ICT@CA

Hello everyone
Welcome back to school, and for the technology department it is a year of major change and innovation. High school and grade 5 students will for the first time use their own individual laptops at school, moving us in line with other major international schools in the Asia/Pacific region.  The educational opportunities that constant access to computers opens up for teachers and students are exciting and educationally transforming, although we are also keenly aware of the challenges as well - I write this with Facebook open, carefully hidden behind the word processor screen!

Techfest
To celebrate our new immersion in technology, Canadian Academy is holding Techfest on the first day back to school.  This is a whole day of hands on technology for the High School, with Grade 5 and the Middle School also attending some sessions.  With keynote speakers, gifts for all, and a chance to win an iPad, Techfest should get our laptop program off to a flying start. 

Morning sessions are designed to get everyone up to speed on a number of commonly used tools such as Google Apps and blogs, but the afternoon is a series of electives where students can explore programs of their choice in more depth. Parents are welcome to attend any sessions throughout the day – classes may at times look full, but if there is breathing room still join in anyway – either as an onlooker, helper or student. The keynote speech will begin at 9:10 in the Main Theatre, and the timetable for the rest of the day’s sessions can be picked up from the main office on Thursday morning.

Parents are also invited to a special evening focused on Technology in the main theatre on Thursday, August 19th.  This session will kick off our laptop initiative from the parent point of view.  We will spend time exploring issues such as: how you can help your child, making healthy choices and screen time, security and privacy issues on the internet, information access at Canadian Academy and so on.  This session will be from 6 pm to 8 pm and will be hosted by Kirsten Welbes (MYP Coordinator) and Melanie Vrba (HS Principal).  The session is most suited to parents of 5th grade students and above.

Tech Talk
As part of our commitment to involve all members of our community in technology we will be holding our Tech Talk sessions again this year.  These drop-in sessions are held in the atrium every Monday from 3:30 to 4:00 and every Tuesday from 8:00 to 8:30. All are welcome to come in with their computer questions and we will do our best to solve them.  Maybe you want to know more about how to use Powerschool or Finalsite, or how to edit photos – just turn up and we will do our best to help.

CA on the web
In coming weeks people will notice a new look to the parent and student portals in the school website.  Along with many new features, the portals will be reorganized for more readability, and people will be given more control over what they see and how it is arranged.  More about this later.

Powerschool, our online grade, report and attendance database for the Middle and High schools will also be upgraded, so that only a single login will be required for parents to see all their children’s information at a glance.  You will also begin to see the reporting of criteria based grading, as Canadian Academy gears up for the full adoption of the IB Middle Years Programme.

Moodle, our curriculum delivery program, gets not only a new address on the web, but also a cosmetic makeover.  Note that parents are not supplied with their own passwords to Moodle – the parent portal on the school website is the first stop to find out about your child’s classes.

If you lose your login information for Powerschool, please contact the school office (ph. 8573911 or email Miyuki-san).  For security reasons this confidential information cannot be given over the phone, but will instead be sent to the email address that you have listed in the Email Notification section of Powerschool.  Please keep this address up to date, as Canadian Academy will use it to email your family. Note that for Gmail and the school website portals, password retrieval systems are built into the websites already.

I wish everyone a great year, and hope that we all give each other the space to grow and succeed with the exciting challenges ahead.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.  ~Carl Sagan

This year has been rather Janus faced, looking backwards while continuing to implement and fully realise the impact of the many changes from last year, while looking forward to even bigger changes ahead in the way we deliver technology in the school.  If one theme has predominated all year it would probably be the realisation that information technology is no longer a tool wheeled in to replace older tools, but rather these days an indispensable part of the environment for young people.  ICT has profoundly changed the way we interact with each other, and the way we gain and create information, and this has in turn opened up a myriad of educational opportunities.  Canadian Academy’s ongoing challenge is to fully realise the implications of all of this, and to continue to provide a cutting edge education for its students.

The second dominating theme for ICT this year, has been the very social nature of the changes that technology has unleashed.  We see this out of the school in social media websites like Facebook, but schools have been slower to realise the many educational benefits that similar technologies such as blogs, wikis, forums, and indeed even Facebook itself, can provide.  This year has seen the “viral” impact of blogs around the school, with many grade levels actively participating in these, the use of class forums on Moodle, the slow growth of our own private social network Yammer for the faculty to share resources and discuss professional concerns - the school is beginning to open up and reflect real world ICT practices.  With the introduction of one to one laptops in the High School and 5th Grade next year, this trend will continue to accelerate.

We look forward to next year, with the huge challenge of providing a one to one laptop environment for the High School and Grade 5.  The planning for this project has occupied a great deal of the year, and we are genuinely excited at the opportunities opened up to our students and staff.  With Canadian Academy's strategic emphasis on inquiry learning, we know that the laptop program is a vital component in achieving this goal, as well as providing a pathway to other higher level thinking skills.  We welcome the challenge of educating our students in a fully digital classroom, mirroring the kind of environment that they will spend their lives, both in work and play.

Last year in the school wide goals for the year, we indicated that we would be looking at creating a blueprint for the integrated use of technology in Canadian Academy that would put the school at the cutting edge of best practice in education.  Within this goal two areas were singled out for stronger emphasis, that of online learning, and that of one to one laptop programs in the school. This emphasis implied that both goals would be under serious investigation this year, with view to implementation in the 2010-11 school year, although the exact form or extent of the implementation was to be a major part of the investigation.

Many of us are strongly committed to the principle of one to one laptop usage in the school. There is large usage of the laptop trolleys throughout the school already, and I think most in our community  can see the real benefits that the services we have introduced this year bring to learning.  Whether people are wiki-ing on Moodle, blogging, posting online assignments, or starting to experiment with chat/twitter style discussion forums, one to one laptop use seriously extends the techniques and resources available to teachers, and puts us firmly on the path to extending the collaborative and self reflective learning styles that are shown to be educational best practice today.  It is vital that students learn to use digital media and Web 2.0 tools effectively, and that they learn how to manage their online presence positively.

The exact form of a one to one program for next year has not been decided upon. In the tech department we have had some discussion on the implications of grades 6-12 adoption of laptops next year, but a more limited adoption at say grades 9 to 12 may be more feasible.  How we implement the program also is a major decision - does the school supply devices, do parents buy them, or do we go down a middle road by leasing with view to purchase.

Currently a one to one laptop committee is meeting at 7:45 on Fridays in the ELAC conference room, and we welcome people's contributions here, or in our online community forum. Discussions are now well advanced, but the final shape of the program is just beginning to be looked at. 

This year sees CA advancing on many IT fronts.  Powerschool and Moodle will already be familiar to middle and high school students and parents, but with our brand new website, complete with staff, student, alumni, board and parent portals, as well as gmail accounts for students, we are considerably expanding our communication reach to the CA community.

Everyone's first port of call for information should be the new school website (http://www.canacad.ac.jp).  Click on the Community login button to gain access to information about classes, resources such as student handbooks, links to school related websites, calendars, news and announcements tailored to your needs, as well as contact information for others in the school community.  For parents with previous logins for Powerschool, using the login details of the youngest member of the family should give you access to the school website, although occasionally another of your children's login details may have been used instead.  For middle and high school students simply login using the same details as you used for Powerschool last year.  For those who do not have login details from last year we will be sending the information to you very soon.

Powerschool (https://cadata.canacad.ac.jp) is our online grade, report and attendance database.  Middle and high school students and parents are encouraged to check here regularly not only for grades, but also teacher comments on individual assignments and students' overall progress.  The elementary school, as it moves to PYP Units of Inquiry, is not yet using Powerschool, and the portal is not yet open to parents and students.

Many students will also have encountered CA Moodle (http://camoodle.net) in their studies.  Moodle is a curriculum delivery program, allowing teachers and students to make their own blogs, forums and wikis, submit online assignments, share lessons and resources, and even allows staff and students to chat and instant message each other. Moodle, while a great day to day teaching tool, is also part of Canadian Academy's emergency response system, as many students discovered when the school was closed during the flu epidemic last year. We will be promoting the use of Moodle much more this year, so expect to hear more about it as the year goes on.

The last of our new initiatives this year is to provide all middle and high school students with their own @canacad.ac.jp gmail accounts, in order to facilitate student/teacher communication. Students access their accounts from inside the school website student portal (they will have to add gmail as a resource themselves), or by visiting http://webmail.canacad.ac.jp.  User names and passwords are exactly the same as last year for Powerschool, so students can already begin to use these accounts if they wish.  Remember that these are official school accounts, and should be used according to the rules in CA's Acceptable Use Policy.

With all these changes we will be providing more information, answering questions, and just generally showing people around the new systems at the Back to School evenings in the first weeks of school.  Check the school calendar for the dates of your evening. In the meantime please feel free to comment on this blog, or email me directly for additional information, to provide feedback, or to ask for help.

Murray Smith