Meet the Teacher: Neela Bell
Neela has been an online teacher and consultant for many years, and has a passion for exploring ways to build engaging, personalized online courses that support a diversity of learners. She has taught in a variety schools divisions around Alberta, including Wild Rose, Sturgeon and Edmonton Public Schools. She created an award-winning online learning program for youth at risk while working at Edmonton Public Schools, and now looks forward to furthering her passion and skills at Ignite Centre for eLearning.
What if Junior High felt safe, caring and fun?
The staff at Ignite Centre for eLearning recognize that junior high can be a challenging time and at same time know how to ensure that our students are safe, that they feel cared for, and that they actually have fun while learning! At Ignite, we believe in the importance of strong relationships based on mutual respect, fairness, and trust between students, teachers, and the broader community.
Build Your Future with Ignite Centre for eLearning
At Ignite, we work with our students to understand their passions and encourage them to set both short and long term goals for success. We recognize that all students have unique needs and that success looks different for each student. We believe in the ability of every student to learn and grow throughout the school year, and will work with students to “re-ignite” their love of learning.
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.
Ignite offers:
- Learner-Centred Approach: Students are actively engaged in bringing their own knowledge, experiences, and passion to their learning journey.
- Flexibility and Structure: Students have flexibility in determining how best to create their learning pathway, with structures in place to ensure success.
- Targeted Supports: Students in need of supports such as counselling, accommodations, academic guidance, will be provided these as part of their individual program.
- Focus on Success: We believe that success is defined differently for each student; students play a pivotal role in defining what success means to them as well as how to achieve it.
Click here for details regarding our Re-Ignite program for junior high students!
The Junior High “Re-Ignite” Program
Junior high can be a tough time for some students. It is also a time when some students are exploring new opportunities and passions. The pandemic has made challenges for some junior high students even greater. We recognize all students have unique needs. Our “Re-ignite” program offers junior high students an opportunity to thrive recognizing unique learning and social emotional needs.
The Re-Ignite junior high program at Ignite Centre for eLearning is well prepared to meet the needs of a variety of students. Below are examples of students who have been successful in online learning because of our ability to support them through strong, individualized programming approaches.
Our Re-Ignite program strives to move students along a continuum of supports that will allow them to become strong, independent learners.
A typical day of project-based learning looks like this:
Our junior high program is focussed on a theme this year: What gifts do our students have to ignite their learning and our world, with a particular focus on student passions.
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.
- A virtual science fair.
- Character education along with digital citizenship will prepare students to be effective learners.
- Four themes will be addressed this year around the concepts of:
- Acceptance
- Fairness
- Wonder
- Service
If you are able to relate to any of the scenarios below, our Junior High “Re-ignite” program may be the place for you!
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 here.
Please visit our registration page to register for the Junior High Re-ignite Program.
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.
The following courses will be available to students as part of our online program for the 2021/2022 school year:
English Language Arts (7, 8 & 9)
Social Studies (7, 8 & 9)
Math (7, 8 & 9)
Science (7, 8 & 9)
Health (7, 8 & 9)
Options: To be announced, based on student interest!
*Social Emotional Learning (SEL), mental health, and Indigenous perspectives will be integrated across the curriculum.
Parents will be responsible for providing oversight for student’s programming in Phys. Ed. and other options such as music and art.
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 and their families. 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 you be successful:
- Be your amazing self and connect with your teacher. Knowing them well (and them knowing you) will go a long way to helping you on your road to success.
- Plan your time, for both school and other activities you enjoy doing.
- Ask for help whenever you need it. Ask questions. Your teachers really do want to hear from you!
- Attend live sessions and if you need to be absent for any reason, notify your teacher and 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.
