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Hestia Schools

Hestia Meets a Virginia (US) High School Latin Class: Part VI

In spite of the frustrations documented in the last post, our trial was a truly useful experiment in making academic research more open to and usable for a broader audience, and we can be hopeful about indications for future productive collaborations. We believe that the positive outcomes outweighed the few negatives, and that the obstacles were not intractable.

Students felt that they could engage with the primary source material, which is a rare opportunity for ninth-graders. As a consequence, students felt a stronger sense of ownership of their own study, thereby supporting Dewey’s goals for the democratization of education. In time, we should be able to see whether students also reinvest their interest in Classics as a subject that provides them with unique opportunities to participate as researchers.

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Hestia Meets a Virginia (US) High School Latin Class: Part V

It was not all plain sailing, however. Inevitably, we encountered problems and frustrations with conducting this trial. What Elton and I learned, and what we document here, may help to inform how to design and conduct future collaborations, because the obstacles largely address infrastructural concerns, or pragmatically, “getting work done on the ground.” The researchers themselves felt that they were not fully able to carry out the trial as thoroughly as they might have because of the school syllabus and timetable.

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Hestia Meets a Virginia (US) High School Latin Class: Part IV

Encouragingly, the results showed that the students enjoyed using Hestia, particularly the ability to scan the ancient locations and find out about what Herodotus says about them using GoogleEarth. Initially we thought that was accounted for by the fact that GoogleEarth was new to students and that they enjoyed the novelty of seeing the world from satellite. Rather than GoogleEarth’s novelty, most of the students were already seasoned users of the application. So it appears that Hestia was building upon their technological familiarity.

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Hestia Meets a Virginia (US) High School Latin Class: Part III

One of the ways that my collaboration with Hestia added to my own “pedagogical toolbox” as a teacher was working with Elton to design the survey.  The survey itself had to target a student audience and, at the same time, deliver robust information for the research team. I had a lot of experience and interest in writing good questions and assessments to evaluate student mastery, but I did not have a lot of experience thinking in survey metrics.

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9th-Grade

Hestia Meets a Virginia (US) High School Latin Class: Part II

As I concluded the first installment of this story, we left off with Elton and myself considering a robust pedagogical framework that would guide our decisions about involving the students during their classroom time.  We were hoping that the lessons would be interesting but also would convince educators that our goals aligned with other school goals for curriculum and school improvement. Therefore, some of the consequential, overarching philosophical questions we pondered were: Can a digital lab work? How can it work? What consequences might it have? What potential might there be to share or to extend the practice?

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Latin3

Hestia Meets a Virginia (US) High School Latin Class: Part I

In 2010, the Hestia team worked together with a high school in the US state of Virginia to experiment with different ways of thinking about Herodotus’s Histories using digital resources. In the next series of posts, Chris Ann Matteo, formerly an Outreach officer for the American Philological Association (APA) and a teacher of Latin in Loudoun County Public Schools at the time, talks about the inspiration behind the collaboration.

It all started when I met Elton Barker at the final dinner of the Classical Association Annual Conference in March of 2009 in Glasgow.

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Workshop Trials

Teaching ancient history can be difficult. You are dealing with what can seem a remote and lofty world which has little in common with ours, very often you are dealing in abstracts or people who at first glance have little in common with us. This is not true but it is a perception.

I remember someone once saying to be that seeing a temple for real helps it make sense. It is one of those things which always stuck in my head and resonated when I thought about my own experiences of travelling ancients sites.

Ok, so what we are talking about here is not quite the same as actually seeing something for real, but it is pretty close.

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Introducing Hestia Schools

I remember when I first heard about the Hestia project, through an announcement on a Classics news list, on a rather long Monday morning. It immediately jumped out and grabbed my interest – what could be more exciting for any lover of texts from the ancient world to explore them through a new, digital medium? As a childhood lover of books and also a fan of computer exploration games, to me, this project is taking these two fascinating and enjoyable things, and merging them together so that one enhances and illuminates the other. I had read some of Herodotus’ Histories, and loved its meandering process of discovery, so the idea of mapping out the text captured my imagination.

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