Senior kindergarten teacher Brad MacMaster is loved by children and parents alike for his unconventional and humorous approach to gender neutrality and learning in his classroom. The Newcastle Public School teacher wears pink every day to class and also uses a Smart board to foster interactive learning.Yvonne Berg
Joanna Sanders Bobiash
École Wilfrid Walker School, Regina, Sask.
Earlier this year, when Japan was devastated by an earthquake and a deadly tsunami, Joanna Sanders Bobiash found a creative way to explore the issue with her Grades 6, 7 and 8 social studies students.
She asked them to build a website that could teach the school's younger students about the disaster.
"The fact that they were writing for a broader audience instead of just me, I felt like they had a stronger sense of responsibility," she says. "I found that they really retained the information a lot more."
The students used Google Earth to map the path and the impact of the tsunami, and wrote entries on the recovery efforts, and how earthquakes and tsunamis are formed.
This summer, Ms. Sanders Bobiash became one of Canada's few Google-certified teachers after she attended a training session in Seattle over the summer. The training taught her new ways to use collaborative documents and YouTube in her classroom. Her students now have their own websites, which act as a sort of e-portfolio that their parents can use to track their learning.
Ms. Sanders Bobiash is also working to flip her classroom – meaning students would view her lectures at home and then focus on problems and assignments in class. She intends to spend her Christmas holidays building video lectures that she'll post online. Although a number of resources already exist in English, she must build her own because her school is French immersion.
"Students get a lot more out of the lecture if they can hear and see it," she says. "They need to be able to review and they don't always have someone outside of the classroom who can read to them in French."
– Kate Hammer
Heidi Siwak
Dundas Central Public School, Dundas, Ont.
The best class project Heidi Siwak has led in 22 years of teaching began with friendships forged over Twitter.
She collaborated with people in New York, Australia and Finland who have interests in children's storytelling and app development, and helped her Grade 6 class build their own iPhone app.
A year or so ago, Ms. Siwak fully committed to using technology to help change the way her classroom operates, and took on the app project "not knowing at all what I was getting into," she says.
Her students picked the app's purpose – a tourism guide for Dundas – chose landmarks, photographed them, researched and wrote about them, and designed everything from the user interface to the colour scheme. Ms. Siwak's global friends handled the programming.
The app will launch soon, full of facts and history about sites in Dundas. It maps directions to the sites, and if you point your phone's camera toward any one it overlays the image with information.
"[The students]were so engaged. They became professionals," Ms. Siwak says. "It was amazing, the level of discussion."
Discussion is key: Ms. Siwak spends much less time teaching from the front of the class and has scrapped her seating plan. Students work mostly in groups with her guidance, and post their work to the school's blog network.
"It's noisy," she says. "There's lots of talk."
The class had neither an iPhone nor an iPad when the app project began, but they make do with the technology they have. For Remembrance Day, for example, they hosted a global Twitter chat about Hana Brady, of the book Hana's Suitcase, with participants from nearly every continent and Hana's brother, George Brady, following along. And after watching a documentary, they arranged a Web question-and-answer session with a British-based archaeologist featured in the film.
"This is a different world now, in education," Ms. Siwak says. "It's not within the four walls any more – the whole entire world is our classroom."
– James Bradshaw
Bill Belsey
Springbrank Middle School, Cochrane, Alta.
Bill Belsey has never known teaching without a little help from technology.
Thirty years ago, he and his wife were fresh out of teachers' college when they landed at Eskimo Point, now in Nunavut, to start their careers. They had some salary advanced, but instead of stocking up on supplies or paying down student loans, they bought a Texas Instruments TI-99 to teach with – one of the first computers in the Arctic.
Now, students in Grades 5 to 8 from his rural school at the foot of the Rocky Mountains have no trouble using technology to delve into troves of information.
"We have kids coming into our schools now who have more knowledge about certain content areas than their teachers do," he says.
Accordingly, Mr. Belsey considers himself now as a facilitator, "almost like a gardener," and the class's online hub, coolclass.ca, is his garden. He has a smart board and four donated computers on hand, but some students bring smartphones, with the Rocky View School Division's blessing.
Digital storytelling is a mainstay of Mr. Belsey's teaching, influenced by the role of stories in Inuit culture, and his class was one of Canada's first to have an iTunes subscription for podcasts it makes of book reports and audio essays.
The "Cool Class" kids have made and posted videos about everything from math to weather and Canadian history; launched a blog where fellow students across the country wrote love letters to Canada; connected online with Palestinian students in Jerusalem to talk about the meaning of peace; and used Skype to discuss malaria with students in Botswana.
Mr. Belsey hopes many more teachers will be more experimental and less wary of technology.
"We can sit on the edge of the pond and wonder whether the water's great, or we can hold our kids' hands and jump in the water and say, 'Okay guys, we're going to swim together," he says.
– James Bradshaw
Brad MacMaster
Newcastle Public School, Newcastle, Ont.
Brad MacMaster firmly believes that technology has a place in the classroom, even in kindergarten.
Two years ago, he created a kid-friendly website where he posts cute snapshots, videos and blog entries for parents to track their children's day at school.
"My son now races home to tell me about the video that was uploaded and says, 'All the info is on the website, mom.' ... How cool is that?" says Jennifer Stycuk, a parent who nominated Mr. MacMaster, her five-year-old son's teacher.
Every technology that Mr. MacMaster uses in his classroom is paired with a specific skill that he thinks his kindergarten students will eventually need to master. He has smart boards with programs that allow students to touch words on a screen to create a sentence.
"Kids at that age don't really have finely developed motor skills, so this is a great way for them to practise their sentence construction without the frustration of having to always hold a pencil," he says.
Instead of writing thank-you notes after a field trip, his students create audio podcasts, which "forces even the shy ones to get talking." He also uses apps that require students to rule out the odd thing in a group. This, he says, will help them to prepare for multiple-choice questions in standardized testing. If the student picks the right one, he or she gets to pick a song on Mr. MacMaster's iPod for a class dance break.
Mr. MacMaster has also been fondly dubbed the "Pink Guy" by his students for perpetually wearing outrageous pink ensemble pieces. "I just want to break down gender barriers," he says. "At the end of the day, you want to get kids excited about school, and this technology is just a great way for them to go home and show off all they can do."
– Tamara Baluja
Lorraine Clarkson
Site supervisor, Toronto Urban Studies Centre
When Lorraine Clarkson first came to the Toronto Urban Studies Centre in the 1980s, the outdoor education facility had only a few Polaroid cameras and one computer.
Today, under Ms. Clarkson's leadership, this Toronto District School Board facility has won numerous awards for its use of technology.
The site encourages Grade 3 to 8 students to engage with their urban surroundings using technology, she says. One of its programs lets students use GPS units and digital cameras to explore the city, and then map their discoveries using software on the computer.
In other exercises, students explore the building materials used in various buildings around the city, and learn about different kinds of rock to eventually build an animated presentation on the computer.
"You always hear that technology has students glued to a computer screen. But instead of being cooped in, they're out exploring," Ms. Clarkson says. "And it's not just outside for the sake of being outside. They have a purpose which gets them excited."
Once students come back from their field trip, Ms. Clarkson and her staff help them create a final product on computers. All the computers have dual monitors – one as workspace and the other that streams a how-to help video, which Ms. Clarkson says allows for differentiated learning.
"If they want to watch the whole video first, they can. If they want to watch the video only if they get stumped, they can. And if they want to use the video as they do the work, it lets them to do that," she says. "It's all about meeting the students' needs."
– Tamara Baluja
James Bradshaw