Press Release
SASKATOON, December 3, 2007 – Three Greater Saskatoon Catholic Schools teachers are among the winners of Canada’s 2007 Microsoft Innovative Teachers Awards.
Kelli Boklaschuk, Darren Cannell and Maureen Romanchuk were selected for creating The Crooked, Crazy Weather Project for Romanchuk’s Grade 4 students at Bishop Filevich Ukrainian Bilingual School in Saskatoon.
In the project, technology was used in various ways to keep the 22 students interested and engaged as they learned about predicting weather, a unit in Saskatchewan’s Grade 4 science curriculum.
In class, lessons about topics like meteorology, precipitation, clouds and snow were taught with the help of videos, sound files and websites. Rather than taking notes from a board at the front of the room, a projector was used to enlarge and display the information – a small difference but one that made this task much more interesting, Romanchuk reports.
Students also learned about Internet searching, using key words, evaluating websites, manipulating HTML scripts and creating hyperlinks. For the lesson on learning how to set up and enter information into a blog, students were each matched with a city and assigned to answer several weather-related questions about the locale. Each of them also wrote and videotaped a weather forecast for their city. The student blogs and videos can be accessed at The Crooked, Crazy Weather Project’s website: Weather project
Students had fun using the technology, says Romanchuk, and it helped them grasp and retain what they’d learned. “Some children were hesitant at first, but they took this on and exceeded our expectations.”
“Changing the way you teach to adapt to the students is very important,” says Boklaschuk. “It’s obvious this is the way they like to learn.”
The teachers hope the recognition the project has received will encourage more teachers to investigate how to incorporate technology into their lessons. In fact, The Crooked, Crazy Weather Project was designed as a template so other teachers within the division can easily use it to teach the same unit.
A total of five Canadian projects were selected to receive a 2007 Microsoft Innovative Teachers Award. The winning teachers attended the International Innovative Teachers Forum in Helsinki, Finland earlier this month. All winners from Canada were also invited to attend a similar forum in Hanoi, Vietnam in spring 2008 for teachers from the Asia/South Pacific region.