Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Saskatchewan
ETEC 511
Assignment #3
Dr. Matuil Alam
Susan Wilson
November 30, 2007
Educational Technology in Rural Saskatchewan ETEC 511
Ensuring the Viability of Wawota Parkland School Susan Wilson
Abstract
The South East Cornerstone School Division has determined that Wawota Parkland
School requires monitoring for viability. Practices that ensure the viability of Wawota
School must realize equitable and effective benefits for all of the school community
members. Educational Technologies, distributed through Information and
Communication Technologies, can enhance student learning and ensure the viability of
small schools in rural communities of Saskatchewan.
a significant loss to a rural community, Wawota continued to grow and prosper. Attaining
town status in 1975, Wawota has continued to survive and progress through the
perseverance of its community members. Today, the town’s population of 620 supports
various necessary businesses, recreational facilities, community organizations and a
school of 120 Kindergarten to Grade 12 students.
Wawota Parkland School’s motto is Nec Aspera Terrent; Undaunted by Adversity.
Wawota’s long standing history of volunteerism and community pride has helped to keep
the school strong and viable. But as improvements in farming technologies; the
mechanization of farming, the substitution of capital for labour, and the application of
other technologies such as fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides (Encyclopedia of
Saskatchewan, 2001) have enabled farmers to take on more land, small farms have
disappeared, taking with them a significant number of students. Now, in 2007, Wawota
Parkland School has been placed on viability review by the South East Cornerstone
School Division. Technology helped cause the decline of rural population. Can
technology also help keep small rural schools viable?
Saskatchewan has a history of innovation in educational technology. Technology-
enhanced learning began as a way for geographically challenged teachers and students to
supplement available print-based resources for the purpose of enriching learning. As
early as the 1930's, radio broadcasts were used as supplements to available print-based
materials. This evolved into audio and video cassettes in the 70's. The 1980's saw real-
time audio and slow scan video communication between educators and their students
using the telephone system. This was also the time period for the advent of televised
instruction through STELLA, the Saskatchewan Tele-learning Association which evolved
into what we now know as SCN, or the Saskatchewan Communications Network
(Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan, 2001).
Wawota did not see this technological advancement until the late 1990's. Feeling
the effects of declining enrollment and reduced capacity, Wawota Parkland School began
to offer electives such as Calculus 30, senior level French, Law and Psychology through
SCN. SCN classes proved to be an improvement over traditional text-based
correspondence classes in Wawota School. There was a very low drop-out rate among
SCN students paired with a high rate of success. Part of the success can be attributed to
that fact that the controlling school division allowed extra time be billed by support staff
personnel in compensation for the added tasks associated with SCN classes; photo-
copying and faxing assignments as well as supervising attendance and exams. The
school installed a separate telephone line to be used for communication between the SCN
students and their teacher. Students could call teachers with questions or responses and
teachers could call to verify understanding and attendance.
ICTs helped alleviate the burden on support staff by allowing students a conduit
for receiving and submitting their own assignments through web-based course
management systems like Web-CT or Blackboard. These systems allowed for electronic
communication between student and teacher as well as on-line examinations, further
reducing the workload on support staff.
Although Saskatchewan's use of digital technology in education began in the
1990's, Wawota School did not realize the advantages of ICTs until after 2001 when
CommunityNet, a provincial initiative to establish a high-speed digital network was
established. The formation of South East Cornerstone School Division (SECSD) in
January, 2006 provided teachers in the school division the opportunity to both offer
and/or receive online classes on a reciprocal basis with other schools in the division.
Educational technology is important to SECSD. As stated in their strategic plan,
Information technology is a tool for improving, and ultimately
transforming, teaching and learning. To accomplish this, it must be an
integral part of the School Division’s overall plan to move all children
toward high academic standards. Furthermore, because technology will
continue to play an increasingly more important role in our modern
economy, integrating technology into schools is critical to help prepare
students to succeed in a knowledge-based world.
SECSD supports online teachers with SMART boards, a Breeze Server, a web server,
required software programs specific to content area as well as applications such as Adobe
Connect and Camtasia Studio. They are supporting action research into innovative
practices by offering a $4000 grant to teachers who demonstrate how they can improve
teaching and learning through technology integration. The school division employs three
technology consultants who work under an educational technology coordinator.
Professional development, classroom support and training are important functions of the
educational technology department.
Students may benefit from spending more time with the subject matter as they can
review anything at their own pace. Computers can also bring the expert to the learner,
anytime and anywhere. Learners and teachers relate differently with the elements of time
and space so "education on demand" (at home, in the workplace, and in school) is a
growing expectation.
We need to prepare our students for their lives after high school. Demand for
online courses at the post-secondary level is expected to increase;
…offering this mode of delivery is becoming an important element of
strategic plans for many post-secondary institutions to meet the
expectations of students and faculty…over seven in ten students taking
TEL courses agreed there is strong demand from students at their
institution for online or televised courses and programs. (Ekos Research
Associates, 2005)
learning often requires that students make contributions to their own learning
environment.
Our students have the opportunity to prosper in the future by providing services
such as health care, education, research and consulting to new global markets if they are
well-equipped. Phil Carr (2007), believes that we can prosper,
but only if Canadians come to understand that our most valuable resources
are our people. In order to thrive in this new age we will need to invest
very soon by connecting Canadians everywhere to each other and to the
world. We must also provide them with the tools, information and
infrastructure that they will need to begin to educate each other and
eventually the world, over the Internet.
ICT’s in education will become an essential tool to deal with the expansion of the global
economy. We must understand what works best and move to train teachers so that
students can reach maximum benefits of technology.
The integration of technology also requires support for teachers and students.
Students need to be assured that the necessary technology will function properly and that
there is a resource person available to help them; either with their online work, with the
technology at hand, or help them to communicate with someone who can help them.
Teachers need support in terms of functioning equipment, extra time to develop and
manage online material, and professional development and training to enable them to use
more advanced technologies as they become available. As technology advances, the
instructional methods we use must also advance. A lack of proper support can lead to
frustration and reduce learning.
Wawota Parkland School currently uses technology to automate administrative
tasks to make them more efficient. Keyboarding and Information Processing classes are
offered on-site, and Computer Production Technology is offered online. Nelson’s
computerized instructional program, “The Learning Equation” has been used by the Math
department for many years. Slowly, computers are beginning to be used as cognitive
tools in multiple discipline areas; spreadsheets in Accounting, graphing applications in
Math; desktop publishing in English and for the Yearbook. This year marks the first year
that an online course has been offered by a teacher at Wawota.
With two well-functioning computer labs, personal computer access for every
teacher in their classroom, a multi-media room equipped with satellite (SCN) television,
high capacity computers for CPT and Yearbook, and a Polycom system, Wawota
Parkland School has a strong technological component. Microphones, a digital camera
and videocamera, and a webcam are accessible to both the staff and students. Wawota
School, with the support of the South East Cornerstone School Division and
Saskatchewan Learning, is in a good position to expand their use of online courses and
resources.
Wawota Parkland School has incentive to increase their use of educational
technology. With a professional teaching component of 8.4 full-time equivalents
managing full Kindergarten to Grade 12 programming; staff are working to their
maximum capacity. Educational technologies can help teachers with split grade classes
as one grade can work independently on the computer while the teacher instructs the
other. Students who miss classes for farming, sport, or family responsibilities can access
their courses when and from where they are able. Students are allowed more choice in
the electives that they can take. The school is able to offer high-level academic classes
like Physics and Calculus even if their small rural setting does not attract a teacher
specialist in that area.
If current staffing practices continue, and Wawota fails to attract new community
members over the next few years, the school will be in a position where it will not be able
to provide necessary classes of acceptable quality to our students. Wawota Parkland
School will truly be in a position of non-viability.
In an effort to ensure that rural students are not disadvantaged, small schools may
be consolidated and students taken by bus to larger, centralized high schools. This option
has a detrimental effect, not only on the staff and the students, but also on the entire
community. There is a “reciprocal, interdependent and mutually beneficial relationship”
(Mulcahy, 1999) between a school and its community; and, once the school goes, the
community will soon follow. Mulcahy (1999) continues to assert,
If a small community school is determined to be non-viable because it
lacks the capability of providing quality education, the response should
not be to close it but to provide it with whatever resources it needs to
become viable. Reform efforts should set out to make small schools
viable, not to close them. We make them viable because we value them as
necessary for the education of rural children and the future of rural
communities.
Educators focus on the principle of equality of opportunity. ICTs may be the most
effective way to bring equity to rural school divisions in Saskatchewan as they can
distribute content of equal pedagogical quality to students in all areas of the division.
Material can be generated by local teachers, familiar with the culture and content
important to students in Saskatchewan, and the content can be distributed in an efficient,
effective and equitable manner. ICTs can enrich the learning process and improve access
to quality education.
Successes in maintaining the viability of small rural schools have been realized
through the use distance education technologies.
The distance education program currently operating in a number of small
schools (in Newfoundland and Labrador) has been a good example of how
we can use technology to help schools offer a broader spectrum of courses.
This type of program should be expanded …. the information technologies
that now exist make the size and location of a school irrelevant to its
program capability. (Mulcahy, 1999)
The Fort Vermillion School District in Alberta saw challenges with six schools
spread out over 250 000 square kilometres. They created a sophisticated video-
conferencing system called the RACOL (Rural Advanced Community of Learners)
project which “is a distance learning endeavor which intends to use advanced
communications technologies in order to provide real-time classroom instruction to students
in remote regions of Alberta “ (RACOL, 2004). In addition to the SuperNet Broadband
system put in place by the Alberta Government, RACOL uses advanced educational
technologies. Interactive whiteboards are the focal point for the students. Each student
desk is equipped with a microphone and a button to enable students to send messages to
their instructor. Video cameras about the room are able to focus on any student who
wishes to address the instructor.
Students are also able to participate in the lesson by writing on the actual
whiteboard and their information is then broadcast, right over the media-based lesson
playing on the whiteboard at the moment, to their instructor and to all other students
participating in the course. The interactivity enables students and instructors to build on
relationships already started at the face-to-face meeting that takes place before the course
begins. Teachers are prepared and even given some coaching in theatre skills to help
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