Hello fellow educators. Welcome back to the Christian Educator podcast.

Ok, ok. It has been six months since my last podcast. Yes, I am making my confession here. At first I thought I would start my first podcast after our 25^th Anniversary for our schools. Yep, we just celebrated 25 years of education. Actually we gathered to celebrate one day and spent the other two days looking forward to the next 25 years. When Jesus told the young man, let the dead bury the dead, he wasn’t saying we shouldn’t honour the past he just had priorities that couldn’t wait. I feel the same way. This podcast will focus on what we are doing right now to help us take the steps I believe will be necessary to get us into that future. So, after the 25th Anniversary/Looking Forward event with all of our staff I was whisked away the very next day to spend two weeks on a European Tour visiting schools that were experimenting with 21st Century Learning Spaces and programs. This was an extremely important time for me as I was able to see some very exciting ideas first hand. I discovered from this trip how important it is to understand exactly what we should be doing in education over the next 15 to 20 years before we start a building buildings for our schools. We are getting closer, but I want to say to all the staff listening to this, when we build this time, phase 5 if you can believe it, we will get it right. We are not just going to build boxes. From this trip I headed down to South Africa with our partners at the bottom of this great Continent where I meet with our partner school in Pretoria, Hatfield Christian Online School. Note that this is HCOS Africa. We visited several township (that is poor disadvantaged black schools) where our partners are reaching out with amazing solutions. Essentially they have equipped teachers in the classroom with a projector, a laptop and an internet connection. These ingredients are still missing in many North American classrooms but this isn’t what is so revolutionary. What was making the enormous difference in those classrooms was the curriculum this enabled them to access. They were using our online courses which have been combined with the Hatfield’s rewrites to make an impressive curriculum for the South African student. This project caught the eye of the Rhodes University, the most academic post-secondary institution in South Africa. They are funding this project into six more schools this upcoming year as a larger pilot. After bringing our friend Samson Mukado, ACSI director for Africa, we have been encouraged to press ahead and work to scale this program in a way that might create some solutions for many more classrooms in African. I must say the entire experience was surreal to me. The first thing I saw in the pilot school we visited was a picture of our online science teacher Heather Loenen on a rollercoaster as part of her Science 10 physics lesson. To my knowledge this was not staged. Wow! Here I was in a very poor township hours away from any major center in Africa and on a screen in the classroom was our Science teacher. From there I headed to Indonesia where we are in talks about expanding ICOS (I’ll explain more about ICOS a bit further into the podcast) to create some country wide solutions. And then completed the around the world trip home after more than three weeks of travel. When I got back I made a trip to Ontario to work on the beginnings of Nimbus Christian Educational Services. We are consulting with a group of educators in Ontario to create some cloud based, thus the name Nimbus, solutions for Christian schools in their Province. On the way home I stopped off in Alberta for the ACSI Board of Directors meeting.  The following week I attended the International Association of K-12 Online Learning conference where I presented in three different workshops. From there we meet with all of our leadership staff for three days in Phoenix to carry forward from the 25th Anniversary initiatives. With our campus school leaders I then visited High Tech High in San Diego, a school known for “project based learning” and 21st Century teaching practices and it wasn’t yet December. We had two visits from high profile Provincial leaders, one the Minister of Education and another from a key adviser to the Premier.  I had several in Province trips before the holidays which I actually don’t count as travel any more. I did get a week and a half off for the holidays and, well, here I am today.

So, I gave you my entire schedule for the last three months to excuse my absence from the internet airwaves. I am sorry. I missed you all. What’s encouraging is the frequent emails I still receive from people listening to past podcasts.  The downside is I have lost any ranking status on iTunes. So if you want more people to find me. Go on iTunes and write a review or make a comment. It will help bring me back into the top 10 K-12 educational podcasts in Canada and of course if you include this podcast in your blogs, tweets and emails then others will find it again and we can all be reunited.

Since I have been on a roll spouting out my travels I want to use the rest of today to give you a comprehensive overview of all of the Heritage Christian Schools programs and projects. As we took time to gaze, at times a bit ostentatiously, into the future of our schools and efforts for the next 25 years, we all began to get a sense that our outlandish goal might just be in site. If you haven’t heard, we believe that we are called, that is Heritage Christian Schools, is to be involved with the discipleship of at least 1 million children worldwide. Since the amazing start-up and growth of our online school programs, we have a newfound faith in the means and methods we have become proficient at. “High Tech with High Touch” is becoming our motto. This coupled with the enormous favour we have with our Provincial Government we are beginning to see that this goal actually could become a reality. Here is what we are doing right now to make this happen.

Or campus school program continues to be a strong and stable foundation to all of our programs. I can’t tell you how often this comes into the discussion as we talk to educational leaders worldwide. We don’t just do online stuff. We have a vibrant, exciting brick and mortar school. By the way I hate that metaphor, thus we call HCS our “campus program.” The day to day work as a campus school continues to inform all of our school leadership in ways that push us towards 21^st Century solutions for all kinds of Christian students. Even though our largest population of learners are home educated students or distance learners through online at Heritage we need to always remember that this a unique exception in our School organization. The vast majority of students worldwide have never even experienced what we take for granted. The majority of kids worldwide are only now beginning to use computers for their education, much less, taking part of their learning through and online context.

There are three major ideas or projects we are working on in our campus program that make us very distinct from most campus schools. First is our one to one computer project in the high school. Every student in our high school gets a personalized netbook that is a school computer that they can take home and use in the classroom. More and more we are looking for ways to take advantage of our online expertise for the classroom and the campus school student. We are using Moodle for our courses in the classroom. We have an amazing student information system called Student’s Achieve which tracks schedules, assignments and assessment. This keeps every student and parent up to date with how they are doing with their learning. We have just started a Ning, this is an educational social networking site. The netbooks give the opportunity for students to use online curriculum, some of which is from our Online School, search, manipulate data and word process. The second is our Global Citizenship Program. This year we will take our largest group of grade 12 students with us on the 6 week Mexico trip. This is a life transforming experience for our students. Keep in mind that this isn’t a typical outreach, in fact, it is designed to have a specific impact upon our students more than any outreach activities. The students will move their schooling into this third world environment and they will live and work in a different culture. You can’t imagine the impact this has on how our students see the world. Finally the new big area of focus in the campus program is our Learning Commons. This is one of those great connectors that is happening between HCS and HCOS. Instead of trying to do two different things with our library needs as schools we are combining all of our resources to create a completely new approach towards the tired idea of “the Library.” This new community of learning resources is being led by one of our most innovative teachers in the Online school but now has responsibilities in both schools and for a team of people working with her. By consolidating the two schools we now have a physical place for the commons and a virtual place for the commons. In no other area of education, do these two spaces connect better than in the library. On my European trip I had the opportunity to visit several libraries. They have become places where students can go online and find the learning resources they need.  The repository of physical books is now way down the list of what they are using libraries for. At HCS there is new life in our Learning Commons and kids are excited to spend time in this space. At HCOS kids have more access to resources than ever before.

Before I forget, I often leave out one of our most significant educational programs in our Schools and this is Heritage Christian Preschool. This great program is working with about 50 students this year and is having a dramatic impact in the lives of students and families. About a third of the families are from KCC, another third from other churches and at least one third of the children are from non-churched families. This continues to be a great entrance into our schools and a wonderful outreach into our local community.

Heritage Christian Online School has grown into the largest Distributed Learning School in our Province public or independent. Presently we have 1835 full time K-12 students. Nearly 90% of these students are in families committed to home schooling. The remainder of students is what we would classify as “distance learners.” Our students here can use a variety of methods and tools to accomplish their educational program from traditional home school, paper based, curriculum to dynamic online courses. All of our kids have teachers who work with their parents or teach them directly when in an online course. Many of our kids have an integrated program of online and paper. There are some very exciting things happening in HCOS. Several years we started Learning Camps which has facilitated Province wide one and two day learning experiences. In some cases like robotics and having guest speakers we have them travel from community to community to take the best to everyone. This year we officially started Coop programs where families and students come together for one day a week or every other week to combine resources, parent teachers, and courses. This program provides face to face opportunities for our students and teachers. We have learned that the more relationship we can foster the better our learning experiences will be in HCOS. Our online programs and high school Grad program continue to grow. This year we have 381 students in Grades 10-12. We have over 120 online courses and wonderful educational programs like our Humanities 10 and 11 and our Comparative Civilizations 12 which are both taught in a synchronous time table. We will be taking students to Europe, Mexico and beyond this year. One area that has continued to surprise us is our Special Education program. We have over 180 students who receive significant funding from our Provincial Government. We are BC’s largest Special Ed program. Instead of baby-sitting these kids in classrooms we are designing very creative and innovative individualized educational plans for each and every student. Other new initiatives include our virtual worlds projects in Quest Atlantis and Thinking Worlds where teachers and students are building places where they can learn online. The Learning Commons is gather community in book clubs and blogs. We have an amazing array of online subscriptions to educational tools and the list goes on. Our online school has opened the door for our leadership to represent Online Education to Christian Schools internationally and Christian Education to the international Online educational movement.

The next program I want to tell you about is an offshoot to HCOS. BC Online School continues to provide online alternative choices to high school students who are presently enrolled in campus schools around the province. Last year we served more than 2500 students most of whom were from public schools. We have enrolled students from nearly every high school in BC. These are the same Christian courses and teachers who work with our HCOS students. We are hopeful in the next year that we will begin to receive funding for adult students. We are prayerfully considering how a potential teacher’s strike will affect this program. Our teachers and program will continue without interruption and we are anticipating a large influx of students if this should happen this year.

Mathonline.ca is a brand we are using to distribute our world class Math program. In the first three years of HCOS we did well in all of our academic subjects with the exception of Math. Our course were poorly designed and we did not take advantage of the amazing tools available online for this subject. After, some research and retraining we launched into a flash video style curriculum that gives very good instruction that is suited to the way our brains want to learn math. To date we have animated the entire Math curriculum from Grade 8 to AP Calculus. We have developed a platform called Study Forge and are using this website to market to individuals and schools. We anticipate that this will become a distribution point for students all over the world.

The last program I want to tell you about in our schools is the International Christian Online School or ICOS as we call it in the office. For the last three years we have been developing a world class online ESL, that is, English as a Second Language curriculum.  We combined our amazing tech team enhancement skills with a team of Language specialist to give us a set of courses that rival “Rosetta Stone” or “Tell Me More” in the online world. We have a full time marketing company working with staff to enroll students from all over the world. Presently we have students throughout South and Central America, the US, China, Hong Kong, Russia and places we don’t even know about. This curriculum can be used as a supplement to and existing program or can be used by an ESL teacher with a school classroom. We have national wide possibilities in Indonesia and Taiwan.  In the next 6 months we will enroll more than a 1000 students worldwide. Eventually, behind this program, we plan to start offshore high school programs throughout the world where students will be able to learn in English and receive a full BC Dogwood Graduation Certificate. ICOS will be one of those significant places where Heritage Christian Schools will be able to reach that “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” of 1 million students.

Just think, eight years ago we were a small Christian school even by BC Independent school standards of 250. Today, we have over 300 staff working in all of our schools and are reaching close to 6000 students. If we will stay faithful to our Lord and keep our hearts and lives centered on Him I believe we will reach that crazy idea of a million.

Next week I want to take some time and explore some of the distinctiveness of our school program and community. Thanks for being patient with me in my busyness and most of all thank you for your commitment to discipleship-base Christian Education.