⇒ We are welcoming registrations for the 2023/24 school year ⇐
Head to our registration page for more information.
Meet the Teacher: Marilyn McKnight
What if … Elementary was full of joy, imagination, and real-world exploration?
The staff at Ignite Centre for eLearning recognize that our children were born to learn – to question, to wonder, to explore, and imagine.
Take a listen to Ignited elementary student Breanna B and her mom Mercedes who share their experience as a connected family to the Ignite community!
Connect to the World with Ignite Centre for eLearning
At Ignite Centre for eLearning, we work with our students and their parents/caregivers to understand how to connect their passions and learning to one another, to their communities, and to the world. Our staff understand how to ignite children’s ability to learn about their unique potential and to use their skills of inquiry and creativity to co-create knowledge and deep understanding of the world about them.
As part of our commitment to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action, we endeavour to ensure that all students at Ignite Centre for eLearning benefit from deepening their understanding of Indigenous ways of knowing and being. This will be reflected in instructional approaches and course content across grades and subjects.
At Ignite, we believe in the ability of every student to learn and grow throughout the school year.
- Learner-Centered – Students are actively engaged in bringing their imagination, wonder, and joy to their learning journey.
- Flexibility and Focus – Families have flexibility in determining how best to create the learning pathway for their children, with structures in place to ensure success.
- Targeted Supports – Students in need of supports such as psychoeducational assessments, speech language pathologists and literacy specialists, will be provided these as part of their individual program as needed.
- Focus on Success – We believe that success is defined differently for each student; families play a pivotal role in defining what success means to them as well as how it can be achieved.
Click here to learn more about our Ignite Young Minds program!
Program Details
The Elementary program at Ignite Centre for eLearning is well prepared to meet the needs of a variety of students, including students who:
- for whatever reason, cannot attend a physical building
- have physical or mental health issues
- need a flexible schedule due to sports, travel, etc.
- feel that they learn best through online learning
- have strong parent/caregiver support in the home
- want to feel a sense of connection to a learning community.
Online Learning Program
The Elementary online learning program at Ignite Centre for eLearning provides students with an opportunity to experience high quality learning through both synchronous (live, online), scheduled instruction sessions, balanced with asynchronous (offline) learning time. The teachers at Ignite bring many years of excellence in teaching in online environments and are passionate about supporting student success in these environments. In addition to well designed, high quality online courses, students will have the opportunity to participate in field trips, land-based learning opportunities, as well as meeting with staff in local communities when it is safe to do so.
For elementary students, we believe that strong parent/caregiver support at home will be important to ensure student progress and success.
What Does Learning Online Look Like in Elementary?
Our elementary program is theme-focussed this year and is based on the following question: What gifts do our students have to ignite their learning and our world, with a particular focus on family in grades 1 to 3, and community in grades 4 to 6.
Key Features:
- Project-based and integrated across the curriculum so students work on meaningful projects that might combine learning from 2 or more subject areas.
- Virtual science fair.
- Character education along with digital citizenship curriculum will prepare students to be effective learners.
- Four themes will be addressed this year around the concepts of:
- Acceptance
- Fairness
- Wonder
- Service
A sample weekly timetable:
- Literacy lesson
- Online learning requires parent support. Read more here about how parents can partner with us to ensure student success.
- See more details of student learning and school activities
Course Offerings
All students new to the Ignite Centre for eLearning are required to complete an orientation course that will prepare them to be a successful online learner and contributing member of our learning community. Parents are also invited to attend information sessions to understand how best to support their child(ren) learning at home.
The following courses will be available to students as part of our Elementary online program:
English Language Arts
Social Studies
Math
Science
Health
Social Emotional Learning (SEL), mental health, and Indigenous perspectives will be integrated across the curriculum.
Physical Education and other options are directed by the teacher with support from the parent.
Read more here about how parents can partner with us to ensure student access.
Assessment
The Ignite Centre for eLearning is committed to ensuring all students are successful. Fair, consistent, and reliable assessment of student learning is an important part of this commitment. The purpose of our Assessment Guide is to share information about assessment with students, parents, and stakeholders in an effort to improve both learning and instruction. Assessments provide teachers information to understand what students know and do not know in relation to course outcomes. This information is then used to guide instruction and provide support for students to achieve their goals.
Our Assessment Guide will help you understand:
- responsibilities of staff, students and parents/caregivers;
- how we will tell you about your student’s progress and learning;
- how we assign grades/marks;
- how your student will be assessed; and
- the steps we take if your student’s work is plagiarized, missing, or not finished.
We welcome your feedback regarding our Assessment Guide.
Success Tips
Alberta Education has published an Online Guide for Students and Families, which has some excellent considerations for online learners. At Ignite, we believe that learners will be successful if they have the necessary supports in place. Students and their families play an important role in ensuring that we have identified and provided those supports for success!
A few tips we know, from our experience and the research, will help your student be successful:
- Keep connected with your student’s teacher. Knowing them well (and them knowing you and your student) will go a long way to helping them on your road to success.
- Plan time for both school and other activities your student enjoys doing.
- Encourage your student to ask for help whenever it is needed. Ask questions. Your student’s teachers really do want to hear from them!
- Ensure your student attends live sessions and if they need to be absent for any reason, notify their teacher and have them watch the recording..
Michigan Virtual has created an excellent, research-based, free orientation resource called Strategies for Online Success to help students prepare to be successful in online learning: https://michiganvirtual.org/resources/sos/
General Information about Safety and Security online @ Ignite
During the school day, our secure learning environment requires students to log in with a chrome browser, create a chrome profile and enable the synching of the browser. We push out extensions to the browser to support learning (like a Read Write Literacy app) and to ensure the integrity of the student digital footprint. Teachers will instruct students in our orientations how to do this.
We have installed a mandatory browser extension, Student Aware, that will notify administration if students are accessing worrisome websites or engaged in dangerous online activity. Our school will then notify parents. This service is only available if students are using the Ignite email on a synched chrome profile. We will be providing some parent information this year to help parents learn more about setting up computers so children are safe online. More information will come on this topic.
We do ensure that our students understand the importance of not sharing personal information online as well as other important aspects related to digital citizenship/literacy. For more information about keeping your children safe online, see our blog here.
Click here to view our numeracy and literacy celebratory results!
