The future is already here, but it’s unevenly distributed.
By Leigh Borden, Alanna King, and Tim King
In April 2023, Tim and Alanna King travelled to Newfoundland as part of Tim’s role with ICTC, the Information and Communication Technology Council. Leigh Borden, teacher-librarian at Holy Trinity Elementary School in Torbay welcomed us into her library learning commons to try out a new digital game for learning about cybersecurity. The school’s population is at about 500 and is Kindergarten to grade 4 so we met with 5 classes sequentially. Leigh, Tim and Alanna met this month to reflect on that experience. Here are the highlights from that conversation. We encourage you to watch the whole thing on video to hear the joy and passion from these expert educators, and our guest appearance by Cleo, Leigh’s pet.
A: Tim, why don’t you tell us maybe about your perceived need and then how we matched you up with Leigh?
T: So what happened was I was seconded last year and they kept telling us we have K-12 cyber security material and anybody who works in education knows there’s no such thing as K-12 because everything is very distinct and different. I don’t even think Kindergarten stuff would work in grade 2, grade 6 or grade 12. I started looking around for something that could fill that gap so that maybe we could actually do cyber safety training with the littles. I came across Cyber Legends at a conference. It’s a Canadian made startup. They’ve done some really interesting things with gamified learning, all cloud-based stuff. You don’t need a fancy machine – you can play it on a Chromebook, and. it teaches you basic cyber safety. I met the people who ran Cyber Legends and they’re on a personal mission to try and resolve this gap we have. ICTC has supported them for the last year and a half doing outreach with Cyber Legends so that we can provide material for elementary classrooms.
A: How did we find ourselves in Newfoundland?
T: The other thing I do with ICTC is CyberTitan, which is how I got into it. I coached it for a number of years out here in Ontario. CyberTitan is a National Student cyber security Competition. We had somebody from Grand Falls – Windsor reach out and say, “We’d really like to get into it. We have no idea where to start. Would you like to come out and do a couple of days of field trip type stuff with students and just walk them through it so they get a feel for it. So I got the trip out to Newfoundland. I was really excited about that. My first time on the island. But then because Cyber Legends was just coming into focus and we’d just started the partnership, I said, well, what can we do to try and try some Cyber Legends while we’re out there too! And that’s where Alanna came in.
A: And I said, I know someone in Newfoundland and she’s really interested in trying new things. And, we approached you, Leigh. And of course, being you, you said yes. Can you tell us what that looked like when you said yes?
L: I love being given things to say yes to that are interesting and exciting and bring friends from the mainland into my school. I didn’t really know much about what Cyber Legends would look like. I did know, however, that our school district has required us for quite a few years to teach digital citizenship lessons and these sort of came down from above. They weren’t particularly connected to a grade level, as Tim mentioned earlier. Often, they felt like an add-on for teachers. People didn’t necessarily feel like they were very well integrated in the learning we were already engaged in, and not necessarily very meaningful for students. So when Tim and Alanna got in touch about Cyber Legends, I was excited to give it a try. We came up with a day when I could have all of my grade four classes. We figured that would be a good age group to start with for this project. I could have them all through the library on that day and we had an incredibly exciting morning despite the miserable weather that we had outside that day and in fact for the whole week that you were here.
Scaffolding the Learning Experience
A: I just think like we couldn’t have arranged a more perfect way to sort of establish that baseline. It was really amazing.
L: I thought it worked out really well in that we got a chance to see not only how the different groups of children, the English classes and the French immersion classes, interacted, but also how our technology held up to the program. As the morning went on in my school, typically, we find that the wifi works considerably better before recess than it does sort of after lunch. And that was something we took note of in the program that day.
A: Was there anything that you had to do in terms of the teachers or the students or the admin to prepare them for the arrival of that day?
L: Not really. I did visit all of the classes ahead of time and set up their class profiles and [each student’s] individual accounts in Cyber Legends. I had introduced them in a very, very brief way to what they would encounter in the program. Mostly, I wanted to cut down on any delay in the signing-in process because sometimes when kids are signing into a new program, it can take them a lot of time if they’ve got a new username or password to deal with. So I wanted to make sure that I had front-loaded that a little bit because we only had a half-hour with each group, but an hour would have been perfect, I think. Beyond that, it was not heavy lifting for me in terms of preparing the students for it. They dove right in, as you can recall. They loved it.
A: Tim, what did you do to prepare for this day?
T: My big worry was that we were using basically experimental technology, so it is kind of like a test for your network. All of these little details that maybe the people who were designing the game didn’t even think of either. And why would they? But this is the world educators live in. You’ve got old tech, you’ve got middle tech, you’ve got new tech, you’re trying to make it all work.
A: One of the things that I noticed right away was that you had sort of a presentation area so that we could do a show and share over there. And then you had a move away space where kids could actually get their own device and find their own space to sit down. How do you facilitate from the beginning of the year, this is going to be our structure when we need a Chromebook, we’re going to do this. Like, how do you set that all up with a student?
L: Well, we start very young with our students. We start with them using technology in at least grade one, and sometimes in Kindergarten. We start by getting them accustomed to using their Chromebooks. And if you’ve done any Chromebook work with littles, it’s a lot of labour to establish at the beginning. Over time, we’ve established a routine of working with old keyboards that we have the cords cut off, for example, singing the alphabet song, typing out the alphabet on the old keyboards, noticing that they’re not in alphabetical order, finding the letters of our name on the keyboards and so on before we ever go near the Chromebooks. But as you might remember, I had a giant Chromebook keyboard in the library as well, which we use with a pointer for pointing out all those tricky bits, like the underscore in every one of our students’ email accounts. They have an underscore, which is a very strange character that nobody recognizes. We also contrived a system of colour coding on our Chromebooks. And we used the Cricut machine in our library and made color-coded dots out of permanent vinyl, which we’ve stuck on all of the 50 or so Chromebooks that are in our school, so that children know that if you need to make an underscore, you press on the big yellow dot on the Shift key and then touch one time on the little yellow dot on the underscore key. We’ve also regularized some letters of the alphabet, e.g. “g,” ‘t”, and “a,” again using the Cricut, so that they match the style of printing we teach our littlest learners. These keyboard improvements have really helped us. So, by the time you get to grade four, there really aren’t that many children who need assistance, for example, in signing into their Chromebooks. They’ve got that pretty down pat. Mostly, what they need reminders about is how to use the technology safely and appropriately and the right places and times for that.
A: It was incredible. And I remember, Tim, you had a really strong reaction to Leigh’s innovative keyboard modifications that she’d made. Do you remember what you said at that time?
T: It just drives me crazy that you see all these big multinationals saying Chromebooks for education, and then you look at the Chromebook, and it looks exactly the same as the Chromebook in Best Buy. And I’m thinking, how is this for education? And you look at what Leigh did with some crafty vinyl stickers. Why aren’t all of our Chromebooks for education color-coded keyboards? Why isn’t that just a natural thing?
L: It was hugely logical for us, and I have to say that my colleague Kim Keating and I came up with this plan together. We decided to try it with the Cricut vinyl after a few other discussions about other stickers that we might use, but the Cricut vinyl has proved quite invincible. We have hardly had to replace a single colour-coded dot, and it has been worth it for us. So, as a matter of fact, through a number of different presentations that my colleague Kim and I have done here in Newfoundland, we have others in our school district who are adopting the same kind of process with their Chromebooks in their schools in order to make it easier for their little ones to get engaged with Google Apps earlier on.
A: Now, I’m a secondary literacy English specialist. And the first thing I noticed, and this is the secondary point of view, was how much those students in grade four were relying on the audio version of what was being told because it was so text-based. And I hadn’t even considered it. But another thing that you had ready in your learning commons was a pair of headphones for every kid who would need them.
L: We encourage all the students to come to school with headphones from the beginning of the school year. I have a set of about 40 in the library for anyone who needs them. I bought them with microphones because I wanted to make sure that we could maximise voice to text opportunities for students. But I also have little giveaway earbuds. If I’m on an airplane, I take all the ones that nobody else takes. I put them in my pockets. And when a kid shows up at the library without their own earbuds, I give them a set. I write their name on them, and these are yours. They do rely more than perhaps they would have before the pandemic on audio because I think that sometimes reading skills are difficult. Technical reading skills–when the text is unusual or unfamiliar–it’s definitely harder for them to read it than to listen to it. I like that Cyber Legends both had the audio and the text version available.
A: I like the fact that if everybody grabs headphones, whether they do or not, it normalizes it. And there wasn’t anyone who felt like, my reading ability is going to be preventing me from playing this game. And I think that, like, that equity piece is really important. I was really impressed by that.
T: It worked as well as it did because you had a well-running machine there. The kids had been trained on what they needed to do. The expectations were clear. You’d done all sorts of additional adaptations to your technology. It was a real joy to see.
L: Thank you so much. I think that the feedback we got from the children was really interesting too and the fact that we were able to, with one class in particular, meet several times with the creators was really, really neat for them. They felt like they were extremely important beta testers for this game.
Key Takeaways
A: Well, and they were! Tim, did you get any feedback?
T: Yeah, the team at Cyber Legends were just overjoyed. The chief software engineer on the program was thrilled to be talking to the kids. He could not get back to us soon enough.
A: And since that experience, when I’m watching parents and children out in public and they’re using their device and I see that moment when they need to hear the sound, but that barrier without headphones, it creates extra noise for everybody else,which can be annoying and also maybe unmanageable in terms of like trying to keep a space appropriate for multiple types of learning in one place. It’s a disadvantage because they suddenly can’t go ahead with the activity that they were planning. The other piece that I was thinking about was the feedback from maybe the teachers. Did you get any feedback about anything that had changed or any ripples that had come out of that experience?
L: Yes, we had several. The teachers were all really excited to have had the opportunity to come and do something as interesting and unusual as this. It’s not the kind of thing that happens every day in our schools in St. John’s. One teacher in particular was quite a techie teacher. She was very young, one of our French immersion teachers at the time, and she got really into identifying the sort of glitchy bits and so on with the kids. And she and they came back to Cyber Legends quite a few times and made lists of the concerns that they had and sent them forward to the team at Cyber Legends. She was really excited about that side of it as well, which I think was probably beyond some of the other teachers, but for her, it really fit into her interests.
A: That’s a really nice way to sort of pull in the power of the student voice, too, to say, this is what we’re noticing and this is what we think needs adjusting or changing.
L: Yeah, I think so, too. I think that made them feel so much more engaged in this particular game than they would otherwise have been.
A: Tim, on that day what did you observe that you thought automatically these are things that that I would recommend be changed?
T: I noticed that if you can get the kids immersed in the game quickly, they’re all going to play it their own way. So I love the differentiation inherently you get in gameplay. But we did notice the network speed as a barrier to entry, I think one of my favourite pictures is one of the kids waiting for the bar to fill. So he’s turned the laptop sideways and he’s shaking it to try and get the bar to go faster. I love that moment. But once they were in it, they were in it, like it was down the rabbit hole and they were gone.
Once when we were having some of the technical issues with that one generation of Chromebook, the one little guy who went and stood on the milk crates and started playing on the projector, just because he felt: “I need to get into this. Everyone else is going to be talking about this at recess. And I can’t miss this.” So he went out of his way to make it happen. When you see students grabbing opportunities like that, that’s really thrilling for me.
Developing a Digital Fluency Continuum
A: In terms of the actual lessons of cybersecurity or how it fits into a continuum of what we’re trying to achieve as teachers in the year 2023, helping our students feel digitally ready and adaptable for whatever those changes are that are to come. What did you notice, Leigh?
L: The most important difference was that the students were really captivated by it. They felt engaged by it. I think in my experience, often the lessons that we have been provided with around digital citizenship or cybersecurity have not felt particularly meaningful to students. They sound like something a teacher says, the Internet is dangerous and you should stay away from it, when in fact this opportunity through Cyber Legends gave the kids a chance to feel like it was something that they belong to and it belonged to them.
A: It’s really neat. There was one moment that I think repeated definitely in the last two or three of the classes, because we had gotten further along through it. But basically, the game starts with an orientation, how you move on the keyboard. Remember, it was those WASD skills with the left hand instead of the arrow key. (Here Tim and Leigh share knowing glances🙄.)
Then the next task was, then they can start to personalize. You know that they spent some time in there going, “oh, this is how I want my person to look or my avatar”. But the very first digital literacy task that they had to do was to make a pizza. They had to choose a number of things they could put on it, but they were like normal pizza items and also ridiculous pizza items. A lot of kids would be like, “I’m going to choose puppies, firetrucks, and pepperoni, and that’ll be my pizza.” But then the task after that, and I’m going to say it felt like about five minutes, so I’m not sure how much gameplay it actually was, was to recall their pizza toppings and use that as a password to enter the next thing. I think what it’s trying to teach them is that a multi-phrase password is stronger than another one, right? Almost 70% of the kids, maybe even more than that, went up to the teacher and said, “I don’t remember my password, what is it?” That’s when I said “OH!” because we repeated the same exercise with Cyber Legends in a public library situation. These students or these kids were grade 6 to 11 and they came by choice. And Tim introduced them with Cyber Legends and said: “Get into this.” And at that task, all the youngest students had the same problem. But the older students immediately took a picture of their pizza and thought,”I know I’m going to need to remember that.” Like, they had clued in somehow to suspecting that this is going to be a clue to something that’s coming up. And I was thinking that’s a huge literacy piece.
L: I’m intrigued by that. I would have liked to have seen that. I also wonder about something that we didn’t do with Cyber Legends when we tried it at my school, but that I would be interested in pursuing, is to do some more pre-teaching. I’m sort of hesitant. On the one hand, I like the idea of just dropping them in and seeing what they sort of figure out. But on the other hand, there are these extended lesson plans provided in the teacher’s site for Cyber Legends. There’s just a ton of stuff there. It would be interesting to try it both ways and see what the kids prefer and what they get out of it in both cases.
T: The good news is that based on your feedback, I think primarily from your school, they’ve done exactly that. Starting in the new year, they’re going to have game clips you can play. So when you’re doing the password lesson, you could just play the password section of the game, like an in and out kind of thing. So like a target: “This is going to be about passwords.” This is going to be online privacy. This is going to be… Instead of it being this giant thing that you can get lost in, it could be something very lesson specific.
A: I wonder if we could do some sort of like pre-diagnostic to see what do you know, and then notice has that improved or has that changed at all? I’m wondering what kind of observational data we can get. Would you use that, do you think, Leigh?
L: Well, I think you’d use it to target your lesson planning, at the very least. If you had some information, oh, the kids know a lot about making passwords, but they make really poor choices about who to talk to online, for example, then you could at least strategically select the lessons and game clips, like Tim’s saying, that you were going to focus on.
A: So Tim, your ICTC has a sort of a digital fluency, digital literacy continuum called FIT, right? Is it something that you can see CyberLegends fitting into?
T: Yeah, like I said, initially the idea was to try and create a full curriculum, a K to 12 curriculum, and CyberLegends was the missing piece there. But I think if we were smart about all of these programs, and there are a lot of programs in Canada that are trying to address cyber safety, but if we just got everybody together and actually developed an interlocking curriculum of tools that everyone knew was safe and Canadian made with Canadian data storage and everything else it would meet everyone’s criteria. Everybody could just dive into that pool of resources knowing that it’s credible, good stuff from partners who want to help and then work their way forward.
A: But one of the other things that we’ve found this year is that provincially, everybody has their own set of standards. Does Newfoundland have its own set of standards for digital citizenship or fluency or something like that?
L: No, we don’t. There are no curriculum outcomes for even technology education for K to 6. It starts to pick up at grade 7. But it’s a very small percentage of our program of studies overall. And there is not, as I said, a continuum or a skills set that we’re meant to be teaching. The approach that’s been taken in the past has been kind of piecemeal. And to be perfectly honest, we haven’t seen much come forward in the last year or two on it anyway.
Narrowing the Digital Divide
A: So I guess my hard question for you then, Leigh, is how do you take your direction with knowing what should they know?
L: That’s a really tricky question. I would say it applies not only to what they should know having to do with digital citizenship, but what they should know in the digital realm altogether. What skills should they have in Google Slides when they’re in grade two, for example. I have an idea in my head and sort of a list of things that I try to teach to my children in my school, but something that’s come to me quite heavily in the last couple of weeks is that not every school in my school district has the same access to the same sorts of technology, to the same bandwidth that I have. And so, what I’m doing with grade ones in my school is not even remotely possible for grade ones in some rural and remote schools where the Wi-Fi may be terrible and the devices are limited. I’m feeling a lot of pressure around the equity side of things right now. Not only am I concerned about students’ access to quality cybersecurity education, quality digital literacy, I’m concerned about their access, period, to digital technology. A couple of years ago, during the sort of latter phases of the pandemic, I was very interested in a resolution that was passed at the United Nations about access to digital materials and spent some time writing a letter on behalf of our provincial teacher librarians’ organization pointing out that this is something that the United Nations says that all of our children in school throughout the world ought to have access to. We’re not doing a great job of it in Canada, unfortunately. Even within our city here, I can see that there are vast inequities from one community to another, from one school to another. You can read the UN document here.
T: I always assumed that the policy and the curriculum design were slow because people just didn’t care. Now I’m starting to wonder if there’s a lack of curriculum because it would force people to look at that digital divide and say: how can we teach this at one school when the school miles up the road doesn’t have reliable Internet access? You would need to fix that first. Well, we can’t fix that.
L: I don’t think that’s a Newfoundland and Labrador problem. I’m sure that’s a problem in many, many parts of Canada, even in big cities. I used to teach in Toronto and I know that my school, which was an inner city school, definitely had less access to resources. But it’s a difficult question because it’s one that people don’t very much want to address. It’s a concern that we have here. In 2021, our grade 7 to 12 students were all given one-to-one Chromebooks. Terrific, except there doesn’t appear to be a plan in place for the systematic replacement of those devices. We are concerned that in 2027, there’s going to be what we’re referring to as a techpocalypse, when there are 60,000 Chromebooks out there, and not one that works, and none to replace them.
A: And that doesn’t include even the quantum computing stuff that’s coming down the pipe. So…
T: In my high school, one of the things we do is IT support locally, because I’m teaching IT. The students run our own help desk. What happened a few years ago, just as we were getting into Chromebooks, probably about the same time you were, there were. piles of dead Chromebooks everywhere. Students have intentionally broken them or whatever, and screens were a real problem. On the early ones we had, they were really bendy, so that they would snap really easily. So I looked up a replacement and said, can I replace this? And our school board IT department said: “No, no, no. That’s our job. You have to give it to us.” So we sent it down to them. And they charged $300 to repair a three-year-old– what was then a $349 Chromebook. Which made no sense at all. So they said: “Well, we’re not going to do that anymore.” Meanwhile, I go looking them up and I find an aftermarket screen replacement for $35. So my students, because we don’t charge anything for the work, could repair the Chromebooks for a few bucks each. For a long time my school was the only one with access toChromebooks because we kept the old ones going. And we started Frankensteining them too! We would bring in partially broken ones, dismantle them and use the spare parts to make other ones work. But it was a great experience for the students. So there are solutions to this, but not through inflexible system think. When you’re dealing with adults with a contract who want to charge what they want to charge for the work, it backs us into a corner.
A: One of the takeaways was when one of your staff came in and had comments were about how much they were beta testing the network and how that was informative for her. Was there anybody else that you think was like, had key observations about it?
L: Kim is a teacher on our staff who happens to be the person on staff who’s most engaged with the management and acquisition of technology. She’s the person you talk to if something needs fixing. She and I talked afterwards to our district technician who comes to repair things. We were explaining to him the various things we’d seen. For example, that middle generation of Chromebooks that really resisted running the program. He was really surprised, of course. But he carried that forward to his superiors in the IT department of the school district, just as a point of interest. We did afterwards add another Wi-Fi router in the library. That seems to have helped a little bit with some of our afternoon problems.
A: Do you think that Cyber Legends or something like this kind of learning will become part of the grade four practice?
L: I think so. I have just been in touch with Tim fairly recently, in fact, about setting up accounts for my current grade fours. Now I’ll introduce it to them just after Christmas in the new year. I like the idea of them being able to use it in one of their rotations in their centres in their classroom so five or six of them could be working on Cyber Legends in learning blocks. That would probably be a more integrated way of them approaching Cyber Legends rather than something special you have to come to the library for.
A: And Tim, for you, did working with Leigh and her grade fours change how you proceeded for the rest of the year in terms of what you wanted to accomplish?
T: I think what it did is provide a proof of concept. It is the right tool for the job. I love that they’re breaking it into pieces and changing the delivery methods. There’s a value to the game. What I’ve enjoyed about this conversation is how wide ranging it’s been and how it really shows how uneven this landscape is. There’s the William Gibson quote all over again, right? The future is already here, but it’s unevenly distributed. That’s especially true in education. In a lot of cases, the schools we see do really well in technical competition, are specialist urban schools with every benefit and advantage, they’re well on the right side of the digital divide. So for those of us who are still struggling to get over that wall, it’s a battle.
A: And for Leigh, Is there something that you want to do for, what are the other things that you feel like you’re planning?
L: Well, in my professional learning journey this year (our plan that we make each year for our professional goals for the year ahead), has to do with technology in kindergarten to grade two in particular. I feel like we’re doing a really great job in grades three and four at our school. My children can access Book Creator, they can make websites, they’re comfortable in Google slides. I’m doing a good job on that side of things, but I wanted to make sure that the skills that we’re developing are helping the children get to a point where they don’t need to think about their skill development anymore. The skills are ingrained and then they can get on with deep learning in whatever capacity it is that we want to go to. So that’s really been my focus, and I think using programs and games like Cyber Legends gives us a chance to build in those safety and security skills they need, again, without having to spend a ton of time doing a typing tutor or something like that. It’s built in, it’s fun, it gets the lesson to the kids so that we can get on with the next big thing. And that’s my goal: to get to more big things using technology so that the kids are engaged more fully in their educational experience.
A: Does that give you the hope that you needed, Tim King?
T: Yeah, it does. I was thinking about it today and this does help you actually learn better, too. So if you’re handy with the technology and how to get going quickly on it, it’ll speed up every aspect of your educational journey. Ideally, when you graduate, it’ll put you out into the world in a place where you understand how it works and you can participate. The last thing we want to do is graduate anyone with such poor digital skills that they’re unemployable. That’s my hope. If I can teach, like Leigh is, to sign into Chromebooks efficiently, then in grade 7, they don’t need to worry about that. They can dive right into a coding project, or writing a book online, or any number of other incredible projects that, if they have to learn the basic skills of where letters are on the keyboard, they’re going to be far, far behind. This is a serious part of the digital divide. It’s an equity piece that we’re seeing here in our school system. I suppose what I need to do in my position is continue to do what I can with the kids that I have and also advocate for the rest of the children in our province.
A: I would love to hear how the middle schools handle your kids when they come in and they’ve got the advanced skills that they weren’t expecting. Tim, if people want to get involved in Cyber Legends, are there opportunities still available to them now?
T: Yeah, we’re still operational at ICTC until the end of March. That’s when our CAN code funding ends. But I would still be more than happy to provide a site license for anybody who wants to try Cyber Legends. Just look up ICTC and eTalent Canada, and you’ll be able to find us on there and get in touch, and we’d happily provide you with your first year experience with it, and you can test it and see if it fits the need. Then if it does, hopefully we can keep Cyber Legends going. They are a small Canadian startup. This is not some big corporate monster. This is like a making this thing work. so I want to help.
L: Thank you so much. Thank you. It was a pleasure to have you at my school in April, and it’s a pleasure to be back with you right now.
Leigh Borden is teacher-librarian at Holy Trinity Elementary School in Torbay, Newfoundland. She is also president of Teacher Librarians of Newfoundland and Labrador and an Angela Thacker Memorial Award winner.
Tim King is a computer technology teacher and is currently seconded with ICTC, the Information and Communication Technology Council, where he is working to improve cyber-education in Canada. He splits his time with a second secondment with the Quantum Algorithms Institute where he is developing curriculum for the emerging field of quantum computing.
Alanna King holds a M.Ed. from the University of Alberta with a focus on school libraries. She was a teacher librarian with the Upper Grand District School Board for 11 glorious years, and held various roles with the Ontario School Library Council. She now works between curriculum research for TVO and teaching online secondary school English. She was a recipient of the Angela Thacker Memorial Award in 2020.