A new pilot project is bringing state-of-the-art education technology to students in Grade 6 classrooms as well as student teachers at Mount Saint Vincent University.
Partnering with education systems publisher Nelson and the provincial Department of Education, the project provides Chromebooks loaded with the Edwin system to the children. At the same time, students in MSVU's education undergrad and graduate programs also get the devices. It's funded by Nelson, with no cost to the university or the province.
The Edwin system features a suite of education applications and offers access to learning resources directly linked to provincial curricula. MSVU's faculty of education is helping to develop localized teacher resources and will be contributing to research about Edwin and its components, according to a news release.
The pilot has already distributed the computers to about 3,000 Grade 6 students, with more to come this school year, including those in French immersion schools, Nelson CEO Steve Brown said at a news conference held Tuesday at the Halifax university to announce the project.
"I've got the pleasure this afternoon of visiting a couple of schools and going in the classrooms and I'll tell you, I've been in Edwin classrooms now across this province and across other provinces to see kids enjoying education allows them to apply themselves and be immersed, which, as I said, brings great outcomes," Brown said. "So it's like anything else in life, you've got to like what you do and the more you like it, the better you do at it."
Nicole Rogers, a Grade 6 teacher at Sackville Heights Junior High School, is seeing the pilot program in action first-hand with her students.
"It's going well so far," Rogers said. "There's a lot of applications that the program has that haven't been released - Nova Scotia doesn't have access to them yet - but what we've been given access to so far is going well."
She said the children enjoy it and she's learning more about it all the time, too.
One of the big aspects of Edwin that all the stakeholders point out is the fact the resources can be loaded at the school and taken home with no need for Internet access, bringing an equity component that has been missing in the past where households that can't go online might have missed out.
"That, if nothing else, is what really levels the playing field so that all kids have access to the device and all kids have access to the programs on it even if they don't have internet," Rogers said. "That's the thing that, as an educator, just taking away that socio-economic component, has been great to see."
Brown was excited about the partnership, especially with seeing MSVU's education faculty keen to train teachers to be ready for the technology in classrooms.
Al Reyner, graduate cohort co-ordinator at MSVU and lead for Edwin at the university, is also excited about the prospects of what they are terming a "digital learning ecosystem."
"I've been in education for 40 years, this is the first time I've seen something that has the power to impact so many people," he said.
"There's so much that kids need to know that we don't know they need to know. So by focusing on collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking inside this ecosystem, everything is lined up for them. We can take them step by step through that."
The students in the education program all have their Chromebooks now, he said, and the school is curating the content from the university.
"So we want to have our professors, our experts in the field, add content of their own, so when they're teaching the pre-service teachers, it flows right in. The key for us is to make sure that our professors next year can use it with their content and their students as they teach pre-service teachers to be teachers."
