Saturday, June 16, 2007

About ILS

Innovative Learning Services is a service unit within the Calgary Board of Education. Our mandate is to help teachers take advantage of existing technologies and help scan the horizon for future technologies that may have a positive impact on student learning. We're not about training teachers to build websites and create PowerPoints (although we do our share of that); we're about helping them gain understanding of how an online space or a PowerPoint might allow them to work differently with students or allow student to work differently according to their learning needs.

ILS houses a distributed learning unit, a home school unit and CBe-learn, our online high school. I work as a specialist in the distributed learning unit. Distributed learning is a term that has been used to describe learning that occurs both inside and outside the classroom. For example if I am in a school facilitating the use of our learning management system (Desire2Learn) the teachers with whom I am working will be presenting learning experiences not only in the classroom but also anytime anywhere else through the Internet. From this comes the idea that learning is distributed for students. Eight specialists/consultants work with 6000 CBE staff in over 200 locations to bring new thinking about teaching and learning through the use of technology.

The One-to-one Teacher Laptop Project gives an idea of one of the ways we work with CBE staff and schools.

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