Professional Learning Goals

Logistics: As a team, we have a much better understanding of what would be involved in the managing of a classroom project like this in an alternative school and regular high-school setting.

Guidance: We had some excellent discussions about what guidance counsellors do to support the appropriate use of mobile technology in school (e.g., providing a secure spot for students to drop off their mobile devices).

Collaboration: We were able to meet at each other’s schools to learn how they set up their classrooms and this provided an excellent opportunity to reach outside of our departments.

Life-Long Learning: As technology changes, we will need to change and grow with it. We were able to reach out to the industry to develop a relationship with Sphero robotics, as well as Moment, an online app that helps us track our daily mobile technology usage.

Activities and Resources

We were able to visit other schools/classrooms in our board and this helped us understand some of the unique features/challenges of a school with minimal technology programs, a school with a wide variety of hard and soft technology programs, and an alternate school. This allowed us to share lessons and techniques that we have developed over the years to support each other.

We were able to use some of our available funds to visit the Niagara District School Board’s Launch Centre, a unique program that has developed strong partnerships with the industry (and their technology program is based out of a shopping plaza, as well). Grade 9 students have a dynamic math educator who works hand-in-hand with technology educators to deliver an authentic learning experience. The Trades and Technology coach for the board invited us to their Skills Canada run-off competition where we had an opportunity to interact with eight different broad-based technology educators, and exchange emails and ideas. We learned how the NCDSB has partnered with VEX robotics so that each class in Grade 7-9 has a class set of VEX IQ robots to learn to code with.

With the extra time, we met with one program officer at each of the two Niagara College campuses for a tour and discussion about the skills that secondary school students entering programs are arriving with and what knowledge and skills they wish students had when entering post-secondary. During this time, we also learned about a Federal Apprenticeship website that helps provide students interested in entering a trade with grant money.

Unexpected Challenges

Our one challenge was release. Our district put a moratorium first semester on PD so many of our meetings were after school and two meetings were on a Saturday.

Once the second semester began, we were able to use our release and travel to the Niagara region for meetings with Niagara Catholic District School Board and Niagara College.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we were unable to present our work to teacher candidates at a faculty of education. We were disappointed that this opportunity did not happen as we felt we had a lot to offer future teachers given our wide variety of experiences, but will reach out to them next year.

Enhancing Student Learning and Development

In two of our schools, we have already started to engage our students with robotics. The learning that we have done is allowing our students to see a direct link between numeracy and the programming of robots. Our alternate school has just been “gifted” several Vex robots that three of us will be working with so that they can be introduced in an alternate school setting.

Our learners come to us from Grade 8 with a wide variety of experiences integrating technology for learning. This project is helping us establish a baseline for all learners and build on their understanding of how mobile and embedded technology can be used to further their learning while establishing in the students’ mind acceptable norms of use. With some of the funding, we purchased four Sphero robots (Scott was so excited, he purchased a BB8 for his own personal use.).

From our work, we believe that we will further enhance student learning and development by finding more links that will lead to the creation of meaningful projects in exploring technologies.

Sharing

Our team presented along with Tunde, another OCDSB educator, on April 27 to a group of 23 exploring technology educators. The session started at 9:30 a.m. and went until 3 p.m. with topics covered such as the appropriate use of mobile technology in the classroom, hands-on with SPHERO (we were loaned two class sets so everyone had one), linking numeracy with programming using VEX, and Arduino.

Information has also been made available to our educators on Google+ and I am continuing to work with our new Trades and Technology consultant on the integration of our work into a modular learning format.

Project Evaluation

As a team, we feel that we have met (or exceeded) all of the goals outlined in our proposal. We have a better understanding of each school site’s unique needs and how we can support each other.