Our Plan to move forward

The work that we have been doing in my superintendency has been very positive but to create real change we realized we needed to connect with a larger group. It is important for me as a Superintendent to think beyond my own collection of schools and to maintain a System view. To that end I have now created a technology committee that has broad base representation and when we meet the next time, the committe will expand to have members from every superintendency in the Board.

Currently the original committee is out in West Vancouver as guests of Chris Kennedy and his administrators. West Vancouver is doing some very innovative things in the areas of instructional technology, programs of choice and assessment. The Peel group is out there to listen, learn, ask questions and bring back ideas and suggestions to help us move forward.

It is important to continually remind people of what this journey is really about. This isn't about technology for technology sake, this is about looking for ways to use technology to help us improve our practice to meet the needs of 12st Century Learners. In his book, Teaching Digital Natives; Partnering for Real Learning, Marc Prensky talks about the huge changes that have taken place in education, but he also laments the fact that the change is happening everywhere but in the classroom. We still assume that children are arriving in our schools as empty vessels and it is our job to fill them up. The reality though, as Prensky points out, is that children are on the internet, watching television, movies, playing games, and are inundated with knowledge and information from a variety of sources. Then they walk in a class room where the sad reality is class rooms look the same as they have for the last 100 years. What is even sadder is what is going on in many of those class rooms hasn't changed much either.

To continue to move our students forward schools need to be meeting the needs of our clientele. The fact that Pensky would identify schools as the least innovative places that kids spend their valuable time is very sad and certainly speaks to the engagement issues that we are having with our children, particularly our boys. When our kids are living in a world where the computer can immediately respond to their passions and interests, it hardly surprising that they fail to find a socratic class room engaging. Among the children that Prensky interviewed for his study, they commented on the fact that they feel teachers do not respect what they bring to the class room. 21st century class rooms need to reflect a partnership between the students and the teacher. The role of the teacher changes from the giver of information to the coach that helps students become critical consumers of information. The children in our class rooms who are the adults of the future will need very sophisticated tools to allow them to navigate and challenge the techno-information age that they will be living in.