About Me

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I have been an elementary and secondary school teacher and administrator. Currently, I am a faculty member in the Faculty of Education at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. My M.Ed. and Ph.D. had a focus on the educational and linguistic experiences of children who moved from other countries to Canada.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

BlackBerry increases support for the Haiti Digital Mentoring Project

This week I received a shipment of another 100 smartphones from BlackBerry for the Digital Mentoring Project in Haiti. This increases the number of smartphones and tablet computeres that BlackBerry has donated to 150+. It is an incredible display of support for the work we are doing to connect school principals in Haiti in a digital professional learning community.

Here is an overview of the project:

1. Original group of 10 school administrators (2011-2013) who served as our testing group. The results of the research project that accompanied this pilot project are forthcoming this spring in two international journal publications and a book chapter.

2. Scaling up from the pilot project to include:

a) 20 BBs for school administrators from a private school system with representatives in each region of the country (research: assessing use in a school system)
b) 30 BBs for teachers and administrators from a school in a small community (research: assessing use to connect staff within one school in a rural community)
c) 10 tablets for student use in same school as b (research: assessing use by students and teachers in classroom settings)
d) 20 BBs for lead teachers from a teaching association with teachers from different parts of the country (research: assessing use to support teacher professional development)
e) 10 BBs for administrators and support staff in a large school in a city (research: assessing use to connect administrative staff in a large, urban school)
f) 10 tablets for student use in same school as e (research: assessing use by students and teachers in classroom settings)
g) 30 BBs for Ministry of National Education regional staff and/or school principals (research: assessing use to connect principals to support leadership professional development)
h) 10 BBs for a university senior management team (research: assessing how mobile learning can be facilitated in a university setting in Haiti)

There are a lot of projects on-going and it is exciting to see the project scaling up in this way!