ETAPe project: Franco-Ontarian students learn about ICT

ONTARIO - About thirty francophone students from northern Ontario are participating in the new ETAPe pilot project - Technopedagogical environment for personalized electronic learning - which aims to integrate new technologies into their school curriculum. The Conseil scolaire public du Grand Nord de l'Ontario (CSPGNO) and the Franco-Ontarian Center for Educational Resources (CFORP) are joining forces for this project.

Hubert Lalande, director of the multimedia production service at CFORP explains that ETAPe is above all an educational project and not a technical one. The objective is to better understand how ICT can help young people in their learning, particularly in terms of motivation.

For Pierre Riopel, interim director of education at CSPGNO, the situation is ideal since the groups chosen are small: 12 students at the École publique de la Découverte, in Val-Caron, and 22 at the École secondaire de Hanmer. . The small number of students allows for individual support.

Integrating new technologies into learning has been a priority for CSPGNO for several years. Already, all primary classes are equipped with an interactive whiteboard. The schools are also all connected to a wireless internet network, although the most distant schools are more than ten hours away. The school board also has 2,200 computers for… 2,200 students.

However, setting up a project like ETAPe requires money. It is thanks to the program Hybrid learning from the Ontario Ministry of Education that the CSPGNO was able to finance the purchase of a whiteboard, projector, touch pads and laptops for all students and teachers in grades 7^e year.

Before starting the ETAPe project, the two teachers, school administrators and educational advisers received training offered by the CFORP. “The hardest part was getting everyone to the same level. One of the teachers had extensive experience with the interactive whiteboard while the other had never used it, ”explains Hubert Lalande.

Pierre Riopel spoke with the school administrators and their assessment of the first two months of the year is simple: “Wow! However, we will have to wait for phase two of the project to verify this first impression. Hubert Lalande hopes to be able to associate the project with researchers from the University of Ottawa or Laurentian University and thus carry out a longitudinal study on the role of ICT in learning. Mr. Lalande's objective "is to interest as many people as possible and thus extend the project to the next school year. The CFORP is open to all invitations! "

Pierre Riopel will present the ETAPe project on November 9 and 10 at a conference in Toronto on the theme Connect to success. The objective is to make the project known and who knows, to interest new participants.

In order to provide adapted educational resources, the Franco-Ontarian Center for Educational Resources has created resources specifically for the TBI, in addition to transposing educational resources from paper to electronic format. By the end of 2011, Hubert Lalande predicts that the center will have created around ten TBI titles for all school levels.

An adventure of this kind requires significant technical assistance. It is the Symbaloo visual content aggregator who is responsible for the technical aspect of the project.

To consult the CSPGNO website

To consult the CFORP website on the ETAPe project

To consult the educational tools of the CFORP

To visit the Symbaloo site