PROSPECT HEIGHTS — Catholic schools are closed for the summer, but you won’t find the workers at Catholic Telemedia Network (CTN) spending much time at the beach.
The CTN team, which provides technology and educational resources to schools in the Diocese of Brooklyn, is busy spending the summer preparing for the 2024-2025 school year.
CTN is perhaps best known for its work on Tablet Jr., a special supplement published eight times a year in The Tablet, featuring articles written by students in the Diocese of Brooklyn.
But CTN, a service of DeSales Media Group, the ministry that produces The Tablet, has many other programs and events to plan.
The three-person CTN team consists of Gina Krainchich, director of educational media services; Laura Hickey, senior technology instructional specialist; and Shirley Alulema, instructional media specialist.
The team will spend the summer planning Girls & STEM (a conference in which seventh- and eighth-grade girls are taught to code), the Freckle Face-Off (a student math challenge), and professional development programs for teachers that will, for the first time this year, include an artificial intelligence component.
“There’s a lot to do. Education never sleeps,” Alulema said.
These programs require scheduling, many phone calls and emails, booking guest speakers, consulting with the Office of the School Superintendent, and holding brainstorming sessions.
CTN works with Discovery Education, a technology platform that provides videos, virtual field trips, and interactive teaching resources on many of its programs.
Krainchich said the idea is to have everything worked out by the time schools open in September. “All that planning happens in the summer so we are ready to implement as teachers are returning,” she added.
As they plan the events, the CTN team consults the school calendar to ensure they do not conflict with the days students take standardized state tests.
The team is also developing a new project: a media lab where students can learn to create a website, record a podcast, and shoot and edit videos.
Hickey said while the media lab is still in its preliminary stages, the team has a clear goal in mind for the project: “To give students a voice and a different way of showing how they’ve learned.”
“Instead of writing a report on what they’ve learned, they can create a podcast,” she added.
Krainchich said the team will also look ahead to the Jubilee Year in 2025. “It will be an opportunity for us to provide support materials to teachers,” she explained.
The Catholic Church celebrates a Jubilee Year once every 25 years unless otherwise dictated by the pope. Pope Francis announced that the theme of the upcoming jubilee will be “Pilgrims of Hope.”
Krainchich will spend her time this summer looking back as well as forward. She plans to take a deep dive into the data from programs and services that CTN provided during the 2023-2024 school year.
“We will be reviewing and evaluating things — looking at what worked and whether we want to continue,” she explained. “We’ll be asking questions like, ‘Are teachers using it?’ and ‘Is it impacting students?’ The data will give us a good sense of that.”
And while it promotes professional development for educators, CTN doesn’t shy away from professional development for its team.
“The three of us are constantly reading articles and doing research to make sure we are up-to-date on the skills we need to know so that we can relay that information in a less scary way to principals and teachers because we realize that it can be overwhelming,” Alulema said.
The team is mindful of the core of CTN’s mission — promoting the Catholic faith — in everything they do.
“It’s really about bringing our DeSales mission to the schools,” Hickey explained. “It’s telling students how, through media and communication, they can become evangelists.”