The Ottawa Catholic District School Board’s Samaritans on the Digital Road is a week-long program that ties the religion curriculum to responsible technology use and aims to create discerning digital citizens. It does this by having students explore a specific verse of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan each year as part of the religion curriculum.
“Digital citizenship is taught across all schools and is extremely important for all students,” said Brenda Wilson, the board’s superintendent of student success. “Samaritans on the Digital Road allows us to deliver the key messages with our Catholic lens using our religion program.”
The online curriculum supplement is taught to students from Grade 1 through Grade 12. It covers topics ranging from password privacy for younger students to plagiarism and pornography in older grades.
“This program includes information for parents about the safe use of the devices and responsible use of the Internet at home as well,” said Wilson.
After becoming one of the first boards in Ontario to embrace students using their own smartphones, tablets and laptops by developing a Bring Your Own Device policy, a team of teachers set out to work putting together the Samaritan program.
“We want our students to be able to use technology as a tool for learning, innovation and creating new knowledge,” said Wilson. “But the freedom to use the tool comes with the need for responsible use of technology.”
The program first appeared in Ottawa’s Catholic schools in November 2013 and since then has caught the attention of other boards across the province. Among them are the Peterborough-Victoria-Northumberland and Clarington Catholic District School Board, which began offering the program for Grades 7 to 12 students last year and intends to offer it to all students this school year.
“Samaritans on the Digital Road aligns with out Catholic School Graduate Expectations, Catholic social teachings and Gospel values,” said Deirdre Thomas, the retired superintendent of schools at the Peterborough and area Catholic board, on its web site. “(It) reinforces our strategic priority of embedding technology to support digital literacy, creativity, innovation, collaboration and the learning needs of all students.”
And it isn’t just school boards that the Ottawa Catholic board has impressed with Samaritans on the Digital Road. Over the course of this school year the Canadian Education Association will study the program and its impact on students’s use of the Internet as an innovative tool for learning.
“(We’ll) do research through a case study so that we can share all of the good and best practices that have been happening with the Ottawa Catholic school district so that we can package it as a template for other school districts,” said Max Cooke, spokesperson for the Canadian Education Association.
Cooke said its research team was immediately impressed by the impact the Samaritans on the Digital Road program had on students over the past two years.
“We saw Grade 1 kids sitting around tables quietly in some cases and then collaborating with each other and they all had technology in front of them,” he said. “So this argument that technology will only serve as a distraction has been disproved by this board.”
Having the effectiveness of the program reviewed by the Canadian Education Association, with its more than 125 years experience, excites Wilson.
“We are very proud of the positive feedback received (already) through the Canadian Education Association,” she said. “The skills students need to be successful and contributing members of society includes the use of evolving technology so access to powerful learning devices connecting the classroom with real life tasks remains a key focus.”