Canon-Mac Spotlight:
Recognizing CM Community Members Who Go
ABOVE AND BEYOND
There are so many amazing things happening in the Canon-McMillan School District. This edition, we wanted to congratulate and put the spotlight on: anon-Mac CANON-MAC SCHOOL DISTRICT NEWS
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Lauren Paddick, Canonsburg Middle School English Teacher, who won a $ 500 McDonald’ s MAC Grant to help her fund her Ozobot Project. While learning to program the Ozobots, students will read and analyze fairy tales, analyzing plot, characters, setting, conflict, theme, and mood. Students will begin programming the Ozobots to demonstrate the traits of a character in a fairy tale. After mastering the basic programming of the Ozobots, students will use what they know about literary elements to write their own fairy tales featuring an Ozobot as the main character and at least one other Ozobot as a secondary character. Students will work in groups to create their fairy tale and story board. Groups will write their fairy tales and plan for how they can represent a character’ s feelings and actions with the Ozobot programming options. Groups will present their fairy tales live in class with programmed Ozobot boards in addition to capturing the Ozobot“ performance” on video to share digitally. Students will also write an informational essay about the implementation of technology in English class and how they approached programming a robot to demonstrate human feelings and actions. The Ozobots can also be used as an enrichment activity throughout the school year for students interested in programming.
Greg Taranto, Canonsburg Middle School principal, and Angela Marasco, CMS math teacher, who were selected to present at this year’ s Three Rivers Educational Technology Conference. Dr. Taranto and Mrs. Marasco shared how coding is used to teach problem solving at Canonsburg Middle School’ s Team Oriented Problem Solving( TOPS) course, which all 8th graders take at some point in the school year. TOPS and how coding is incorporated in the class was recently featured by the Association for Middle Level Education’ s National Journal.
Dr. Mark Abbondanza, North Strabane Intermediate School principal, for achieving the 2017 Frank S. Manchester Award for excellence in journalism.
Nina Unitas, who received the 2017 Pennsylvania Art Education Association Outstanding Supervision / Administration Art Educator Award. This award recognizes exemplary contributions, achievements, and service to art education at the state, regional, and national levels.
The 36 LIFT students( and their families), who raised $ 675 for the Canonsburg Food Bank.
Amy Zimmerman, Michael Zimmerman, and Makenzie Buhman presented at the 14th annual Washington County Literacy Seminar that is hosted by the Washington County Federal Program Coordinators. The event was hosted this past August at Washington & Jefferson College. They presented at this event for teachers across Washington County.
Joni Mansmann for her member spotlight article in the ASBO( Association of School Business Officials International) magazine.
Scott Chambers for being selected as a member of the AASA principal’ s supervisory academy.
Canon-McMillan High School’ s Kailee Monaghan, one of two students who recently received the Luminari Award. Luminari is a nonprofit headquartered in Pittsburgh that provides an all-expense-paid admission to Luminari’ s“ I Want to be an Ambassador!” camp— a merit-based scholarship with a value of more than $ 1,200. She was nominated by her school for having demonstrated motivation, open-mindedness and the willingness to learn.