With their first HP grant, teachers at Grand Manan Community School made learning and teaching exciting. They're about to take it even further with their second grant.
When Andrew Jones, a teacher at
Grand Manan Community School 
, received the application form for the HP Technology for Teaching Grant, he thought filling out the forms would be a waste of time. He assumed his small school on a remote island off the southeastern tip of New Brunswick would have almost no chance of being selected when competing against schools from across Canada.
He submitted the application and dreamed about how his school of 450 students from kindergarten to Grade 12 could benefit from everything the unique grant offered. There were five
HP Tablet PCs, five
HP multimedia projectors, HP Help Desk technical support for a year and professional development programming from the
International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) to spur ideas on how to maximize the use of technology in the classroom.
Andrew and a team of four other teachers drafted the grant proposal themed “Fishing for Knowledge.” The plan was to leverage the grant’s offerings to create class projects that would focus on breaking down the school’s geographical barriers produced by their isolated island location. Students would learn about their unique marine environment and cultural traditions as well as those of other students in different geographic locations. The result of integrating technology into learning would provide new and rich content to engage students.
Andrew received the surprise of his life when he found out in the spring of 2004 that Grand Manan had been chosen by HP as one of eight Canadian schools to receive a grant, worth more than $30,000 per school. “The only thing more exciting than hearing that news, was seeing the results of the grant in action,” says Andrew.
The core group of five teachers held formal meetings each month to share progress, wrote team and individual objectives and constantly shared new learnings. They all quickly began to see the benefits of using technology as a teaching tool.
One of the individual goals for each member of the team was to simply “try something new” with the technology. One teacher created a wildly popular game of Jeopardy with Microsoft PowerPoint, making reviewing course material fun and educational for her students. Enthusiasm for teaching with technology spread like wildfire to all the school’s staff and, in turn, generated even more ideas on how to leverage these new resources.
Throughout the year, teachers and students completed many
“Fishing for Knowledge” initiatives . “We collaborated with another school in New Brunswick – communicating online – to compare our island, which is a fishing community, to the other school’s community, which is based on farming. We also collaborated with
schools in Holland , sharing information about our respective cultures and people.”
Staff were enthusiastic about their new equipment. One grade 8 teacher sacrificed her class preparation time to take some students down to the grade 3 classroom to help show the younger students the thrill of scientific discovery -- made possible by using the tablets in conjunction with digital microscopes.
“Teachers just don’t give up prep time,” describes Andrew. “But she was so charged up about how the technology could make learning exciting she sacrificed that valuable time. ”
“The most important thing that has happened because of this grant is that we now have a technology culture at our school,” explains Andrew. “At first, many of our teachers were a little scared of using the new technology. But once they got more comfortable, they started to apply simple things to their lesson planning and it snowballed from there. Now the technology is at the heart of lesson planning and is considered a valuable learning tool.”
As for the students, Andrew said it’s a joy to watch their faces light up as the technology makes learning more fun and compelling. The young children are mesmerized when highly visual and interactive material from the Web is projected big and bright. For the middle grades, Andrew says the tablets and projectors have been especially useful for helping students learn how to make effective presentations. And for the senior students, Andrew says it was awe-inspiring to watch them use the technology to overcome the isolation of being on a small island.
At the
National Education Computing Conference this past June, Andrew highlighted Grand Manan’s successes of how they integrated technology into teaching. The innovative projects undertaken and fresh ideas for ongoing learning secured Grand Manan as the only Canadian school to receive a “reinvestment” grant by HP. Winning this second grant will see more tablets, projectors and additional support provided to the school so more kids can benefit from the technology when they return to class in September.
The grant program not only demonstrates HP Canada’s commitment to bringing technology into the education system, but, as Andrew notes, it has resulted in the HP brand being revered in his community, where the school’s win represents an intense source of pride for all citizens on the island.
Summing up the program, Andrew says the biggest lesson he has learned is that “every teacher in every school should have a tablet and a projector in the classroom. It’s as simple as that. These tools are so powerful they should be standard equipment for everyone.”
It’s a thought echoed by Dr. Michael Fox, Professor at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. Dr. Fox is leading a team of education professors who are conducting a research project entitled “An Investigation of the Effects of Dedicated Notebook Computers on Teaching and Learning in New Brunswick Middle Schools.”
“As a remote, island location, we have been very impressed with the high degree of technology being employed at Grand Manan Community School,” says Dr. Fox. “The school is currently breaking new frontiers on laptop and integrated technologies – connecting their students to the world via HP technology. We see marked improvements in student skills and attitudes towards learning.”
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