This school year, students in
Sandalwood High School's Academy of Information Technology (AOIT) will participate in cross-curriculum projects that integrate their core subjects to their academy subjects.
Each grading period, freshmen in the school’s AOIT will work on a project that focuses on English, math, science or social studies. Students will connect what they learn in their core classes to create a combined project that furthers their understanding of the subject and connects to real world situations.
Projects are not only a collaboration for students, as teachers also have to work together to plan their individual curriculum around each other to ensure the success of the projects.
"The projects are exactly learning multipliers," said Tom Foppiano, Human Geography teacher. “They enable teachers to engage their students, and they also allow the students to do projects that engage their peers through visual stimuli.”
For the first of four projects this school year, students focused on science. During the first grading period, students studied severe weather, including lighting, hurricanes, tornadoes and flooding.
Students were tasked with building a mock arena on the Westside of Jacksonville that would be safe from severe weather.
To complete the task, students had to determine which severe weather conditions Jacksonville is traditionally known to have – combining both the science and geographic aspects. They then had to graph the coordinates of the location to see what size stadium would fit in the location – the math aspect of the project. The final aspect is English, which will be graded based on the spelling, grammar and composition of the final report.
Students completed the project by creating an informative, concise and entertaining PowerPoint presentation that summarizes the reasons people will be safe from severe weather in the proposed arena.
To present their project, students used interactive whiteboards that were provided to the school through a Workforce Grant. The school currently has six of the high-tech whiteboards, which allow teachers and students to annotate presentations and run any software application projected onto the whiteboard from a connected computer.
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