Celebrating Ms Helen Sarantes

by Penny Preen-Kynigou, Elementary School Faculty

“Ms.Helen” has been the Technology Specialist at ACS Athens for the past 34 years and has taught generations of ACS Athens students. Her ACS Athens chronicle is one and the same with the history of computing at our Elementary School! To give you an idea, I invite you to join me in traveling back in time, through the years, and peek into her lab...to a time when a ‘mouse’ was still a rodent...to a time when people walking along the street talking to themselves weren’t using a mobile phone but were probably crazy... to a time when video calling only happened in sci-fi movies, and the internet was just a twinkle in the eye of a computer scientist!

Ms. Helen Sarantes joined ACS Athens in 1986. “No one knew what a computer did back then!“ she told me. She used to go and browse computing magazines at the ‘periptera’ in Nea Smyrni, exploring the latest ideas from the States. Her earliest computers were the Commodore 64K’s, the ones with green letters on the screen, and printing paper with holes along both sides that came out in one long strip which you had to tear apart. The school had just 3 programs then: Logo programming, a spelling program, and the students’ favorite, the Oregon Trail. Then Helen wrote a grant and managed to get funding for a brand new computer lab with the latest Hewlett-Packard machines. This computer lab was where the Elementary School books are now shelved and Mr. D. has his counseling office. In those days, there was no network, and she would have to go from machine to machine, installing a program on each from a big floppy disk. As the pace of technology accelerated, Helen was continually reinventing the curriculum. Hewlett-Packards were replaced by Compacts, Compacts replaced by Apples, Apples replaced by PCs. Each year one program superseded the other. Each fall, with the re-opening of the school, I would find her in the lab busy reinstalling updated versions of programs, finding brand new material to replace programs no longer supported, always keeping at the forefront of change. The arrival of the networked lab, another technological milestone, provided some welcome relief, and I remember her proudly showing me how now she could upload a program on one computer, and it would be accessible on all! Then came the internet, opening up infinite possibilities. Nowadays, we take these things for granted, and it is hard to imagine how very different things were not so long ago!

Ms. Helen always saw the potential for the integration of technology in the wider curriculum. She worked tirelessly to provide technology support for the core subjects and units of study across the elementary school grades. This was especially fostered during the school’s adoption of the Primary Years Program of the IBDP where technology and library lessons were team-taught with the classroom teachers. This is the time at which Helen and I collaborated most and which cemented our friendship. She would greet me at each lesson with her characteristic enthusiasm at having discovered yet another great program that she could offer to our students, allowing them to apply skills learned in class in a dynamic and interactive environment.

Ms. Helen leaped at the opportunity to be actively involved in the research for the development of the educational search engine Choosito! , which helps students find reading material online at their own reading level. She was nominated for the 2016 ISTE Outstanding Teacher Award in recognition of her contribution. As the school moved into the development of blended learning and the i2Flex program, Ms. Helen and I co-authored a chapter for the first ACS i2Flex book on the pre-i2Flex skills fostered in the Elementary School, spending many a weekend together writing draft after draft.

Meanwhile, within ACS Athens, she oversaw the alignment of Elementary School standards and benchmarks for Technology and put in place a structured scope and sequence of skills from JK through 5th grade. At every level, she introduced students to the fundamentals of computing, terminology, troubleshooting, and the structured step-by-step thinking technology demands. Without this common vocabulary and fluency in these foundational skills, the elementary teachers would not have been able to guide their students to shift so swiftly and successfully into virtual learning during the COVID 19 lockdown.

Ms. Helen never sought recognition for what she did. Her reward was the joy of teaching, the excitement of watching students achieve success, and the opportunity to mentor individual students who had a passion for technology. Our students will always remember

Ms. Helen celebrating their achievements, how she would always take the time to patiently explain everything so clearly, how she would go out of her way to find each student the perfect tool to expand their learning. Above all, our students will always remember Ms. Helen for how helpful she always was!

Ms. Helen, we wish you joy and happiness in the new adventures which lie ahead! Thank you for dedicating yourself to our technology adventures here at ACS Athens. How could we have made it this far without you?!

You will be greatly missed!