Using Technology to Engage Students and Empower Communities through Authentic Tourism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The author examines a partnership between educators and tourism operators that explored the creative potential and technological expertise of the community's youth. Using technology skills acquired during their daily classroom assignments, students developed projects to enhance the products of local tourism operators and showcase their peoples, cultures, and histories. In just 3 years, the first SMART(TM) Showcase District in the world provided the catalyst for a community to be recognized as the first SMART Showcase Community in the world.BackgroundThe Miramichi region of northeastern New Brunswick, Canada, is a complex and diverse community and ecosystem. Including people with a mix of languages and backgrounds, the community has looked to the Miramichi River, which runs 250 km through the region, for access to its primary industries, fishing and forestry. Between 2004 and 2010, the forest industry collapsed almost entirely, resulting in mill closures and job losses. Hundreds of people were without jobs, and an out-migration of workers began to the oil patches in Northern Alberta. Relying on that diverse mix of community and its celebrations of the founding cultures of the region-First Nations (Mi'kmaq), Acadian, Irish, and Scottish-the residents of the Miramichi region began looking to tourism as a major source of income.When a community faces challenges, a trickle-down effect occurs into all sectors of the population and especially into the school system. School district leaders and workers began feeling the effects of the regional economic and population collapse as the student population began to decline. In order to move forward, they knew that creative, educational, and community solutions were needed.During the time the community was facing these challenges, school district leaders had developed a model for integrating technology into the classrooms. Under the direction of visionary superintendents, a strong district technology team was established with a technology supervisor, technology mentors, information systems (IS) manager, and technicians. Every member of the team brought unique strengths to ensure the successful integration of technology into the curriculum. Identified for their leadership skills and technical expertise in incorporating technology into their daily lesson plans, the technology mentors were recruited from classrooms. The IS manager and his technical staff created an infrastructure that would handle emerging technologies. The technology team met on a regular basis to design and implement strategies that would ensure that technology provided to teachers would meet the curriculum outcomes of their various classroom projects. Teachers were invited to submit proposals about these projects, and although they were allowed to suggest certain technologies, the final decision was ultimately left to the technical staff. Often technologies were moved between schools depending on each building s infrastructure and educators' needs.Technology mentors developed professional development strategies to assist teachers with incorporating the new technologies into their lesson plans. These included one-onone sessions, after-school professional development, and modeling within the classroom. As teachers became more comfortable with the technology they were using, the technical staff installed new servers and network cabling to support the new directions educators were taking. When SMART Boards® (interactive white boards) were first introduced into the district, teachers had to submit proposals detailing how they would use these resources in their classrooms. As teachers observed their colleagues using these tools, they realized that teaching with technology was no longer intimidating, and eventually all classrooms in the district were provided with SMART Boards and the Phonic Ear® Surround Sound System. Many of the district's teachers were recognized as SMART Exemplary Educators with their creation of SMART Notebook(TM) lesson plans that would engage students while meeting the needs of individual learners. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".