Exceptional Times: Using a Pandemic to Close the Digital Divide

Thoughts from the depths of the COVID19 pandemic: Rather than give in to the digital divide in times of crisis, why not leverage this moment and make moves to resolve it?

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It has been suggested that due to the inequity of access to technology and internet, our education system should shut down during the COVID19 pandemic.  Rather than surrender to this inequity why not attempt to address it directly?  We could leverage all the digital technology we have sitting fallow in closed schools and sign it out one to one for every student in need.  If this goes on longer then connecting with educational technology charities like Computers for Schools would allow us to quickly get technology permanently into the hands of students without it.  We could approach this crisis as an opportunity to do something we should have been doing when things were in better shape, working to close the digital divide for all our students on the wrong side of it.

At the same time we could offer limited access to our public school library learning commons where students would have access to internet.  With appropriate safety precautions (limited numbers allowed, strict hygiene practices, solo seating arrangements), we could take immediate steps to bridge the lack of connectivity and allow some form of education to continue for students across Canada.  At a time of isolation, our poorest students are doubly so because they can't get online  Simply turning off the education system for months at a time will cause lasting damage for millions of students.  In the meantime, the ones who have always suffered on the wrong side of the digital divide are in even worse shape.

This is a measured and logical approach to resolving the digital divide (a lack of educational technology access to all students)  that has long plagued education.  Rather than having this pandemic make it worse, why not leverage it to make it better?

Handing out one to one technology for students in need so we can keep moving everyone forward educationally wouldn't be as expensive as you might think and the alternative is significantly more costly.  Our public schools have developed the network infrastructure necessary to provide internet, so limited access to that infrastructure could still address the needs of social distancing while providing connectivity that is vital to us battling this pandemic as a collective.  Those students aren't the only ones who would benefit, their entire families would, and so would society itself.

Companies like LOON are already building last mile
infrastructure like this.  Partnering with Ontario schools
would mean internet at home for almost every student.

If this pandemic has shown anything, it's that our ICT infrastructure is more vital than ever if we're going to move against this crisis in a coordinated manner; communication is key.  There are existing technologies we could apply to extend school and municipal wireless networking out into the communities that surround them.  With fundamental networking infrastructure in place, some innovative final mile solutions (like Blimpernet - an idea that my students and I came up with last year) could make the internet available to many more Canadians just when we need it.  Google is already well down this road with their #LOONproject, which works right now and could provide emergency connectivity for almost every Canadian for up to 100 days at a time.  We could eradicate a problem that has been plaguing us as a society since the majority of us went online; getting everyone connected.

Seems like a no brainer with so few planes in the sky, no?

Wouldn't it be something if one of the lasting legacies of this pandemic was that it helped us close the digital divide and improve equity through access to technology in our schools and society in general?  That it would also allow our education systems to continue in a limited capacity instead of shutting down is a consequence that would benefit all Canadians.

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I sent this to a number of MPs as well as the PM.  I only hope a measured, reasonable response is still in the cards.  If you feel the same way, forward it to your elected representatives.

How to Pivot Ontario Education to Prepare for The Next Wave

I've been participating in Learning2Pivot with doctors Bryan Sanders and Verena Roberts and many others online during this pandemic emergency.   The people in these talks make a point of trying to see the forest for the trees, which is refreshing after another week in the trenches of a diabolically delivered remote learning program.  One of the main ideas in these meetings is to try and work out a pedagogically credible way forward during pandemic emergency remote teaching, so I'm encouraged to give it a go.

I've been struggling with our response to COVID19 since it started (which is why Dusty World has been busy - it's my mechanism for reflecting my way out of the frustration and hopelessness that has accompanied it).  Leveraging our considerable resources to pivot effectively is at odds with much of what Ontario has done in this crisis, but there is still time to build capacity and create a more resilient, digitally transliterate system that would not only work more efficiently face to face, but could also handle remote learning much more effectively.

OSAPAC's broken and abandoned website
- a good metaphor for educational technology
integration in Ontario's school system

When I started thinking about the logistics of actually pivoting to an effective remote learning strategy, I was looking for a way to harness the power of the digital technology at our disposal while also acknowledging the digital divide and the skills gap that has resulted from our refusal to acknowledge that digital fluency is now an integral part of literacy; this transliteracy includes emerging mediums of digital communication.  We have to apply the same rigour to learning the digital aspects of transliteracy as we do the traditional concepts we fixate on.  If we did, we could rapidly develop a much more effective and relevant education system.

Ontario had a mechanism for integrating digital technology called OSAPAC (Ontario Software Acquisition Program Advisory Committee), but funding just got cut to that even while this same government was inventing positions at EQAO for its failed candidates.  Instead of strengthening the very thing that could have provided direction and resources and even help make elearning more of a possibility in Ontario schools, our educational mismanagement has cut that and doubled down on the Educational Quality & Accountability Office, whose only function in this crisis has been to cancel everything they were doing and provide no accountability at all.

What I'm suggesting below might even be attempted as a zero cost game by taking the money being poured into an accountability office that doesn't account for anything and spending it to recreate and expand OSAPAC into the Education Relevancy & Resiliency Office.  Their job would be to put an end to the corporate branding of educational technology in our system (every board is now a Microsoft or Google board) and restore and expand Ontario's centrally managed and vetted collection of educational technology tools, while also ensuring that the system develops the capacity to effectively use them.  ERRO's first job would be to make this happen by developing platform agnostic access to a vetted ecosystem of digital technology:

If remote learning were a software systems upgrade in
a business, Ontario Education would be getting fired.

I worked in IT for a long time before I became a teacher and was reading about current best practices around upgrading software integrated into a business.  These kinds of short term contract were my bread and butter for a while in the late nineties and early zeroes, and the do-or-die, it must work-ness of these upgrades made them a pretty edgy area of IT to work in.  When you're upgrading hundreds of machines in AstraZeneca's Mississauga facility, and millions of dollars in lost production are on the line if you mess it up, the process you follow isn't political or decided by people who have no idea what they're doing (ie: how education is being run in Ontario at the moment), it's driven entirely by need and effectiveness.

Doing this wrong could cripple a business so it tends to be run with a ruthless effectiveness.  When we were doing a JDEdwards upgrade at Ontario Store Fixtures in the mid-nineties, they brought in a retired marine colonel to oversee the update - failure is not an option, and it's about much more than just making sure the tech works.

That article highlighted five vital things you need to do if you're not going screw up a critical business infrastructure upgrade and ensure it's going to work.  We've systemically ignored all of them while rolling out remote learning in Ontario in the past six weeks.

Proper planning evidently didn't happen before schools shut down because this government needed a three week freeze on everything before they were willing to respond at all.  What eventually emerged was a poorly supported off loading of all responsibility for this onto teachers in a system that has been drained of capacity over the past year.

There continues to be little or no communication between partners in the system.  Our board is continually surprised at whatever the minister decides to roll out at his increasingly oddly timed press conferences.  Leaders weren't on board because they didn't know there was anything to board - any planning appears to have been done privately and then dumped on boards to try and make happen with little or no support.

The digital transliteracy needed to remote teach in online spaces has never been developed in staff.  The digitally fluent ones have had to develop it on their own time and with their own resources.  They've had to fight to attend events like the ECOO Conference, which had its funding stripped this year much like OSAPAC's was.  This government's systemic deconstruction of public education has resulted in an atrophied response that wasn't helped by years ignoring digital transliteracy by the previous liberal government.

Our education system has some tough, resilient educators who keep fighting to build system integrity and efficacy, but many have been beaten down by the past eight years of political games.  It's hard to innovate when you're just trying to find enough space to breathe.  All that aside, let's fix this mess and pivot to a system that has the capacity to remote learn as something other than a political stunt.  Here's how to do it:

STEP 1:

pull the plug on remote learning:  As Nam Kiwanuka suggested on TVO, it's time to stop playing cat and mouse with parents, students and educators and end this round of remote learning.  Use May to wind down remote learning, but let's not waste that time.  It can also be used to collect actionable data on the digital divide in our staff and students.

I've been collecting data on our staff this week. 24% of
our teachers are trying to remote teach on Chromebooks.
That's like trying to play hockey with a two by four.

A digital divide in staff you say?  Surely they all have digital technology at home to do this.  Well, actually they don't.  Digital transliteracy in the general population is appalling, and most teachers follow that trend.  Many don't have the tech needed to remote teach from home or the digital transliteracy to leverage it effectively.

Instead of trying to assess who has what during an emergency, why don't we keep information on access to digital technology for all?  Knowing this would go a long way to explaining why students (and staff) who struggle in school tend towards poor use of digital tools.  How can you be expected to be fluent on a device when you don't have access to it?  This is akin to being angry with a student for not learning to read and write when they don't have access to any reading or writing material.  We really have to expand our sense of literacy to include emerging communications mediums.  The printing press fundamentally changed what literacy looked like in society.  Our digital revolution is doing the same thing, we simply need to recognize this expanded idea of literacy and act on it.

While we're wrapping up remote learning 1.0, restart OSAPAC and gather all the boards together.  End the corporate branding of school boards and make a centralized agreement with all educational technology companies that gives access to vetted, secure online tools to EVERYONE.  Engage the various boards who have all specialized in different systems and bring them together to create a merged digital ecosystem of tools.  For the few who have developed best practices around video conferencing and other problematic applications, leverage that experience so we can establish a coherent, viable culture around its use in education.

STEP 2

Instead of cancelling PD make it mandatory for everyone in the education system.  June becomes digitally transliteracy training month.  Re-orientate on logistics for closing the digital divide in our staff and actually train them in accessing and effectively using a wider range of digital tools that aren't brand specific.

This isn't an optional training, it's mandatory.  Everyone is on the clock and we have their attention, time to fix years of lazy assumptions and develop digitally empowered transliteracy in all education staff - that's everyone from admin support to teaching assistants to building maintenance - everyone becomes minimally fluent in using digital tools to communicate.

For teachers this is a pedagogically driven process.  Best practices have been developed by digitally transliterate teachers for years now, and it's mostly ignored.  When digital technology is pushed into a resisting teacher's practice it's usually as a substitute (use Google docs instead of photocopies - it's cheaper!).  But digital tools don't just offer substitution, they offer a different way of doing things.  Watching teachers all struggling to gain access to video conferencing simply so they can digitally recreate the out of date lecturing they habitually deliver in school was a fine example of the S in SAMR.

Static lessons and rote student work that is easily plagiarized goes away when educators realize that they are no longer the font of information; we are living in an information rich age.  Students don't need to wait for you to pontificate on a subject, credible information on it is all around us.    By pivoting toward student centred learning where teachers are showing students how to access this freely available information rather than disseminating it means a fundamental shift in pedagogy from a rigid, 20th Century, information poor world to the world we live in now.  Over this month teachers would not only learn basic technical skills and familiarity with digital learning tools, but also consider a more viable 21st Century pedagogy.

There would be testing in this mandatory training that would be pass fail.  Educators who don't participate or cannot demonstrate understanding of basic principles in digital transliteracy would be expected to retake the course in the summer - they're not teaching in the fall without it - this is an emergency.

STEP 3

Spend the summer building capacity by working to minimize the digital divide while developing a vetted digital ecosystem for all school boards.  There are no more Microsoft boards and Google boards, everyone is both, and more.  OSAPAC is back and developing a centralized repository of digital tools.  This is an ongoing, responsive process where educators request access to emerging digital tools and OSAPAC does what it always used to do and get Ontario education access to reviewed and relevant technology at a wholesale price.

Over the summer staff would have access to an increasing pool of online learning tools as well as being delivered the technology they need to proceed with an effective remote learning program if it's needed in the fall.

July and August also gives us time to develop an integrated, grade specific curriculum that focuses students on digital transliteracy.  The goal would be to develop a two week intensive curriculum that gives students the awareness they need to proceed with digital tools in a less habitual and more mindful and coherent manner.  We'd no longer leave digital transliteracy to chance.

STEP 4

Leverage our transliterate school system.  In September, if we're face to face we still proceed with the opening digital transliteracy crash course, because we don't know if there will be a second wave and remote learning returns.  If it doesn't, we have a school system that has taken real steps towards being literate in a relevant way, which will improve our learning efficacy while face to face.  If we do end up remote learning again, we've actually laid the groundwork to do it with a degree of effectiveness we can only dream of at the moment.

STEP 4.1

Have a differentiation plan in place for students (and staff) who are unable to effectively leverage digital tools remotely.  These people are the ones that socially distanced in-school learning is prioritized for.  We don't approach this by throwing an elearning blanket over everything.  We differentiate and use our school infrastructure for staff and students who need it, while preventing COVID19 spreading vectors.  Student need comes before ease of management.

STEP 5

Continue to develop transliteracy with PD for staff that allows them to explore and share online, beyond the walls of their classrooms and schools.  Make a point of connecting educators to PLNs (professional learning networks) that have existed online for digitally fluent educators for years now.  Expect digital transliteracy in our staff, and encourage its development.  OSAPAC becomes a central repository of digital best practices and a place where educators and students can find the tools they need knowing that they are safe.  This empowered OSAPAC relevancy and resiliency in digital transliteracy also empowers other groups like ECOO, ACSE and OASBO, all of whom have the history and technical capacity to make Ontario education a world leader in digital transliteracy.  Linking up to existing programs like TVO's TeachOntario could provide online gateways to this material.

STEP 6

Continue to develop transliteracy in our students by inserting skills specific, focused transliteracy learning throughout the curriculum.  Make digital transliteracy an inherent part of literacy training in elementary schools.  Include basic technical comprehension and skills based digital media development for all students (and staff).  Create a mandatory digital literacy course in junior high school that all students must demonstrate proficiency in - better yet, integrate digital transliteracy into literacy, though expecting English teachers to shoulder that burden alone isn't fair.  We use digital tools (badly) in every aspect of schooling now.  Imagine how much better that could be if staff and students had more than a habitual grasp of them. 

STEP 7

Expand ICT networking infrastructure out of our schools by exploring emerging technologies like Google's Loon Project which can provide wide spread 3G internet connectivity for everyone.  In coordination with the federal government, make Canada's vanishing digital divide the envy of the rest of the world, and then design education systems that teach and leverage it effectively.  Continue to explore and expand Ontario's OSAPAC to include emerging technologies as they become available on a collaborative, province wide scale.

Did we hit that checklist?

Proper planning preventing poor performance  ✔

Communication is key  ✔

Get your leaders on board   ✔

Train the house down   ✔

Build an innovative culture   ✔

Yep.  This is a plan designed to build capacity and take on the challenges of remote learning, which range from technology access to digital illiteracy.  The biggest irony is that many more students (and staff) would be able to participate in elearning in order to diversify learning options for students.  Instead of demanding mandatory elearning out of nowhere, developing digital transliteracy in the system would cause it to happen anyway.

Of course, we'd have to approach this from a building-capacity-in-the-system angle to make it happen.  It looks like that's not going to happen in Ontario until after June 2, 2022, which means we've got more than two more years of misdirection and mismanagement from a government that has no interest in building capacity... unless they can just change their minds.

Pandemic Reflections: F2F Has Way Better Bandwidth

I'm a teacher with a lot of technical expertise.  I don't just teach effectively with digital technology, I teach the subject itself.  Fifteen years working in information technology in roles ranging from systems implementation to technical support and training are what led me into teaching the subject.  When I began teaching in 2004, elearning was beginning to evolve out of distance (ie: mail order paper based) material.  I jumped on it the summer after I started teaching at Peel DSB.  At that point elearning was a very loose HTML webpage where you had to write code to display the content properly.  I had some very interesting experiences teaching senior, university bound English on that system.  When I moved to my current board I volunteered for their pilot elearning program and taught a variety of elearning courses purely online, and then did a blended face to face introduction to elearning while teaching the mandatory career studies course.  One of the best things to come out of that project was that all of those students had a very clear idea of whether or not elearning would work for them.  A third of the class never wanted to see it again, and the correlation between students with IEPs and students who had trouble with elearning was nearly 100%.

All that to say, I've spent a great deal of my career exploring how digital technologies might augment our teaching, but I'm also well aware of the shortfalls.

The recent pandemic shutdown has driven a lot of teachers and students online, and the framing by our Ministry early on was very elearning focused, but a colleague in our first ever staff video conference said something that resonated with me:  this isn't elearning, it isn't business as usual, this is emergency response remote learning - we're not 'going online' we're doing everything we can to keep education alive at a time when it's too easily dismissed.  This might sound like an arbitrary distinction, but it isn't.  Not everyone needs to go online, and in many cases (as in the 2011 career studies experiment above), we have a sizable portion of our student population who cannot learn effectively in that space.  When you also toss in the inequity of online learning, it leaves option looking like a very poor go-to.  As educators, whenever we see the system roll out an undifferentiated, blanket response to an issue (like EQAO), we should take a hard pedagogical look at it.  Uniform responses that don't honour our student (and teacher's) individual approaches to learning and teaching are, by definition, unresponsive and ineffective. 

Since the school closures happened I've been very conscious of the economically disadvantaged students who have been cut off at home.  This may very well be a home that isn't safe, isn't providing adequate care and isn't where the student wants to spend their time.  The "stay at home" message that started this off is couched in privilege.  For many students home isn't a nice word.  I've been frustrated by the lack of initiative shown in this crisis, but the digital divide many of our students face was something we could have addressed before, but didn't.  Some leaders are now using that lack of equity as an excuse to do nothing, which strikes me as the worst kind of hypocrisy.  If we messed it up before, we're messing it up now for even more people because what we didn't do before is an excuse to do nothing now?  Wow.

I'm also staggered that there is evidently no one in the largest school system in the country who is responsible for emergency response planning.  We seem to be making it up as we go and delivering planning by press conference (evidently this are no communications going to boards before hand to begin preparing), and we've already lost three weeks planning something that should have been in place from the go.

You know what's harder than teaching remotely?  Teaching remotely using unclear and constantly changing expectations.

So here we are, in a pandemic situation that people have been warning is coming for years.  Our solution is to throw elearning at it, and (so far, 3 weeks in) do nothing to address the fact that thousands of Ontario students don't have the devices at home and/or the internet connectivity to access it - and those are the students who most needed education to support them from the beginning.

There is a reason why we truck in students on diesel fume spewing school buses each day to a face to face learning environment; public education is the great equalizer.  More than anything else it helps us find the best in our population and enable them to achieve beyond the socio-economic situation they find themselves in.  For wealthy students school can feel like a step down from a life of choice and excess, but for others it is a bastion of reliability; the only time in their day when they're talking to dependable, capable adults.  For some it's the only time when they aren't hungry, and our solution in an emergency situation that demands isolation is to ignore them?

Level 3 means you can take a time and date out of an email
and put it in an online calendar, this isn't rocket science.

Let's say we get the digital divide under control and manage to get everyone connected (we haven't and we won't, but let's imagine we did).  Now that we have everyone online and using an appropriate device, we need the majority to leverage digital skills they haven't developed and get them learning remotely.  Ontario doesn't have a digital skills continuum, other than some vague language dropped into other subjects here and there, yet we were increasingly expecting students and teachers to use digital tools in school and now they have suddenly become a necessity.  I teach computer technology and have a well developed program, but I only reach about 100 students out of the 1300 in our school.  If you count the business tech courses and media arts that also build digital fluency, all together we'd be lucky to reach a quarter of our student population, the rest have basic, habitual digital experience - like most of the population.  What we're doing with elearning is akin to handing out books to illiterate people so they can learn at home with them.

Could elearning work?  It has in my experience, and I'm seeing some of my very digitally fluent seniors doing outstanding work online now.  I've had some very positive elearning teaching experiences where we leveraged technology and created a remote learning environment that was rich and responsive.  When it has happened, it was with a digitally focused and experienced teacher and voluntary students who also had the resilience and technical expertise to make it happen.

When you teach online it feels like you're looking at your students through a wrong-way-around telescope.  I described this recently in terms of bandwidth.  When you're face to face with someone you're able to read their body language in fine detail.  The tone of their voice isn't a dimensionless thing coming out of a tiny computer speaker, but it doesn't end there.  I've had students with obvious (when face to face) hygiene issues that I'm able to notice and subtly address by getting our councillors involved.  I'm able to leverage the fantastic food school resources our school offers to get hungry students fed when we're face to face.  I'm able to overhear student conversation in class that gives me the context I need to connect with them more effectively.  I'm able to present body language and nuance of voice that develops trust and a human relationship.  I'm able to differentiate instruction with students quickly and effectively while face to face.  I'm able to close the digital divide for all my students when they enter my lab.   Doing all this in school means I'm also doing it in a place with social conventions aimed at teaching and learning that define and direct what we're doing - you don't get any of that online.  There is a reason we learn best face to face, it has way better bandwidth than any digital option.  Even if you and your students are digital ninjas, remote/online learning is always going to be a lower bandwidth, less effective option that face to face learning.

In a perfect world we'd develop our staff and student's digital fluency and engage in augmented 21st Century learning using digital tools and connectivity to enhance our ability to collaborate and communicate (and be ready for bizarre emergencies like this one), but it makes for a poor replacement; educational technology for augmentation is a worthy pedagogical goal.  Educational digital technology replacing face to face learning isn't pedagogically motivated, it's usually tied to scalability and the resultant monetization of a platform, usually with an eye to reducing costs and centralizing control.  The elearning push by Ontario's current government was entirely focused on this without any thought given to the digital divide, dearth of digital skills and pedagogically reductive nature of remote elearning.

This pandemic has shone a harsh light on the inadequacies of our system in terms of emergency response and digital skills training, as well as highlighting the ongoing digital divide.  A good that might come of it is that we begin to address all of these issues and build a more resilient and effective education system that is able to take initiative and respond to an emergency situation without taking a month to think about it.  The resultant remote learning will still be inferior to what we can do in school, but as it stands now we've taken too long to do something we're not ready to do anyway.  As we limp out of this situation, we need to take a long hard look at how unprepared we were to deal with this.

COVID19: Desperate Times Call for Tangible Measures

My first instinct is to show some initiative and begin solving problems when things get difficult.  I'm frustrated at the lack of transparency, communication and minimal focus on effective learning process going forward.  Had I any say in how things are going down I'd break this down into two approaches:

One unit would be working to immediately attempt to address digital divide issues and try and close the gap on the number of students without technology or connectivity at home to as close to zero as possible.  This would also have the benefit of connecting poor families as well as their children to the major source of communication the rest of us share these days.

The other unit would set up online learning officers at each school board who have the latitude to make agile changes to organize staff so that they are able to communicate with students and leverage existing digital communications to try and provide genuine alternative programming that will allow students to resume their face to face studies eventually without the time away being a complete loss.  Throwing out generic material online isn't going to do any of that.

Being an ex-IT technician I'm very interested in trying to quickly resolve the logistical and technical issues around the digital divide:  Dusty World: Exceptional Times: Using a Pandemic to Close the Digital Divide.  I'd leave the people management to others better suited to it.

At times like this the top heavy nature of Ontario Education with all the ministries, unions, boards, colleges and goodness knows what else, really comes into focus.  We're unable to put the focus where it should be (on enabling student learning, remember?) because they're all too busy getting in each other's way.

I was involved in a VoicED podcast yesterday on how student privacy could be compromised as we rapidly migrate online in response to the pandemic:  EP 06 – Special Pandemic Edition: Transforming Education Under Pressure | voicEd 

Student data privacy is already quite opaque and uncertain with boards all doing it differently, or not at all, with little ministry of government oversight and many questions around who has access to what.  A sudden shift online is only likely to make things worse, but it's also an opportunity.  An opportunity to begin seriously teaching digital skills in a coherent and meaningful way instead of the piecemeal curriculum we've cobbled together to date.  With better digital fluency will come a more responsive and effective online learning response to this pandemic.

If this situation has shown anything, it's that digital communications are vital in creating a coherent social response to this crisis.  Closing the digital divide would not only help those students on the wrong side of it, but would also create a more inclusive Canada.  We couldn't be bothered to do it when life was easy, but maybe we could do it now when life is hard.

I'll end this with the 3 suggestions I ended the podcast with:

1) Use existing board walled gardens (UGDSB's UGcloud is particularly well put together) - that's vetted material in a secure environment - all UGDSB students will know how to use it too. Whichever board your child is in, there will be an educational technology equivalent where they can work in a protected space... and communicate with classmates and teachers!

Created and maintained by UGDSB, the site is designed to provide safe, curriculum-based activities while your child is away from school. This secure website is available only to UGDSB students. Available content for gr 1-8. @UG2GO #InsideUG2Go #StaySafeStayHome #DiscoverTJRC pic.twitter.com/c2lvAeWI9W

— Terry James RC (@terryjamesrc) March 19, 2020

2) Parents shouldn't stress out because of all the 'we're giving you the tools to home-school' rhetoric coming out of the government. No one expects you do get a degree in teaching and begin doing it effectively. This piece from the NY Times might talk you down a bit: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/opinion/coronavirus-home-school.html/  Keep in mind that the 'anyone can teach' nonsense is recent Ontario government rhetoric and not true.  Putting that expectation on yourself at this difficult time isn't fair to you or your family.

3) Talk to your kids' teachers! If you're in my board you have online access on UGcloud to do this - most other boards have similar systems. The vast majority of us want to help and want to do something. We're generally frustrated at all the suits who keep telling us not to.  We should be signing out laptops to the students who need them and providing internet for those without, not doing PR and wringing our hands about liability.

What does UNICEF say?
“Children need structure. Full stop. And what we’re all having to do, very quickly, is invent entirely new structures to get every one of us through our days” - so 'look after yourselves for two weeks' isn't helpful according to psychologists...

https://www.unicef.org/coronavirus/6-ways-parents-can-support-their-kids-through-coronavirus-covid-19

Discussions about this are happening in many places:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/temking_ep-06-special-pandemic-edition-transforming-activity-6647304569095274496-3P84
https://twitter.com/Stephen_Hurley/status/1241367358754770945
... just not where they should be happening between ministry, boards and teachers.

Pandemic Reflections: Surrender as a Survival Technique

I've written a couple of pandemic teaching reflections recently that I'm not going to publish because staring into that abyss isn't doing me any good.  What I have put out acknowledges the difficult situation we find ourselves in, how poorly it has been managed and what we can do to fix it, but I don't know that fixing or improving education is on anyone's radar in the Ontario government at the moment.

At best, our current government's interests seem to be driven entirely by making education as cheap as it can be.  At worst I fear the intent is to drive public education into such a state of disrepair that private charter schools will suddenly appear as a solution to this managed failure, but privatization produces a whole new set of problems and charter schools often result in poorer performance at greater cost.  I always thought Ontarians deserved better, but perhaps we don't.

Meanwhile, we stagger to the end of this absolutely terrible school year that began with the former minister of education telling us our children will learn resiliency by being abused in large classes and ended most recently with the current minister demanding the use of banned software that breaks a number of Canadian privacy laws.  In between this government has belittled and attacked my profession at every turn, and yet they still managed to lose the battle for public support, though that didn't stop them from forcing a contract on us that degrades system performance in every way during an unprecedented health emergency.

With no end in sight frustrated teachers are rightly complaining about a lack of engagement in this remote learning situation where expectations change week to week, digital divide issues remain largely unaddressed and there are no consequences for a lack of participation.  But we shouldn't be surprised, ineffective pass rates are the rule in remote elearning - making marks meaningless is the only way the system can push an entire generation of students through the system.

Ask any teacher who has done remote elearning and they'll tell you that a two-thirds credit achievement rate is about as good as it gets - and that's in a group of students who volunteered for remote learning and all have the ability to access it.  Attrition is more common in elearning than learning is, they should call it eAttrition.  This is the kind of false economy the repeated demands for mandatory elearning will give us - it'll look cheap on the surface but high drop out rates will make it more expensive in the long run.  The fact that any Ontario students are still engaged at all in remote learning is a testament to the thousands of teachers doing back-flips to try and reach them by any means available in a system that seems intent on doing it poorly.

While all that's going on, proudly trans-illiterate teachers are still sniping at the situation and blaming everything on the fact that the medium they grew up with isn't the medium literacy is delivered in half a century later.  If you can't navigate the medium, you can't fully comprehend the message - this is one of the basic foundations of media literacy, yet there are is a majority of righteous teachers intent on protecting this dated idea of what literacy is.  Instead of putting their outmoded concepts of literacy on a pedestal, perhaps it's time to learn something new and accept that the society you grew up in fifty years ago has moved on significantly.

We've always had a hate on for changes in medium, life long learning is just such hard work.  Instead of moving with the times, these Luddites will cling to their habits to the end.  That they're usually senior teachers in leadership positions with the most secure jobs and highest pay says a great deal about how well our system is able to adapt and stay relevant in a constantly evolving media-scape.

As we stagger to the end of this absurd year I'm just trying to keep my head above water.  I had a momentary sense of traction the other week when we were finally allowed into our school so we could put together some computers that we had sitting in there and get them out to teachers who desperately needed them - over 8 weeks into this remote learning crisis.  Getting out and doing something felt good, maybe too good.  It reminded me of the multi-dimensional approach to teaching I'd always adopted, doing work both in and beyond the classroom, school and even my board to help improve our practice in as many ways as I can.  After getting a taste of it for a day it was difficult to go back to the do less with less mandate of remote learning.

Instead of engaging in this simple and inexpensive solution to minimizing the digital divide on a system wide scale, I'm back at home repeatedly hearing about a digital divide that no one in management seems to want to acknowledge.  Only about one third of our staff responded to our short survey of who needed tech at home.  Even though we resolved the digital divide for those staff members, two thirds of them in our building may very well be trying to remote teach without the right tools.  In other schools across our board and across the province we could be addressing the digital divide in terms of a lack of technology access for staff.  Suddenly finding myself back to doing less isn't how I approach my profession and is a source of constant frustration that I have to let go of less it drive me mad!

Which is where I'm at on this lovely Saturday morning.  Not caring eases the anxiety and frustration, but it also means the clowns running this circus get to sell it off to their cousins who happen to be starting up charter schools.  In the process we will have sold Ontario's children to these greedy bastards and made things worse for everyone.

Even though I'm exhausted and feeling defeated by this today, I'll be back when I've had a couple of days away, because I have an important job that it's important to do well.  I may be playing dead right now (and I'm not even doing that particularly well), but I'm just waiting for an opportunity to move when we have a chance of winning Ontario education back from the hands of this circus that a minority of mis-guided people elected.

Why Canadian Education is so Reluctant to Move on Digital Literacy

 I had a talk the other evening with a Vancouver educator teaching cybersecurity curriculum at his local school board. Like me, Todd has been working alone, offering the local students he has access to the opportunity to learn cyber-skills that would benefit them in any field of study. And, like me, he has helped to launch a few students into careers in this radically underserved career pathway.

Despite being 3 time zones away, Todd is running into the same difficulties I am in Canada's regionally siloed education systems. When he reached out to other districts in British Columbia they didn't engage, and so his work remains isolated to his district. Cyber-attacks on education fill the news, yet the vast majority of students have no access to learning this emerging (and essential) digital media literacy.

In 2017/18 we got involved in CyberTitan, the Canadian centre of excellence for the international CyberPatriot competition (the world's largest student cybersecurity competition). From there we developed a thriving cybersecurity extracurricular program that has since influenced our in-class curriculum in timely and diverse ways., but when I asked a system 'lead' if we could help other schools to engage in the same competition I was told, "it's already running at your school." Leaving us in the same place that Todd finds himself.

With headlines like these (an extensive list of Canadian education hacks can be found at the bottom of the post) wouldn't cybersafety training in every school be a good idea?

Ontario school board trying to recover from cyber incident

Personal data of 70,000 students accessed in school board cyberattack

Cyber-education is just the most obvious part of a much bigger digital skills iceberg.

Yet we barely cover coding in public schools, let alone the rest - even though we depend on it in every subject. Digital technology has become integral to learning in 2023, yet no one has a dedicated curriculum to teach the cybersafety and the technical skills needed to use it safely and effectively. It's why remote learning during the pandemic became an abject failure.

Cyber-Education: an Educational Failure in Education

You have to ask yourself why schools aren't engaging in the cyber-education they should have started when eLearning and other online education technology placed student data and attention in potentially hackable online locations. The answer to this question has eluded me for years, but I'm starting to formulate a theory. It began with seeing yet another example of the rhetoric that public education likes to lean on:

"The lack of robust cybersecurity measures stems from underfunding within schools and #educational groups. Often, they don’t have enough resources or budget to invest in #cybersecurity or train staff and students to practice good cyber habits."

Why are Canadian schools so vulnerable to cyberattacks?

ICTC-CTIC has been offering free cyber-learning opportunities for years in addition to running CyberTitan since 2017 with the support of the Communication's Security Establishment (Canada's cryptography agency charged with securing government communications). It doesn't get more credible than that this, yet we struggle to engage individual teachers let alone school system 'leaders' with these FREE programs. The reticence isn't about cost, it's an unwillingness to make time and take responsibility for our rampant use of education technology. The vast majority of cyberattacks depend upon user digital illiteracy to succeed and we face a global digital skills crisis, yet education seems determined to do as little as possible to address any of it. The question is why.

No where did our failure to address
digital literacy appear more apparent than
during the remote learning emergency.

Perhaps picking up the baton now would highlight a failure that has been decades in the making. By doing nothing, public education remains the victim of cybercriminals and technology disruption, just like the rest of us.

We should have begun developing this technology media fluency the moment we placed student learning in hackable online spaces. It's not a flattering analysis, yet moving past this head-in-the-sand approach is essential if we're going to keep putting student (and staff) information where criminals can exploit it. Our collective ignorance is the cause of the current cybersecurity crisis and the global digital skills shortage; it's a failure of education... by education!

Our Failure to Systematically Teach Digital Literacy Even As It Becomes an Expectation in All Subjects

Poor user digital fluency is the result of our failure to teach it in any kind of systemic manner. The cunning plan so far has been to hope parents are doing it at home* (*this link shows that they might be, if they can afford it). Meanwhile parents are assuming a comprehensive digital skills curriculum is happening in schools, and by comprehensive I mean year on year skills development in dedicated subject time using curriculum that results in functional and safe technology users. We obviously don't have those.

The students I see arriving in grade 9 suggest that this is not systemically happening, and where it does happen it is because a single teacher is trying to bridge this gap themselves. The assumption many parents labour under is that teachers are digitally literate, but they are much like the general population. Worse actually, because the education itself has dragged its feet engaging with digital transformation resulting in the people in it being less digitally savvy than the general population.

If we taught digital skills like we taught other foundational skills that are required across all subject areas (literacy, numeracy, etc), we would have periods focused on developing those skills and integrated subject specific digital fluency across all disciplines, but we don't even cover digital literacy development as comprehensively as we do geography (mandatory k-8 dedicated subject time and a mandatory grade 9 course). There are no mandatory digital literacy courses in any Ontario high school and in K-8 curriculum, where it happens at all, it's usually fixated on coding which does little to teach cybersafety. The ongoing digital skills shortage and a rash of user ignorance driven cyber incidents suggest that the piecemeal approach we've grudgingly adopted isn't working.

I've been pointing to these embarrassing statistics and presenting on the importance of filling this foundational gap in our curriculum for years on Dusty World: 

2022 TMC7 Research Symposium: Table Talks and Future Skills

(2020) How to Pivot Ontario Education to Prepare for The Next Wave

(2017) The Digital Divide is Deep and Wide

(2012) The New Literacy

Perhaps now, in a maelstrom of bad press and the potential for real financial damage to staff and students (and their families), education will finally take on systemic transformation to address digital skills and especially cybersecurity awareness. The benefits would go far beyond reducing the number of successful cyber breaches. A more digitally literate society would be able to pivot to remote learning in an emergency and might also offer climate reduction possibilities by reducing the need for face to face schooling. It would even help create a less factory driven/age based system that relies on millions of gallons of diesel to deliver bodies to age appropriate facilities every day. The central problem is that the digitally delayed education system is the least likely place to find this future friendly vision.

We could have used the pandemic to finally
engage with digital literacy - instead it became
another excuse to play victim to our own
lack of foresight.

Do you know how many times cybersecurity is mentioned in Ontario computer technology or computer science curriculums? Not once - not even in the two specialist subjects it should be covered in. We've driven students onto potentially insecure online learning environments for years now and even the compsci students don't learn how to secure it.

 Nowhere has this failure to address digital literacy been more apparent in emergency remote learning where many students were thrust into online mediums that they have very little understanding of with unsurprising results. Most students still equate technology with entertainment, which is why implementing it in classrooms has been fraught with problems. Most teachers have less digital fluency than anyone in a modern office setting.

One of the early myths used to justify this bury-it approach to digital literacy was that of the 'digital native' - the idea that students who grew up with digital technology were somehow magically imbued with the ability to understand it technically and use it safely and effectively. This is like saying that because I grew up in the 1970s and was familiar with cars, I already know how a car works and how to operate one. This absurd belief persists in many schools despite being summarily discounted by research.

Being familiar with digital technology means you don't have to overcome the fear that older people have in making a mistake with it, but I can assure you, students are not immune to making poor technical decisions based on digital ignorance. The rush by students in my school to use 'free' VPNs to bypass blocks on social media sites isn't digital native genius, it's profoundly ignorant. The criminals offering these services aren't offering them for free. This gives a fine example of how digitally illiterate school systems are. Blocking content and driving students to put their digital information at risk through questionable technology is about where we're at in education these days. Incredibly, many educators then point to this as an example of just how good the kids are with technology.

Research on the poor state of digital skills across entire populations shows an astonishing lack of capability, even as we increasingly depend on networked digital technologies to support every aspect of public education. When technology fails, the learning stops in 2023..

This isn't just a Canada problem, it's worldwide.

Addressing the digital skills gap for future education

A global measure of digital and ICT literacy skills (it isn't pretty)

"higher socioeconomic status was associated with higher proficiency both within & across countries - student experience of computer use & their frequency of computer use at home were positively associated with proficiency" - Because we off-load this essential literacy because we don't want to take responsibility for it.

The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think

Nearly 1 in 3 workers lack foundational digital skills

Canada struggles to prepare its workforce for changing digital economy

"81 per cent of Canadians say they don’t have the resources to learn the digital skills required by businesses today, and 86 per cent say they are not prepared to meet the digital skills requirements of the future."

Summary 

Cyber-education is the sharp end of this failure to teach digital literacy because of the fear that surrounds the subject and the dire consequences of not addressing it. Convincing educators to engage with cybersafety, cybersecurity and data privacy learning is virtually impossible, especially as most staff are no more digitally savvy than anyone else. You have to be trying exceptionally hard to not be using digital technology in 2023. Your lights are on because of it and your lessons are available to students because of it, yet no one wants to teach it, or learn it as a specific technology/media skill.

Beyond the sharp point of cyber, we have a population that spends an inordinate amount of their time, both professional and personal, in networked technology, yet almost no one knows how it works, what to do when it goes wrong or how to secure it. Younger people aren't afraid of it, but their bravado creates dangers of a different kind.

If we're going to use networked technology in every subject, we should have K-8 curriculum in place with mandatory time given to specifically learning digital skills well beyond coding, and also include digital literacy integration with all subjects. This should begin the moment we put students in online learning.  A systemic approach to this would start solving the educator digital skills crisis and eventually result in a dramatic drop in successful cyber-attacks as we begin to heal the ignorance that current attacks exploit. Many federal programs exist, but Canada's chaotic, siloed education landscape means that with no central authority, provincial ministries and local school boards are left with the responsibility to engage with a problem that operates well beyond their jurisdictions.

Digital skills gaps cost billions in lost jobs and opportunities and exacerbate existing inequalities. By resolving this failure of vision that public education has been central in creating, we might finally assume the role it should have played all along. It doesn't require lengthy apologies, but it does require some humility before a systemic failure we've all played a part in. I only hope the people leading education in Canada are more interested in doing the right thing for students, staff and their families instead of maintaining the expedient idea that digital literacy happens by magical birthright, or at home.

Yes, it's a tsunami of cyberattacks on canadian education:

Vancouver Film School hit by paralyzing cyberattack
Attackers say they have deleted data stolen from Ontario school board
School board confirms hack; attacker sent note through photocopiers
Ministry beefing up security after school board 'cyber incident'
Ottawa french public school board paid hackers ransom after data breach
Teachers and parents urge answers as investigation into school board hack continues
OSSTF confirms current and past members’ information compromised in cyberattack
Former members call out OSSTF for handling of personal information stolen in cyberattack
Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows school district alerts families of potential data leak
“It’s pretty scary”: TRU students concerned after possible hacking of student aid websites
https://canadatoday.news/ca/vancouver-park-board-to-consider-new-revenue-streams-including-more-restaurants-223298/
https://www.therecord.com/news/waterloo-region/2022/09/15/at-least-three-former-wrdsb-employees-report-identity-theft-attempts-since-cyber-attack.html
https://cupe.ca/statement-crystal-krauter-maki-educational-assistant-and-cupe-4148-president-regarding-ransomware
A failure to educate staff

Psychology, Cybersecurity and Collaboration in Educational Technology

Growing number of parents experiencing ransomware attacks on children's schools

The Digital Skills Crisis:

Can you imagine if nearly a third of Canadian
students couldn't read? Yet that's how we
continue to approach digital fluency.

Why Leaders Need To Close The Digital Skills Gap In The Global Economy
More than 90% of cyberattacks are made possible by human error
The global digital skills gap
Canada's critical 'skills gap' problem explained in 6 charts
World Skills Clock
The skills shortage is 2022’s biggest threat
5 ways we can develop the digital skills our economy needs

How can teachers and parents promote students’ digital literacies skills?

Gen Z says school is not equipping them with the skills they need to survive in a digital world

What our failure in education looks like to the people experiencing it:

"44% said that school only taught them very basic computing skills, 37% said that school education didn’t prepare them with the technology skills they needed for their careers. 40% consider learning new digital skills essential to future career options"