Cyber grant goes to Charles H Best

[attach]1856[/attach]A once empty room at Charles H Best Middle School has been filled with 15 new computers, thanks to a $20,000 grant given to the school’s Cyber Arts Program.

Last year, the North York school was among 15 selected from across Canada to receive cash from Best Buy’s “Best in Class Fund”, which encourages teachers and students to develop proposals that show how incorporating technology in the classroom and add value to student learning.

“(We were) thrilled,” he said. “We were over the moon,” said Grade 8 teacher Benjamin Vlietstra.

The grant allowed the school to fill an empty room with 15 new computers from Best Buy, creating a second – and much-needed – computer lab.

It was a project completed by students in the Cyber Arts program that helped garner the grant.

With the help of librarian Lindsay Carson, the grade 8 class developed a wiki — a website that allows users to create and edit pages — based on the school’s cafeteria. The project included the nutritional information of the food served as well as a cost analysis of serving sizes. Vlietstra said the work the students put into the project is exemplary of the type of students Charles H Best has in the Cyber Arts program.

The Grades 5-8 school is one of the few in the Toronto District School Board with the specialized tech program. Offering it to both grades 7 and 8, the program has a total of 50 students, and feeds directly into Northview Heights SS’s Cyber Arts program. Vlietstra described the program as being similar to how the French Immersion programs work.

“It’s like the way you learn math and science in French,” he said. “But instead you’re learning math and science through computers and art.”

“They are wonderful,” he said. “It’s an amazing group of kids I have.”

But principal Cassandra Alviani-Alvarez said while the students are certainly deserving of the new lab, there is another group whose efforts should not go unnoticed.

“I’m very proud of my staff for taking on the initiative and showing their dedication and passion to student commitment and success,” she said, noting students who aren’t in the Cyber Arts program also have access to the computers, “so we’ve been able to spread the wealth around the school.”

That has led to an increase in overall computer usage.

“At any given time we could have potentially 50 kids on computers, and we do because our labs are booked solid throughout the school day,” she said. “Our priority is to continue to increase technology over time.”