The South Fayette Township School District is continuing its
2017-2018 “Ingenuity and Flexibility” efforts through enhanced
instructional practices and by embedding technology integration
into the curriculum. As part of the: Regional REMAKE LEARNING
www.remakelearning.org Effort; Carnegie Science Center
Pathways to Learning Partnership; Digital Promise: League of
Innovative Schools www.digitalpromise.org; AIU 3 STEAM (Science,
Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics), Arts Education
Collaborative (AEC); and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
Opportunities; and, as grateful recipients of The Grable Foundation
Grants, the District continues to foster and forge partnerships that
benefit children and educators on a regional and national level.
Ongoing embedded and integrated professional development
collaborations remain essential to advancing programs.
Please join us for the District’s fall athletics and arts programs.
The calendar is available online at www.southfayette.org. If any
community resident or family would like a hard copy calendar for
home use and did not already receive one, please pick one up at
the District’s Central Office located in the Stadium Complex.
On behalf of the entire District, and to borrow from Humanitarian
Albert Schweitzer’s words, “Seek always to do some good,
somewhere…” we are ever thankful for the good in this District,
for the incredible partnerships that benefit our students and staff,
and especially for the community’s support of our children and
schools.
All the best,
Dr. Bille P. Rondinelli
Superintendent of Schools
Kristen Davis and
Gavin Parisi, both Seniors
at South Fayette High
School, have been selected
as Semifinalists in the 63rd
annual National Merit
Scholarship Program.
These scholastically
talented high school seniors have an opportunity to continue
in the competition for National Merit Scholarships that will be
offered next spring. According to the National Merit Scholarship
program, about 1.6 million juniors in more than 22,000 high
schools entered the 2018 National Merit Scholarship Program
by taking the 2016 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship
Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®), which served as an initial screen
of program entrants. The nationwide pool of semifinalists
represents less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors and
includes the highest-scoring entrants in each state. For more
information, please visit www.nationalmerit.org.
58 South Fayette
Seated: Priya Matreja and Zoe Koutavas
Standing: Anish Thangavelu, Prateek Jukalkar, Parv Shrivastava,
and Vinay Pedapati
South Fayette High School
Students Present to Pen and
Touch Technology Experts
The MyEduDecks Team is in their fourth year of designing and
Beta testing a pen-based software flashcard application to be
used for personalized learning and assessments. Students are
conducting educational research taking their product to maturity.
Their work has been published in three books The Impact of Pen
and Touch Technology on Education, Revolutionizing Education with
Digital Ink, and Frontiers in Pen and Touch (Springer publications).
In previous years the team presented their work at the WPTTE
and CPTTE conferences at Pepperdine University, Microsoft
Research in Seattle, and Brown University. On October 12-14,
2017, the team presented their research at the Conference on
Pen and Touch Technology in Education (CPTTE) at Northwestern
University in Evanston, Illinois.
The team’s findings were accepted by the conference board
which results in their work being published in 2018. Led by
Aileen Owens, South Fayette’s Director of Technology and
Innovation, this years’ team continued the SFHS teams’ tradition
of presenting their extensive research and findings on the effect
of Pen and Touch Technology within the classroom to national
and international experts in the field. Because of the expanding
use of technology throughout public school classrooms globally,
this research is vital to continue to meet the needs of students
and their teachers. As in the past, the South Fayette team was
able to provide authentic data using their own experiences
within their classrooms as well as the Beta testing they conducted
throughout the districts’ student population. This year the team
created a new iteration of the app for Miguel Hernandez’s middle
school Spanish classroom. This coming year the team is planning
a new Beta test of the app which will include a feature that allows
students to listen to the teachers’ voice in Spanish and help them
interpret the meaning in English. This year’s team included Zoe
Koutavas, Prateek Jukalkar, Priya Matre, Vinay Pedapati, Parv
Shrivastava, and Anish Thangavelu and were accompanied
by Owens and Hernandez. The previous published articles
can be found in “The Impact of Pen and Touch Technology in
Education” http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319155937
and “Revolutionizing Education with Digital Ink”
http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319311913.