From the Project Manager: Mr. Mark Basaraba
Greetings and welcome to the (BIT) Building It Together Project. As I write this, we are planning to present at CASA--in Niagara Falls, Ontario--a conference that will be held this year in early July.
Well, it has indeed been two years of success for the BIT Team, teachers, and students of St. Thomas Aquinas RCSSD #38. We finished off the 2008/2009 school year by celebrating our Skype project. We heard from our students, teachers and community contact members that have been engaged in the project. Success stories were shared and a live Skype was performed with students from St. Augustine School in Ponoka. We were pleased to see Brad Clarke from Alberta Education in attendance to provide an overview for the Trustees, Media and Local Government officials who were in attendance.
In August 2009 we gathered for a professional development day where we invited new teachers into the project and spent the day evaluating our performance while adjusting our project goals. This was a very worthwhile undertaking as it allowed for good discussion on the direction we were going to take in the 2009/2010 school year. We were joined by Jason Daniels, researcher for the University of Alberta. Jason shared with us that he would be visiting classrooms throughout the district and conducting research through observation, discussion with students, school and divisional staff members.
In October, Mr. Jason Daniels visited the schools in the district which are involved with the BIT project. Positive comments were heard and received with regard to his visits.
During the 2008-2009 school year, we completed 29 Skypes to successfully begin our project. During the 2009-2010 school year, we completed 24 more for a total of 53 Skypes since the inception of our project. We are very encouraged to see teachers using this type of medium to enhance the engagement of students in their classrooms. Our students, through this project, have been able to access experts through real-time in their classrooms from areas such as Montreal, Quebec, to Vancouver, British Columbia. We have also been able to Skype to individuals and classes in Mexico, South Korea, and Texas. Along with these, teachers have invited several people into their classrooms live from their local communities in Drayton Valley, Ponoka and Leduc.
As we completed the final phase of our project, we kept asking ourselves, “How can we place this technology into the hands of our students?” At the conclusion of the 2009-2010 school year, we held a contest for our students to engage with their teachers to create a Skype that would be relevant and connected to the curriculum in their classrooms. Student teams then created a video documenting the process of creating a "Skype” lesson with their teacher and the top three entries were presented and awarded prizes at the June 2010 Symposium. By the way…9 laptops with Skype cameras were awarded to the winning students! Plus, an Avermedia Camera went to each of the supervising subject teachers. Each video submission was amazing!
I would like to end by expressing gratitude to the BIT Project team members, and especially to all those teachers, who have been supporting this research project. We ARE seeing the benefits of such a teaching tool and strategy that truly is engaging our high school students.
As a supplement to the success of this project, the BIT team, along with a number of teachers in each of our high schools, attended the “EMERGE” Professional Development Seminar (Banff) in August of 2010. As well, the BIT Admin Team attended WCEAC (Edmonton) in October of 2010. At each event, we proudly presented our PROJECT and findings thus far to the rest of the educators throughout the province of Alberta.
An interim report was be submitted to Alberta Education at the end of August 2010, and a final report was created and provided for the Department at the end of November 2010.
Keep on Skyping!!!!!
Mark Basaraba, Project Manager
Building Integrated Technology Together Project
