Markville's Leadership in Tech Integration

Markville has long been a leader in Tech Integration in the YRDSB.  Of particular note is the History department (www.markvillehistory.com) which for years has been a "Blueprint" of the paperless, digital classroom.  They have always had an open door policy and have been more than willing to share their learning.  Just recently, I asked them to contribute "stories" to a provincial initiative for a proposal to the ministry/province on the imperative for Broadband (Internet) access to support teaching and learning.  Below is one of their stories.

MARKVILLE HISTORY
As teachers, we constantly strive to bring the world to our students. It is hard to imagine the world without the internet. Most of our students now do not know the world any other way. It is amazing to think that something as ubiquitous as an iPhone was only released in 2007. That something like Twitter only came into common usage around the same time. Tablets have come screaming onto the scene only since the release of the iPad in 2010. New transformative tools like Google Apps are changing the way we meet, collaborate, share information and work together. Interactive whiteboards and other response technologies have given us great power at our fingertips to assess, evaluate, teach, create, produce, and build. What was life like before broadband? It’s almost impossible to remember, especially for our new teachers and every successive group of students we teach. It is a part of what we do, intricately weaved into our constantly evolving pedagogical practices. The challenge now is analyzing the role and impact of the internet as it has become such a seamless part of our teaching and learning environment.

The Markville History department has relied on the internet as a tool for delivery, organization and the sharing of information for more than a decade. Our website continues to grow with resources, lessons, activities, student exemplars, interactive quizzes, and complete courses of study. It is the heart of our department and is a resource that people access from around the world. We receive emails from teachers, students, professors, parents and other members of the community about the resources we share on our site almost daily. The Markville History website crossed 3 million hits in November of 2012, with 20 000 new hits in the last 2 weeks. The internet has allowed us to share our resources with anyone that can be helped by them. The transparency of our program requires us to develop quality resources because everyone can see them. It is like a giant open window into our learning environment. This is a great challenge that forces us to constantly change and be better every day, which ultimately keeps us current and is a great motivator.

Every day the way we use the internet and the methods we use evolve as the media, applications and devices change. The pace and speed of change demands constant deconstruction and reconstruction of teaching and learning techniques. At the core of our environment is the paperless classroom. This is much more than simply using traditional techniques without using paper. Every lesson, activity and learning experience is in a dynamic and constant state of change adapting to the power that is offered to our learners every day. We often have to turn everything upside down, shake it up and put the pieces back together as a new tool or device is created exposing us to bigger and better possibilities. We could not have achieved a paperless environment without our department website and then the introduction in our board of the fully accessible learning management system, Moodle. The access was key, the positive use of this access has driven us in recent years.

The central question around internet based technology was often “how?”. But the tools today are so much more intuitive, user friendly and ubiquitous among all stakeholders in education. The big question we always look at now is “why?”. Some of the key answers to the question “why?” is that we continue to weave the internet into our teaching because of efficiency, collaboration, enhancement, excitement, engagement, and power. Students are pushing the growth of the integration of networks and internet tools. Facebook study groups, Twitter feeds for soccer practices and information, twitter deck to supplement in class simulations, concept mapping and sharing, google doc collaborations, real time chat and even daily emails from foreign media sources are all a regular part of the daily life of a paperless classroom. The classroom changes so much every day that we necessarily need to constantly critique, analyze and assess its development.

We spend a lot of time considering balance in our environment. When people outside of our department make comments like: “everything you do is on the computers”, we get offended. We use digital tools purposely to enhance the learning environment. It has gotten to the point that when people ask how we use technology there is not a long list of tools or methods, it is more that we just do. The technology is a part of the fabric, blending into the background. Some classes run in a lab, some with iPads, some with any digital device available, and then some classes run in more traditional environments with little to no technology. The website remains the base of the courses in or out of a digital environment. But the base of our teaching is solid, interactive and constantly evolving pedagogy. As an internet enabled environment is a given, we dedicate the majority of our time meeting and discussing innovative ways of making learning engaging, critical, fun, broad, deep, enjoyable and applicable. It is impossible for us to imagine being in an environment that does not have these combined layers of strong pedagogy, research and evolution with technology. 
 
~Mark Melnyk, Head of History