Any day now, School District 72 (SD72) will be launching a new online initiative to highlight what the students of the district are learning, as told by those doing the learning – and teaching.
“It’s a new blog to communicate what’s happening in schools,” assistant superintendent Nevenka Fair said at a recent meeting of the Board of Trustees.
“It’s an invitation for teachers – or for teachers and their classes as a shared writing activity – or for the students themselves to submit to this blog, to be able to answer the question, ‘What did I learn at school today?’”
The entries on the blog, Fair said, “will be very short (pieces of writing), or possibly video clips – however they want to do it. But it will be great because they’ll be doing it publicly and we can share it with our community.”
The initiative, Fair said, fits into the district’s new mandate from the Ministry of Education.
“The Ministry, amongst many changes, has been looking at making a shift from achievement contracts, and so we’re planning where we’re going to focus our efforts in terms of collecting evidence of learning and communicating it to the public.
“We know that it’s through stories, often, that we really hear how students are doing,” she said, and this is another venue for the sharing of those stories.
She said it will also be of benefit to the students, as it will offer them a place to speak in an authentic voice and express how they feel about how their education is going.
Another benefit of the blog, Fair said, is the added networking opportunity for teachers.
“Oftentimes, there’s only one grade 2 teacher in a school, for example, and (with this blog) they’ll be able to see something another teacher has been doing with their students, and they’ll be able to say, ‘hey, that looks really cool, how did you do that?’ So it’s also a really good professional development opportunity.
“We’re really excited about it.”
There’s not yet a date set for the blog to launch, but when it does, the public will be able to access it through the SD72 website at sd72.bc.ca
The next public meeting of the SD72 Board of Trustees is scheduled for next Tuesday, Oct. 27 at 7:30 p.m. at the SD72 office at 425 Pinecrest Road.