Huntington Student Websites Advance to LI Finals
Three websites created by Huntington High School students will be among the competitors at the National History Day Long Island regional finals at Hofstra University next Sunday.
This marks the first time Huntington students are vying in the website category, which was established nationally only last year. Six websites entered the local high school competition in January. Some were individually created and others were the product joint efforts by two students. Two faculty judges using a complicated scoring rubric selected the top three finishers.
Huntington’s entries into the LI regional competition were created by Esti Lodge and Rebecca Leach: “Camera” - http://72749417.nhd.weebly.com/; Brittany Robinson-Smikle: “Pet Scan: New Hope for Cancer” - http://95482764.nhd.weebly.com/ and Lauren Boyce: “Sputnik: A Source of American Fear and Innovation” - http://28482652.nhd.weebly.com/. (The websites can be viewed by clicking on the respective links.)
Students taking up the challenge of creating the websites spent months conducting historical research and perfecting the graphics and multi-media aspects of each project. The time-consuming work was completed during late afternoon, evening and weekend hours.
“All of us are very excited about the website category,” said Lauren Desiderio, a Huntington social studies teacher who is also the National History Day club advisor. “Today’s students are very tech savvy and jumped at the opportunity to learn how to create a website. This medium allows students to creatively display historical photographs and multimedia related to their topics in addition to their historical research text.”
Huntington’s three entries into the LI competition are informative, crisp, colorful, well-organized and just plain cool. “For example, Lauren Boyce’s project emits the beeps that Sputnik sent back to Earth and JFK’s famous speech on reaching the moon,” gushed Mrs. Desiderio. “Esti Lodge and Rebecca Leach’s project included primary source music written about the Kodak camera and advertisements of the time. The website category also allowed Brittney Robinson-Smikle to effectively express the innovation of her topic in history through the videos and images she found on the PET Scan, which would have been much more difficult to demonstrate in the other project categories.”
National History Day is a sprawling competition involving tens of thousands of students in high schools across America who vie in categories ranging from live theatrical performances and group documentaries to historical papers and websites and individual and group exhibits while adhering to this year’s national theme, “Innovation: Impact and Change.”
“After selecting a historical topic that relates to an annual theme, students conduct extensive research by using libraries, archives, museums, and oral history interviews,” according to New York’s National History Day website. “They analyze and interpret their findings, draw conclusions about their topics' significance in history, and create final projects that present their work.”
Mrs. Desiderio said the emergence of student friendly website creation sites such as Weebly.com have enabled students to create historical projects on topics of study. “I am extremely proud and impressed by their hard work and dedication and look forward to our continued work with website creation in our classroom,” she said.
In addition to the six websites entered in Huntington’s local competition, four other websites were created by students in Mrs. Desiderio’s 10th grade Regents social studies classes for a project on Industrial Revolution innovations. However, those teenagers chose not to enter the formal National History Day competition.
The website finalists are in a unique division. “This is very different from the other categories which are separated into individual and group projects,” Mrs. Desiderio said. “Competing in the website category is much more difficult for an individual.”
The top finishers in the Long Island regional will advance to the state finals in Cooperstown in May.
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