New partnership reaps benefits
High-tech calculators put education council at cutting edge of e-learning
Shawn Giilck
Northern News Services
Published Thursday, May 29, 2014
INUVIK
The Beaufort-Delta Education Council (BDEC) is proving Northern isolation is no barrier to being on top of the educational world.
Tara Gilmour of the Beaufort-Delta Education Council with one of the hi-tech "smart" calculators students in the region are using, due largely to partnerships the council has formed with outside organizations. - Shawn Giilck/NNSL photo
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Largely due to successful attempts to forge partnerships with the private sector and good working relationships with government, the education council is reaping the benefits of more than a half-million dollars in extra funding.
David Reid, the supervisor of schools for the education council, and Chris Gilmour, the technology integration consultant, explained how the organization is benefitting from the partnerships.
An expansion of the e-learning program into the southern NWT is one of the exciting developments on tap for September, the officials said, and students are already benefitting from so-called "smart" calculators provided by funding from ConocoPhillips.
Other companies and organizations, including the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation and the Gwich'in Tribal Council, have jumped on board as well.
"It would be very difficult to do a lot of the add-on things we like to do without these partnerships," Reid said. "The funds for public education allow us to do the basic programs in schools, so we rely on partnerships to help us."
The e-learning program will be expanding to the South Slave region and the Tlicho, Reid said.
"There are two schools there we will be in," he said.
The locations are Whati and Fort Resolution, Gilmour said.
"That's exciting because those are smaller communities with similar challenges to what we have up here," Gilmour said. "We'll be able to add some academic-level high school courses to those communities. It's a big step for them. It's exciting that now we'll be doing it across three districts."
Gilmour said the Beaufort-Delta Education Council is being used as a model for E-learning because it's been working with the concept for about five years.
The council has gone from over-the-telephone sessions to full video conferencing in that time, and that's the wave of the future.
ConocoPhillips has provided around $15,000 in funding for the purchase of the calculators and related equipment, which resemble a standard device about as much as a 10-year-old cellphone resembles one of today's smart phones.
The devices are being made available to senior-level high school students at the moment, especially for their exams, with students in lower grades gradually being given access to the new technology.
Teachers can use the device for their lessons as well, to connect all of the class to the teacher and to smart-boards for multi-media applications.
"It's pretty exciting to see the devices and what they can do to empower the students," Gilmour said. "Once they figure out the sequence, it allows them to do a lot more in a lot shorter time."
In advanced mathematics, it can take a half-hour or more to go through a single question, so the calculator allows for far more work-time once the basics are taught. That's invaluable, said Tara Gilmour, the math and science consultant at the education council who wrote the proposal to ConocoPhillips.
There are seven different applications available on the devices, which don't offer access to the Internet, which is an important difference from other devices.
There are 85 of the new devices available throughout the education council's schools, she said.
"Obviously there are lots of great tools out there for all the courses but the reality is that we have to make some decisions and with the help of our partners, we are now able to get them to a lot more people. Without that kind of support this couldn't happen," Reid said. "All told, everything that we're getting from all of our partners is north of $500,000."
Looking for funding could be a full-time job, Reid said, but BDEC said "it's something we need to do to make things more equitable for students in our small communities as we try to offer more."
