École Pierre-Chiasson
Deblois, PEI
École Pierre-Chiasson is a public school which is a part of La Commission Scolaire de Langue Française, the province’s French language school board. Situated near the Western tip of Prince Edward Island, our K-12 school has an enrollment of 68 students.
Due to our low enrollment numbers, distance education has become an important part of our high school programming. We offer two types of distance education delivery models to our grade 11 and 12 students. The first is an asynchronous learning model provided in partnership with the New Brunswick Department of Education and Early Childhood Development. This program is sponsored and managed by the Prince Edward Island Department of Education, Early Learning and Culture. The second delivery model uses a private video-conferencing network which allows us to connect with other schools in our district. This synchronous environment provides immediate and consistent interaction between teacher and students. Google Apps for Education is used to assign and monitor school work as well as for collaborative projects.
Both programs are quite successful in our school and have allowed our students to take a variety of courses that would otherwise not be available to them. Scheduling supervision can often be a challenge and our solution has been to integrate the supervision duty into the principal’s teaching assignment. Before taking any distance education course, each student is required to meet individually to discuss steps that they can take to become a good distance education learner. We think this awareness piece has helped better prepare our students for this type of learning environment and has contributed to our success.