Everyone at St. Stephens High School shared in a celebration for teacher Molly Rice and her theater arts students Wednesday.
The educational technology company eInstruction brought enough cake to feed every student and teacher at the school.
Rice's Theater Arts II students scripted, acted in and filmed a "Twilight Zone" spoof that won the classroom some $30,000 worth of interactive gadgets.
Among the equipment: interactive whiteboards, a netbook computer and a projection system.
Rice also gets $1,000. She'll spend it on a sound system for the Thursday night "coffee house," where her students perform original music weekly without the benefit of microphones or speakers.
St. Stephens is the first American high school to win the eInstruction video contest.
Rice plans on using the technology to introduce her students to other classrooms in Ireland and England, where she has connections with teachers. The technology goes a long way toward making her 21st-century students the global learners they're meant to be, she said.
Mariah Fleenor, a 17-year-old St. Stephens junior, is already looking forward to the opportunity. She hopes the high-tech tools in her theater class will make distance learning easier.
The equipment also will make Rice's theater setting more practical.
"The items will totally change my room," Rice said.
The class meets in a converted tractor shed where students often have to move their chairs to face the board instead of a stage. Now, they'll be able to learn from any place in the room.
Students got some important lessons even before they prevailed in the contest.
They researched the rules and regulations of the contest. They studied copyright law to determine how far they could go in their 'Twilight Zone" parody, which included a take-off on the Pink Floyd song "Another Brick in the Wall."
Some worked on the script. Some came up with lyrics. Some made the storyboards. Another student filmed. Yet another did the editing.
It made for a novel way to learn, students said.
"It was new," said Katya Bengston, 17. "We'd never done anything like that before. … School can be very repetitive, so being able to do something like this was valuable."
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