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Re-conceptualizing the classroom: New approaches to learning aided by technology will change how we deliver education
At the end of October, flanked by a group of student high school representatives, Education Minister George Abbott announced the launch of B.C.’s Education Plan, a new blueprint to overhaul the province’s K-12 school system.
The new plan, the minister said, will transform the education system to be more flexible, emphasize personalized learning and increase the use of technology.
“The world has changed and we need to shift the way we look at teaching and learning. This plan offers a way forward.”
Though short on details, the plan would also include a new Teachers Act and the establishment of “regular teacher performance evaluation sessions.”
Accompanying the launch was an interactive website created by the ministry to provide more details and solicit public opinion.
Parsing the hundreds of comments received in the past month reveals a mixed response ranging from high praise to skepticism.
One group that leaves no doubt about its opinion on the plan is the B.C. Teachers’ Federation. In its new issue of Teacher magazine, the lead article, “Experiments with kids’ learning,” BCTF researcher Larry Kuehn derides the plan as a power grab by the ministry to undermine teachers through centralized data collection and technology use.
By Michael Mazer, The Vancouver Sun, December 13, 2011
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
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Schools of the Future, Today
For over a year the Ministry of Education has been hinting at a change in direction for the province’s education system.
It all started in mid-2010 with murmurings about “21st Century” or “child-centred” education, with little to no explanation of what that meant, leaving educators, trustees, and parents to banter about ideas on blogs, listserves, and the Twitter-verse.
Even the recent launch of B.C.’s Education Plan has few answers — just a plan to have a plan after engaging with education stakeholders.
But some schools are way ahead of the curve. By using technology, giving students the opportunity to choose what they want to study, or even just allowing teachers to deviate from the curricula norm, these schools have already taken education to the next level and waiting for the ministry to catch up.
Rise of the machines
Librarian Moira Ekdahl is quick to correct anyone who says John Oliver Secondary School in East Vancouver has a library. It’s a Learning Commons now.
Stacks and reference materials have been replaced by laptops, iPads, and interactive white boards. There are still books — Ekdahl swears they will never disappear under her watch — but technology is taking over.
“It’s really driven by giving kids multiple ways of accessing resources and information, and the tools to shape their own learning, and also to support new ways of teaching, because I think teachers need that support as well,” she told The Tyee.
While any teacher can make use of the technology, there are two particular programs that use technology as a main tool in the classroom: the Digital Immersion Minischool and the iPad Literacy Cohort.
Running from Grades 8 to 12, the Digital Immersion Minischool has been running from John Oliver since 1997, taking in students from across the district interested in expanding their online skills. Though the technology has changed, the main objective never has: teaching students how to operate in an Internet world.
When The Tyee visited the Digital Immersion 8 class in early November, students were just getting their brand new Mac laptops, a requirement for the course. Working in groups, they negotiated the definition of “social citizenship” with the aim of creating a wiki on the topic, and ultimately establishing six concrete rules for a class code of online conduct.
“I think we’ve always been teaching those skills. I didn’t grow up with this at school, but we were still required to learn how to critically think, how to problem solve, how to articulate our thoughts, how to present,” explains teacher Zhi Su.
“The way we access and interact with information is different. If you look around you, you don’t see students standing by the bookshelves and accessing books, they’re all on computers, and that’s what they tend to gravitate towards. It’s up-to-date, latest information, whereas some of these books are older than I am.”
By Katie Hyslop, 15 Nov 2011, TheTyee.ca
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Canadian Association of University Teachers launches campaign to Save Library and Archives Canada
(OTTAWA: November 2, 2011) – The Canadian Association of University Teachers today unveiled a national campaign to protect Library and Archives Canada (LAC). The “Save Library and Archives Canada” is being launched by CAUT in response to funding cuts and internal managerial decisions that are threatening the quality and integrity of Canada’s only national public library and archives.
“Badly conceived restructuring, a narrowing of its mandate, and financial cutbacks are undermining LAC’s ability to acquire, preserve and make publicly available Canada’s full documentary heritage,” James L. Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers said at a news conference in Ottawa today.
These changes, Turk added, have already led to a reduction in the number of specialist archivists and librarians, reduced public access and services, and the loss of rare and important materials.
Liam McGahern, president of the Antiquarian Booksellers of Canada, said a growing number of Canadian materials are not being collected by LAC because of reduced funding and a change in its acquisitions policy.
“Canadians recently lost a unique and irreplaceable set of journals chronicling late 19th Century stories of settlers and First Nations people of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Labrador Coast. This is just one of many examples,” McGahern explained. “Rare military documents, sheet music, and literature that would otherwise have gone to Library and Archives Canada are quietly all slipping away.”
CAUT is calling on the federal government to amend the LAC Act to ensure its mandate includes developing a comprehensive, not selective, collection of Canadian material.
“Our nation’s artistic, historical, and cultural heritage is at stake,” said Turk. “Genealogists, historians, researchers, graduate students, Aboriginal communities, and the general public are all affected by what is happening at LAC.”
The Canadian Association of University Teachers is the national voice of 66,000 academic and general staff at 120 universities and colleges across the country.
More information on the campaign can be found at www.savelibraryarchives.ca.
Contact:
Angela Regnier, Communications Officer,
613-726-5186 (O);
regnier@caut.ca (email)
Social justice and diversity key subjects for new UBC program
Social justice, diversity and aboriginal perspectives will be dominant themes in all courses offered by the University of B.C. education faculty starting next fall as a result of a program overhaul that’s been in the works for several years.
The subjects won’t be taught as separate courses but will be infused throughout the curriculum, Associate Dean Rita Irwin said in an interview this week. “The program will have a very different look and feel,” she noted.
There will also be greater emphasis on research and inquiry, along with a requirement for student teachers to complete an alternative practicum in a non-school setting — such as a community centre, a museum, or even a senior-citizens’ home. That’s intended to open students’ eyes to a variety of work opportunities beyond the often-tight job market for generalist teachers in Metro schools.
“It will help our graduates understand what they can do with their Bachelor of Education degree,” Irwin explained.
The exceptional emphasis on diversity will better prepare teachers for work in classrooms that include students with special needs and behavioural challenges. A special focus on aboriginal perspectives will help teachers encourage success among aboriginal students while also teaching all children to appreciate aboriginal culture, Irwin said.
While these studies are not new at UBC, they will no longer be confined to a separate course with lessons to be learned and set aside. Rather, they will be embedded throughout the program, which represents a change for both students and faculty, she added.
Asked what new students are likely to find most surprising upon entering the education faculty, Irwin said it is the ever-growing emphasis on professionalism and the message that once they become teachers, their actions — and their relationships with students in particular — will be under constant review.
“That’s an eye-opener for many of them,” Irwin said.
Last year, approximately 2,700 new teachers were certified in B.C. but only 1,500 new teaching positions were available, the university says. Nevertheless, Irwin says, there are still plenty of opportunities for graduates, including jobs teaching abroad.
BY JANET STEFFENHAGEN, VANCOUVER SUN
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Higher Education in Ontario
Ontarians are busy debating where the province’s three new post-secondary campuses should be, with mayors from Barrie to Niagara Falls holding out their caps. But ahead of that decision, Glen Murray, Ontario’s new Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, says there are all kinds of ideas he wants to explore first. Those who lust after future campuses should take note.
Here are 10 things I learned about the future of higher education in Ontario from Glen Murray.
1. Murray’s biggest concern “is how we’re utilizing the existing capacity we have right now.” He thinks more campuses should be using their physical resources year-round, by offering three-semesters, perhaps.
2. He’s exploring three-year degrees. Three, after all, is the standard in Europe and is increasingly common in Australia. The fourth year could be rolled into the Master’s, he says.
3. Murray knows that students’ “tolerance” for 500-person lectures delivered on physical campuses is waning. He thinks future courses will include more online delivery. “I think you’re seeing the build out now, in the next few years, of information technology and online learning at the kind of scale you saw with the expansion of the colleges in the 70s and 80s,” he says.
4. Murray thinks the government can help us use our time more wisely, perhaps by offering courses on commuter trains and coaches. “Working, looking after your family, often your extended family… it’s very hard to find time to upgrade your skills,” he explains.
5. Murray thinks new campuses should be catalysts for downtown revitalization. When he was mayor of Winnipeg, Red River College wanted to build on the periphery, but he insisted it be built in the Exchange District. “That triggered a renewal of that part of Winnipeg where the vacancy rate dropped from over 50 per cent to around 10 per cent and provoked a renewal of the City of Winnipeg’s tax base,” he says, and “it spawned a whole bunch of new enterprises, triggered a digital effects industry, and repopulated a whole bunch of heritage buildings.”
6. Murray sees a lot of struggling places aching for development in Ontario too. He notes that successful revitalizations of downtowns are already underway by Brock University in St. Catharines and by Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ont. He sees potential for such revitalization in cities like Hamilton, Ont. where downtown is “50 per cent parking lots.”
7. But he thinks rural Ontario can’t be overlooked. “The problems of Dryden, Cornwall, Lindsay, Sudbury or Goderich are not that different from the problems of large urban centres where mainstreets have declined and are bereft of businesses and activities,” he says. “We want to make sure we’re restoring small-town Ontario and using our public institutions to help rebuild main-streets of small communities.” While he says it’s premature to guess where the new campuses may be, that statement makes it seem less likely that all will be built in fast-growing suburban Toronto.
8. Murray says Ontario will bound into the future on the backs of the Gazelles, small knowledge-based companies that derive value out of high-tech design and intellectual property. “[Gazelles] are often perfect in the small retail buildings that make up the small streets of downtowns and they need connections to some sort of university or research facility,” he says.
9. Murray won’t commit to making the new campuses teaching-focused, as was proposed in the recent book Academic Reform. In teaching universities, class sizes could theoretically be halved or tuition could be reduced—or both—because professors spend 80 per cent of their time teaching, rather than 40 per cent of their time teaching and 40 per cent on research as they do today.
10. Policy on the new campuses is coming in a month or so. In the meantime: “if universities are coming at me saying, look, right now we have X number of buildings and this kind of campus, we think we can use these assets to better serve our communities, but our new campus idea would add net new value by doing this, this and this,” says Murray, “that’s the type of thing I’m looking for.”
This article was written by Josh Dehaas for Macleans on campus.