2007 ORION Learning Award of Merit Recipient

The Learning Connections Project

Rudy Candela, teacher at Winston Churchill Public School of the Limestone District School Board, as he accepts the ORION Learning Award of Merit on behalf of the Learning Connections team at the 2007 award presentations in Toronto June 4, 2007.
The Learning Connections Project, winner of the 2007 ORION Learning Award of Merit, brings together a dedicated group of partners and champion teachers who are learning how to make full use of the Knowledge Age's endless resources and new, interactive technologies to raise the literacy and numeracy levels for Ontario students.

The project, which reaches out to nine school districts throughout Ontario, has helped transform teacher practice with the goal of raising student achievement in literacy and numeracy by using videoconferencing, web streaming, and other collaborative technologies and interactive resources.

It points to powerful results in supporting curriculum and professional learning that engages teachers and students, and helps Ontario keep at the leading edge of education, teaching and learning leadership and innovation.

Supported by the Ontario Ministry of Education's Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat and administered through the Advanced Broadband Enabled Learning (ABEL) program at York University, Learning Connections is breaking new ground as an experimental professional development program.

The program is nearing the end of its second implementation year, and with positive results it models the emerging innovations in technology use and teacher training that may eventually be applied across the province.

The program has two human components. One is the Learning Connections team, which began its initial planning in the spring of 2005. The other is the "embedded" teachers in each district. They are also called district champions.

The teachers are said to be embedded, because they are. That is, while they do attend summer conferences, the bulk of their professional development is occurring at their individual schools, as they implement this still-evolving program in their classrooms. But they are not alone.

The Learning Connections team and its bilingual web-portal are the hub of a community of learning. The portal provides the teachers with a wealth of interactive resources. Videoconferencing and various collaborative technologies enable them and the team to jointly develop and evolve course content and learning activities in the light of fresh classroom experience.

The Learning Connection team members are:

- Brian McLean, program manager and facilitator.

- Tania Sterling, literacy program developer and facilitator.

- Sharman Howes, numeracy program developer and facilitator.

- Rita Conley, directrice et facilitatrice pour les francophones au portail liens d’apprentissage (three of the nine districts are francophone).

- Judy Speirs, executive officer, Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat, with special responsibility for Learning Connections.

- Rudy Candela, Grade 4-5 teacher, district champion for the Limestone District School Board and anglophone district champions representative.

- Obadiah George, innovation technology manager, research and innovation, York University.

-Pierre Cazabon, enseigneur en 5e / 6e année à l’école Renaissance et représentant les champions francophones à lcommunauté « liens d’apprentissage ».

The community members can also, of course, communicate one-on-one for mentoring and other purposes. The portal's resources include self-guided literacy and numeracy study programs; work spaces and forums, in which teachers can explore such topics as how to encourage mathematical thinking at the junior level; and synchronous and asynchronous webcasts on boys' literacy, reading comprehension, developing critical inquiry, developing data literacy, place value in mathematics, mind mapping and many other subjects.

However, this is not one-way traffic from the hub to the schools. At the very beginning, the district champions were asked to create communications and implementation plans based on their own and their districts' needs.

In a sense, then, they are implementing their own plans, but ones that are constantly being modified in light of their own, their students' and the community's learning and experience.

The most recent evaluation of the project is very positive, and it has also been noted that the embedded teachers are acting as true champions, in that they have begun to interest other teachers in what they are doing, which was also a goal of the initial plan.



For more information, visit www.learningconnections.on.ca.

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