Information Skills in Education

Warning: This post is unsupported by any data and is entirely reflective of my opinion.

At our last North Van Pac general meeting the topic of discussion was PAC perspectives on Information Technology in Schools. Amongst the discussion of specific technology options, fund-raising, tech support, and teacher enthusiasm two big concerns were raised; the need to establish strong behavioural norms for using IT and the need for students to learn the critical thinking skills required to make sense of today's information overload.

These last two issues, behaviour and critical thinking were, in my opinion, the most important ones raised because they are about how students and teachers use the tools rather than the tools themselves. The tools changes but the challenges around their use do not and we have to help kids learn to use the tools appropriately.

This past week's rhetoric around education in BC showcased the need to develop those critical thinking skills, to help all involved sort the information from the positions taken.

The strike and impending legislation has made this a big week for education in the news, a lot of issues have been raised and positions taken and it gets very hard to make sense of it all. Making it difficult is that everyone is right, and of course everyone is wrong. As with most issues the answer is likely somewhere between the extremes presented by the interested parties.

• Schools could use more funding but funding is limited
• Schools could do more and provide more choices but most students receive a very good education in areas they are interested in from dedicated and skilled educators in BC. 
• There are many classrooms that are over-crowded and have poor composition but most aren't, otherwise the average couldn't be met.
• Teachers should be compensated for the real work they do and/or provided resources so they don't have to do uncompensated work, but they should also be rewarded for teaching excellence not just activity.
• Many parents send their children to schools outside the North Vancouver public schools, but most do it for natural reasons beyond the control of the school system.

With so many groups providing so much conflicting information what are people to believe and how can we make sense of it all. What is and what is not reliable information, when is the authors position distorting or selecting the facts to make a point.

If they aren't already, our kids are going to be buried in this tide of information and opinion and as parents and educators we need to teach our kids the critical skills needed to sort through it all and we need to make use of them as well:

• Who is reporting the information to understand the qualification, position and potential bias of the sources
• Fact checking with multiple sources to ensure they are accurately representing the situation.
• Comparing like units to make differences clearer, this is especially problematic when percentages are compared with absolute figures. Using the recent North Shore Outlook article on student migration for example, is "about 15%" in West Van enrolled outside the public system materially different from "3150 out of 23,500" in North Van, it would be easier to compare if these were both percentages (13.5%). 
• Looking at the ranges / certainty of data. Is it "approximate", "average" on "absolute?" Averages are particularly dangerous creatures as it is often the extremes that are more important, knowing average class size is 30 kids sounds good but is that classes of 29 & 31 or classes of 10 & 50? How many 50's?
• Looking at historic vs. projected data, how are the projections arrived at? Do two points actually make a line?
• Have multiple interpretations been considered or is it just a limited set. 
• Choice of words, are they over or under-inflating the meaning of the facts. There was a lot of "sky is falling" language in the past week.
• Balanced vs. extremity of positions, do they weight the various sources appropriately or are they narrowly focused on one or the other side of the story. 
• Number of sources, are they reflecting the majority or the minority opinion of the population.

The above are all well known critical thinking challenges, exacerbated by the glut of sources but technology layers a whole new set of new ones on top of these. 

Search engines, blogs, RSS feeds, personalization, search engine optimization, all these and other IT systems work to help us narrow our choices to "solve" the information overload problem by finding only the information we want to see. But to evaluate complex issues we need to ensure we aren't eliminating the broader opinions we need to see. 

It is very important that schools teach our kids to understand how the tools tend to distort the information they find, is the most popular article the most definitive? 

Schools already work to teach our kids these critical thinking skills within the curriculum. But if there is one important skill we all need to learn, and the school system needs to enhance, it is how to critically assess information and expand our thinking to overcome the tools rather than narrow it. 

In my opinion students need more access to computers in schools and teachers need more training to incorporate them into classrooms mostly because it is only by coaching them to deal with the messy glut of information available and forcing them to do the necessary critical thinking everyday that our kids will learn to understand the nuances of information overload.

And of course they need to teach readin, ritin, rithmatic and do it all with skill and enthusiasm on a limited budget.

PACs and IT Survey - Feb 2012

I'd like to thank the representatives of the 7 PACs that completed our PACs and IT survey for taking the time to do so. The survey reveals a number of interesting IT related issues for PACs and schools to consider.

PACs and IT Survey Results .pdf

What is clear from the survey is that North Van Schools are well served in terms of internet access and schools generally have access to laptops and/or computer labs, but beyond that despite ample enthusiam to make use of technology there is significant variation based on the PACs, the teachers and the school leadership in both the technology available in schools and how it is used.
Schools have had successes with laptops, with tablets, with wifi, with smartboards and without all of these. It seems to come down to building school buy-in into whatever choices are made.

Issues such as ownership, teacher training, student responsibility, costs, fairness etc were raised by multiple schools and all are important concerns.

There isn't a simple way to summarize all of the feedback collected and I think it is more valuable to see the breadth of feedback collected rather than try to distill out all the interesting bits. The results provided and an anonymized version of all the gathered feedback. Hopefully this report will help PAC's consider the many parts of any IT decisions made to help our children get the most from IT resources in their schools.

Jan 31 Finance and Facilities Meeting

Report on Jan 31 Finance and Facilities meeting

Warning the opinions expressed in this blog are those of the Author ( Mike Sexsmith) and do not represent the views of the NVPAC. I wanted to write just the facts but it is boring to read blogs that do not contain opinion.

The meeting opened with a session on the capital plan and the planned expenses for facilities maintenance. Mr Abercrombie outline the 4 top priority capital projects that the district is asking the provincial government to fund. These are a mechanical/seismic upgrade to Brooksbank for $800K, The replacement of Argyle with a new school for $35M, the replacement of Seymour Heights for 14M and the replacement of Handsworth for $35M. These have been the priority for several years.

We then went into the details of the maintenance plan. I did not collect all the detail but the majority of the maintenance money is allocated to roof repair, facility mechanical system upgrades, painting and functional upgrades. The total needed maintenance is about $5M and the typical provincial grant is about $3M. This means that may of the project will not occur as planned and a prioritization will be done. Given the number age and size of the school in north Vancouver I find it amazing that the province thinks that the facilities can be maintained for $3M per year. This is about 2% of district revenue. This “infrastructure deficit” is just another way that the present government is borrowing money from future taxes.

One point of particular concern to me (as a profession scientist) was the minuscule budget to upgrade and recertify the fume hoods in the chemistry classes in the schools The goal was to certify at least 1 fume hood per high school. I guess this means that only I classroom will be suitable for experiments and that these will need to be conducted by the teacher only since there are not enough for the student to use. Given the fraction of our provincial economy based on resource extraction is seems rather strange that we don’t want to give our student hands on experience in the skills needed in these industries. Perhaps a small issue but one that is symptomatic of the overall shortsightedness of the ministry.

The next section on the agenda was a discussion of covered play areas. A strong contingent of parents from Highlands were on hand to discuss this issue. A representative form the building maintenance department showed several example of the issue that school face with respect to vandalism. It seems that in secluded school covered play areas attract higher levels teenage drinking and vandalism. The district has fenced and decommissioned some covered areas as a result due to the costs of repairs. Several principle expressed mixed views on the educational value of these play areas. In general they were seen as being less important than other priorities for the limited cash. They are too small to impact most kids and usually it is the older kids using these areas. The general expectation was that most kids want to play in the rain and should be encouraged to do so. Overall the tone was that cover play areas are hassle and that the district is not to keen on building or maintaining them.

The parent then gave a case that some kids need the choice of sheltered play and that they felt that it was a basic need for their kid for safety, comfort, dignity and hygiene reasons. They expressed frustration that new schools were being built without these areas They understood the challenges that the district faces with the older secluded structures but suggested that when building newer school the area could be designed with sufficient exposure to prevent the vandalism issues. They also pointed out that we shouldn’t let fear of vandalism stop us for providing facilities that our younger kids need. As a parent with kids in one of these new schools is sympathize with the issue of not covered areas. My kids get soaked every rainy day and I see them all huddling under the roof overhangs at lunch time. But there many more deficiencies in these new structures such as a lack of cloakrooms for wet clothes, overly landscaped school yards, no stage in the gym for shows, limited private LAC space and many more. It seems that the province is not willing to fund these “extras” when schools are built. I guess I sympathize with the school district staff who have to make tough priority calls on educational priorities. No actions were taken as a result of the discussion.

The final section of the agenda was a brief description of the budget forecast for next year. These was no time for discussion but the plan was given to the audience.

PACs and IT Survey

At the January NorthVanPAC general meeting we had a short discussion on PACs and Information Technology and a lot of questions were raised about what equipment schools had, how PACs were and were not contributing to that, what issues PACs had regarding IT in schools and how PACs make use of IT tools for their own purposes.

PACs and IT is the topic of our upcoming February general meeting (Feb 16, 7pm, LMCC)

It's a broad topic and we don't have all the answers or even all the questions. 

In preparation for our meeting we'd like to get a better collective understanding of IT systems in North Van Schools from a parent perspective to help us start the conversation. Of interest are both what we know and what some of the key questions are that PACs should be asking of the schools, the school district and even the ministry about IT systems in schools. We know its not just the equipment that is a concern, it is how the systems are being used so your help identifying those issues would be welcome.


PACs and IT Survey

1. IT Equipment in Schools (What do and don't schools typically have?)

What equipment does your school currently have available or have plans to make available in the near future?


Listed below are some of the common items under discussion but please describe the current state of IT systems available to students and teachers in your school. In particular note if any of the equipment was PAC provided. If you have knowledge of how or the extent to which the items are used that would also be helpful. We don't need an exhaustive list of IT components, the intent is to understand the general state of IT availability in North Van and where people are doing more or less than usual. You may also wish to indicate or describe how well used the items in questions are or how long it has been since systems were upgraded?

1a. WiFi - Teacher Accessible?
1b. WiFi - Student Accessible?
1c. Internet Access - all classrooms / most classrooms?
1d. Students can bring their own devices? (mobile phones / computers / tablets)?
1e. Tablet Computers?
1f. Laptop Cart?
1g. Smart Boards?
1h. Other?

2. PAC Issues and plans concerning information technology
People's experiences vary from school to school, from classroom to classroom. Some school PACs invest in IT systems (laptops etc) for their schools to use, while others do not. In some cases schools encourage PAC investment and in others PAC investment in IT is discourged. In some schools / classrooms IT adoption is encouraged and well incorporated while in others it may not be well used in classrooms. Teachers vary with regard to support and skill in using IT systems. We would like to know how these experiences vary and what peoples main questions or learning has been related to the use of IT in schools (rather than the availability of tech)


2a. What are your school and PACs plans regarding the acquisition of new IT systems for the school? 

2b. What are your PAC or Schools top 3~5 successes, concerns, issues or recommendations related to the use of IT systems in classrooms? (please list)


3. PAC use of IT Systems
PACs make heavy use of IT (especially email) to connect with parents and this has its positives and negatives. We would like to understand how PACs are using IT to help with communicating with parents and coordinating activities with the schools.


3a. What systems does your PAC use to communicate with parents, students and schools?

3b. How effective are your current IT systems in managing PAC communication and engaging the parent community? 

3c . What recommendations can you offer other PACs in terms of managing their communication effectively?

4. Email answers to chair@northvanpac.org
Please try to answer these questions as well as you can, these answers will help us formulate the discussion for our next general meeting. Email your answers to me at chair@northvanpac.org and I look forward to discussing these issues with you at our Feb 16th NorthVanPAC meeting.

Feb 2012 - Upcoming Events

Upcoming Events:
1. District Finance & Facilities Meeting, Jan 31. - 7pm, LMCC
The agenda is to discuss this years capital/AFG needs, covered play areas and start the budget process for next year.

2. NorthVanPac General Meeting, Feb 16, 7pm, LMCC
This will be a discussion on PACs and IT in schools. .

3. Toward the Future of Schools. Feb 28th, 4pm, LMCC
No agenda yet but the last meeting resulted in a soccer academy.

4. North Shore Area 10yr Transit Plan Workshop
TransLink is seeking public input to confirm the draft evaluation criteria, identify any additional projects, and to identify potential benefits and negative impacts of 10 projects under early evaluation. 

North Shore Transit Plan

 
NSATP community workshops

registration for the workshop is recommended
Wednesday, February 15th
6:00 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. Coffee Meet & Greet
6:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. Presentation & Workshop

Pinnacle Hotel
Pier Two Room
138 Victory Ship Way, North Vancouver

Volunteers Needed:
1. Integrated Transportation Committee - City of North Van. We've been invited to represent parents on this committee but need to respond ASAP. The representative needs to be familiar with student transport safety issues in the City of North Van. I would welcome volunteers.

Board Meeting Summary - Jan 24, 2012

The Jan 24th board Meeting was a long one covering student achievement, a new soccer academy, plans for public consultation on surplus land, consultation on the operating budget, an update on planning for the Community Learning Program at Balmoral and a variety of other concerns. 

Below is my summary of what I heard

District Soccer Academy @ Windsor

The big news for the evening was the boards approval of a new District Soccer Academy at Windsor High School starting in Sept 2012 and operating in a similar fashion to the successful Hockey Academy program at the school. This is definitely good news for the soccer mad amongst us. North Van has various mechanisms to enable students to integrate their athletic and academic pursuits and this new program demonstrates once again North Van's interest in enabling enthusiastic students to pursue their interests.

In a similar vein of enabling enthusiastic students, Trustee McGraw reported on the Digital Media Academy's visit to the EA Sports Motion Capture Studio this past month. The students were able to use the facility to incorporate motion capture animation into their projects but more importantly, were able to strengthen their connection to an industry of interest to them.

Community Learning Program @ Balmoral

The most contentious topic of the evening concerned the evolving plans for the Balmoral site. A number of community members spoke on the issue and the need for better consultation with the public over the planned and proposed uses of the school. With the new community learning program moving into Balmoral in September along with multiple potential other educational uses (distributed learning, adult learning, recreational usage etc) there will be a lot of changes in how that facility will be used, changes to traffic etc. and the district needs to work through with the public and the community what the impact of those changes will be. The uncertainty around the full scope of these changes and how they will go into effect needs to be dealt with and the districts move to further consultation with the community on the changes should help to ensure a better migration to the new mandate for the school.

Mary Tasi

A short presentation was made to outgoing Trustee, Mary Tasi with her family present. Superintendent Lewis highlighted the caring, compassion, concern for others and creativity Mary demonstrated during her term as Trustee and it was nice to see Mary honoured for this. 

There was a report given on student achievement, which essentially shows slight improvement and an above average rating overall for North Van. I had to leave during this discussion so I missed much more than that. 

Surplus Land

Returned to the discussion on surplus land consultation. The district wants to improve its consultation process around surplus land and will be running a committee to recommend a repeatable process that can be used whenever surplus land is available. This seems a worthy effort as it would help people to understand the process around how the land decisions will be made. 

Budget Consultation

Due to the significant cuts made 2 years ago NVSD is in a strong financial position and estimates having $1million more that expected to include in next years budget, the planning for which has started. The next finance and facilities meeting will kick off consultation on what to do with the extra money as well as maintain the balance budget. 

Enhanced Learning Opportunities

It changes with the addition of the soccer academy but there was a lot of discussion about enhanced learning opportunities in North Van at this meeting. One of the challenges many students face is simply finding out about what is on offer within a complex calendar. As John Lewis expressed in the meeting success is more related to personalized learning every day within the classroom than personalizing the learning through specialized academies, it is important to offer students of all types appropriate options for their interests. To help with this the district has produced a new brochure summarizing the secondary enhanced learning opportunities in North Vancouver. Any student heading into secondary school should read this to understand the options available to them.

Superintendant's Report

Superintendant Lewis took the opportunity of his report to, amongst other things, bring attention to and thank the school-based administrators for the load they are carrying during what is now the longest job action in BC schools history, over 100 days with little to show for it. 

My goodness the teacher's job action is playing havoc with the school administrators! On top of everything else, with the teacher's not supporting provincial exams the principals and other school based admin will now be supervising and marking all of the FSA exams and if it continues pretty much all of the provincial exams. They have already had to produce all the non-report cards. And while some people are happy as they are talking to the teachers more (good) many parents and students at the secondary level are getting concerned about how the lack of marks and other feedback impacts their ability to make choices for summer school and course selection for coming school year and helping in this area may also fall to the admin. So please, thank your school admin for their efforts this year.

 

NVPAC Meeting Summary - Jan 19 - Art, Fundraising, Technology

Meeting Summary: North Van PAC meeting - Jan 19, 2012.

Next meeting:  Feb 16, 2012 - "IT Resources in Schools Discussion" 

January's NVPAC Meeting was an interesting mix of discussions. 

Artists for Kids

The meeting started with an introduction to North Vancouver's "Artists for Kids" Art Enrichment program. During a tour of the current gallery we learned about the visits to the gallery students make in Grade 5, and the use of the art to encourage discussion, understanding and then practice of art principals. 

We then discussed the new gallery space opening on Lonsdale this year and other Artist for Kids enrichment opportunities such as the after school programs and summer camps. It's a great program for connecting kids to art and unique as the program is primarily funded through print sales, 75% of which are apparently to teachers. 

The Artist for Kids trust also offers a number of joint sales programs for PACs to assist with joint fundraising. PACs interested in fundraising through print sales or auctions should contact the Artist for Kids trust. Similarly, if PACs are interested in after-school art programs they should contact the Yolande Martinello, Principal Fine Arts District 44 and Director Artists for Kids.

Fundraising and Planning for Big Projects

Our next discussion was on the challenge of fundraising and planning for big projects. A common situation for PACs is a challenge with knowledge transfer through the regular cycle of parent experience. When parents get involved with a big project they are often new to the challenge and must learn the ins and outs of fundraising and project management within the school system. And then once the project is complete they often move on to other schools in short order, there comes a recovery phase and the cycle begins anew with the next set of parents. 

Addressing this challenge had been a potential workshop topic for the February meeting and our discussion revolved around what sort of a workshop if any we could do to help PACs with this issue. Feedback in the room was that each of the projects and school situation is so unique that it would be very difficult and perhaps of limited value to do such a workshop. 

But discussion did reveal two areas in which schools share a common challenge. Emergency Preparedness, which we discussed at our October meeting, and IT policy and resources in schools. 

Emergency Planning

From our discussion its clear that schools continue to experience a wide range of levels of emergency preparedness, from well established manuals to barely existent emergency kits. North Van Pac strongly encourages schools to develop and dry run their emergency preparedness plans and resources. North Van PAC offers grants toward emergency preparedness efforts, currently these are not well defined but if your school has a need please contact us about it as that would help us understand how best to help PACs with this important issue. We also strongly encourage schools to contact the North Shore Emergency Management Office as they offer a wealth of resources and planning assistance to help you prepare your school for emergencies.

IT Resources in Schools

While each school has a different situation, IT resources in schools appears to be a common topic of interest to all PACs. Different schools have different current tools, different acquisition plans, in some schools PACs have big plans to help purchase various things (tablets, laptops, smartboards) while in others PACs are told not to provide anything. Some want the latest, some find the rate of change too fast for it to be worth buying anything. 

Once past the acquisition of tools, schools have concerns about the usage of the tools. Are tablets in Kindergarten helpful? Are teachers ready to use the tools? Are students learning or distracted? Do they have the skills to evaluate online materials and resources? How do PACs successful adopt and use these new tools for their own needs.

It was clear from the meeting that there are a lot of questions around this topic. So many that we aren't even sure what questions we should be asking as PACs and parents as schools and society as a whole incorporates and adapts to these tools. As we heard at the November meeting, the ministry have vague plans to increase the use of IT in schools (although not necessarily budgets), so as PACs we can only expect this issue to get more complicated. 

Its an important discussion and one in which all PACs can help each other. Coming out of this we'll be asking our members in the coming weeks to help us with survey on the current state of IT resources in their schools and what, if anything, PACs are planning in this area. We will follow this up with a longer discussion of PAC/IT related issues at our February meeting with the overall objective being to gain a better understanding of the key issues and questions all PACs should be considering with respect to IT resources in schools.

NVPAC response to the Job Action

We finished the meeting with a question on a potential response by NVPAC to the current job action. But other than wishing the sides would find a way to resolve the issue and get everyone back to work normally there wasn't a consensus on what that response should be. The only significant consensus was that principals and other senior admin in the schools are bearing much of the brunt of this job action and deserve a lot of credit for how the schools continue to function.