant Recipient - Barb Delmonico // This grant provided funding for a faculty member to attend a teacher’s workshop by renowned children’s book author Eric Carle. Teaching methodologies learned helped enrich the Kindergarten curriculum.

Grant Recipient - Mary Arnott // This grant provided funding to develop a program to integrate educational websites for enrichment of the 2nd-grade curriculum. This pilot program was reviewed by other grade levels for possible integration into their curricula. More than 75 websites were identified and grouped according to content. Student activities were created to go with each website, thereby offering teachers easy access to very usable content and material to enrich the second grade curriculum.

Grant Recipient - Gail Calloway // This grant provided financial assistance for 7 eighth grade students to participate in their class trip to Washington, DC. Funding for this grant was made possible by a gift from the Skaneateles High School Class of 1951.