OPSBA Surveying the World on Learning Technologies

TORONTO , Dec. 17 /CNW/ - Earlier this year, the Ontario Public School Boards' Association (OPSBA) released a Discussion Paper entitled: What If? Technology in the 21st Century Classroom. http://www.opsba.org/files/WhatIf.pdf. As school trustees, we want to be part of developing a provincial vision and strategies that will make all our classrooms connected and relevant. As a follow up to What if?, OPSBA has released Getting Ready for Learning Technologies - an interest inventory survey for those people involved in bringing effective use of learning technologies to our schools. The survey takes only a minute to complete online and can be found at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/OPSBA_GettingReadySurvey

As OPSBA prepared the paper What if? Technology in the 21st Century Classroom, we often heard that people working in this area felt isolated and unaware of relevant work that might be happening elsewhere. This isolation creates duplicated effort, and lost opportunities for collaboration and joint positive initiatives among people in the Information Technology field.

OPSBA's goal in launching the interest inventory survey is to take a first step to build a community of information sharing and make everyone's efforts more beneficial for all. OPSBA hopes the Getting Ready for Learning Technologies survey link will find its way to anyone involved in working to bring effective learning technologies to our students and schools.

The survey shows that OPSBA has made an effort to organize the work that needs to be done into seven specific disciplines (or "layers"): Culture, Capacity, Curriculum/Courseware, Computing Devices, Connectivity, Construction, and Coordination.

This structure will help make it easier to keep track of the work that is currently being done in these areas. We have shared this framework with the Ontario Ministry of Education to support their planning for learning technologies. While OPSBA's work naturally focuses on Ontario, our hope is that people from around the world will share their interests and insights with us.

For further information: Howard Goodman, OPSBA IT Ad-Hoc Committee Member, [phone]; Jeff Sprang, Director of Communications, [phone]