Samira Ahmed
Student, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa

Samira Ahmed, a law student at the University of Ottawa, founded FYBY News, a for youth by youth news outlet in Ottawa. FYBY News is a Child and Youth Friendly Ottawa program which airs informative videos, created for and by youth, in local high schools, community centres and on the Web. Thanks to Samira’s hard work, over 5,000 students in the Ottawa area have viewed FYBY News segments. The program provides Ottawa’s youth with the chance to gain knowledge about issues, opportunities and resources that are relevant to them. It is a tool for youth to express opinions, engage in discussion and create positive change within the community and the world. Through FYBY News, youth are inspired to be active global citizens and effective problem solvers and are provided with an outlet for to express their creativity.

Kathy Cassidy
Westmount Elementary School, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan

Kathy Cassidy, a Grade 1 teacher at Westmount Elementary School in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, has creatively incorporated technology in her daily classroom activities to enhance her students’ learning opportunities. She uses a variety of tools to enhance her students’ learning, including blogs, Skype, wikis, podcasts, video, photos, and online communication. Mrs. Cassidy’s Grade 1 students begin blogging the first week of class, creating their own personal online portfolio that showcases what they have learned over the school year. They also have “blogging buddies”, second year education students at the University of Regina who read and comment on their blog postings. A classroom blog includes videos and photos of the students’ learning activities, most of which have been taken by the students. With the integration of Skype into the classroom, the students communicate with other students and people from around the world. The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) recently named Mrs. Cassidy as recipient of the 2009 Kay L. Bitter Vision Award for Excellence in Technology-Based PK-2 Education, which is awarded to educators who demonstrate vision and creativity in a project or program that effectively integrates technology in the classroom.

Julia Christensen, Erin Freeland Ballantyne, Alana Kronstal, Jessica Simpson and Teresa Winter
Graduate students and community activists, Northwest Territories

Julia Christensen, Erin Freeland Ballantyne, Alana Kronstal, Jessica Simpson, and Teresa Winter, graduate students and community activists from the Northwest Territories, developed Our North/Our Future: Talking Change, Security and Sustainability with Northern Youth, a collaborative project between the International Polar Year GAPS Project, the Arctic Indigenous Alliance, the International Polar Year Canadian Youth Time Capsule Project, and the Sustainability’s Paradox Video Project. The aim of the project was to provide an opportunity for youth to include their voice in discussions on the future of the North. In April 2009, 14 northern youth gathered in Tuktoyaktuk, NWT, to discuss the challenges and opportunities they encounter, as well as their visions for the future of their communities. As part of the workshop, participants were trained on using video, photography and blogging to explore and share their thoughts on life in the North. The workshop was held during Beluga Jamboree weekend, which provided an amazing opportunity for the participants to go out into the community of Tuktoyaktuk to interview residents on their perspectives on change and their hopes for the future of their community. A blog was created using the materials collected and continues as a forum for discussion.

Rob Dougherty
Teacher, Tom Baines School, Calgary, Alberta

Rob Dougherty, a Grade 7, 8 and 9 teacher in drama, performing arts and explorations in film at Tom Baines School in Calgary, Alberta, was awarded a 2009 Prime Minister's Award for Teaching Excellence for his outstanding achievements in teaching. Rob’s teaching approach is to value everyone for their creative talents, aptitudes and attitudes and to encourage student leadership and collaborative problem-solving during student-led theatre and film productions. Rob pioneered the integration of information and communications technology into junior high performing arts courses in Calgary, including the use of film in drama classes, employing digital recording and editing techniques. The curricula he developed are now available province-wide. Under Rob’s direction, students created a moving multi-media presentation about Canadian soldiers who died in the Afghanistan campaign for the school’s Remembrance Day gathering. He also created a Star Wars fan club, one of the school’s most popular clubs, where students learn about filmmaking, story telling and acting as well as collect funds for charity.

Carl Hofbauer and Lian Anson
Directors, BC Student Film Festival, British Columbia

Carl Hofbauer and Lian Anson, along a group of BC media teachers, organize the annual BC Student Film Festival (BCSFF), which recognizes exceptional student filmmakers in British Columbia. Students at the elementary, secondary and post-secondary levels can submit their entries to the festival. The films are judged by industry professionals, according to age and category, and every young filmmaker receives written feedback. The award-winning films are screened at the festival itself where awards are also presented. In addition to film screenings, the BCSFF holds workshops during the day, in filmmaking, acting, animation, sound and screenwriting, led by the Vancouver Film School’s faculty of entertainment industry professionals. The festival is an opportunity for young filmmakers to learn and be inspired and to meet other students who share a passion for filmmaking.

Frances MacKinnon
Producer, Discovery Channel, Toronto, Ontario

Frances MacKinnon is the founder of Youth Films International (YFI), a volunteer-run series of documentary workshops that provide students with a real life documentary-making experience from concept to screening. The free YFI workshops foster a fun, no-experience-required atmosphere, where students get hands-on help from top industry professionals. Beyond basic technical training, this series of workshops is intended to instil a sense of responsibility in students in what they present to the world and what they contribute to the airwaves on a global level. Students explore issues of respect, ethics and responsible film making; develop strong writing and editing skills; and, face the challenge of how to remain entertaining and engaging. Every student that completes the series of workshops is considered for the re-mentoring program which invites them to coach the new crop of students and share their experiences. Since it’s inception in 2008, students have produced eight documentaries.

Sharon Peters
The Study School, Montreal, Quebec

Sharon Peters, while teaching at The Study School in Montreal, had students in her Grade 10 multimedia class participate in the pilot year of Take 2: The Student's Point of View, a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering young people to become global citizens through the use of digital media. The organization provides students with professional high definition footage of areas of global conflict and supports them as they use the footage to create documentaries, public service announcements and shorts. Ms. Peters’ class received 38 hours of footage from Take 2 founder Karin Muller which was filmed during her stay in a Sudanese refugee camp in Chad. The students developed technical skills in video software, media literacy skills and global citizenship skills as they collaborated with other students to create meaningful documentaries about the Darfur crisis. To share their work, foster collaboration between students at other participating schools and receive expert feedback on their videos, students created a social networking site for the project. The students also created weekly podcasts about the Darfur conflict which were posted on the project’s site.

Wayne Robinson
Student, Langley, British Columbia

Wayne Robinson is an independent filmmaker who graduated from Brookswood Secondary School in Langley, BC, in 2008. Exposed to the idea of media literacy and Adbusters Magazine in Grade 8 by his teacher turned mentor, Carl Hofbauer, Wayne has since become extensively literate in the magazine, and its umbrella organization, the Media Foundation. Inspired by Adbusters’ grassroots campaigns, Wayne directed a documentary entitled Blackspot Culture detailing the Adbusters and the Media Foundation venture the Blackspot Unswoosher Shoe. The documentary premiered at the Montreal World Film Festival. Wayne has also enthusiastically participated in various other Adbusters campaigns such as Buy Nothing Day and Digital Detox Week. He hopes to continue deepening his understanding of media literacy during the next few years while attaining a political science combined philosophy degree at the University of British Columbia and pursuing a film career on the side.

Vinita Srivastava
Assistant Professor and Online Stream Director, School of Journalism, Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario

Vinita Srivastava, Assistant Professor at the Ryerson School of Journalism in Toronto, founded Verse City in 2004, a project aimed at getting youth, visible minorities and aboriginal students interested in pursuing careers in news media. In 2008, through a grant from the Youth Challenge Fund, the project partnered with East Metro Youth Services (EMYS), a community-based youth social services centre in East Toronto and started up a full-time journalism workshop as part of the EMYS Violence Intervention Project. Youth from Toronto’s priority neighbourhoods who are interested in pursuing a career in journalism receive multi-media training in a number of areas, including reporting, video editing, photography, sound and blog writing. Verse City also runs a five-day intensive workshop in the summer; under the guidance of Journalism School students and faculty as well as local media professionals, participants explore media tools and skills including writing, interviewing and digital photography. They also have the opportunity to produce an original piece which is published on the Verse City Web site. To see the latest Verse City projects, go to: www.journalism.ryerson.ca/versecity. The Verse City Project also has partnerships with: NFB/CitizenShift, CBC.ca/Your Voices, and Young People’s Press.

Kym Stewart
PhD student, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia

Kym Stewart’s doctoral work has looked at how to imaginatively engage children in an examination of their media culture and to create lesson plans that are culturally inclusive. Along with Jude Comeau, a Grade 3 teacher at Armstrong Elementary School in Burnaby, she has developed a media education unit, Media Detectives-in-Training, which allows students to take on the role of media detectives to make sense of their media-saturated world. The students are provided with case study situations to hone their detective skills, solving the mysterious case of branding, scoping out obnoxious and sly logos, and tracking down the product-placement culprits. In addition to this project, in 2007-08 Kym worked with Dr. Mark Fettes and Vonnie Hutchingson on a project that addressed the concerns of the effectiveness of transformative media education in public elementary schools in a primarily First Nations community, Haida Gwaii/Queen Charlotte Islands. The focus of this project was to develop lessons that were tied to the community in an attempt to merge media literacy with the local land and culture. The unit relied on Haida stories to provide the engaging structure for looking at the world we now live in. Kym is also a media education consultant for the district of Prince Rupert. Kym, Debbie Leighton-Stephens and several teachers in the district have taken on the challenge to create culturally inclusive media education programming for students as a means of engaging them emotionally and socially. Click here for more on Kym’s work in media education (PDF).

Nathan Toft
A. Lorne Cassidy Elementary School, Ottawa, Ontario

Jane Smith
South March Public School, Ottawa, Ontario

For the past three years, teachers Nathan Toft and Jane Smith have been helping their Grade 5 students in the west end of Ottawa, Ontario, to produce a regular podcast called Portable Radio. The podcast allows the students to showcase their interests, their projects and the work they do in their classrooms. The students use their writing, speaking and computer skills to create a quality 15 to 20 minute show. The project teaches lessons in group work, planning, writing for a specific audience, public speaking skills and digital audio editing. It allows friends and family at home and around the world to listen to the students’ work online or by download at www.portableradio.ca. In addition, they occasionally create a shorter podcast called Portable Radio Point of View which takes current events and challenges the students to form an opinion and justify their points of view on a variety of subjects. Portable Radio Point of View is regularly aired on the local CBC Radio morning show Ottawa Morning and was awarded the Kidcast Award for Point of View programming. Portable Radio was originally produced in two portable classrooms and is now created through online collaboration between classes in the two different schools.

Dr. Steven Van Zoost
Teacher, Avon View High School, Windsor, Nova Scotia

Dr. Steven Van Zoost, a Grade 11-12 teacher in film and video production, advanced English and theory of knowledge at Avon View High School in Windsor, Nova Scotia, was awarded a 2009 Prime Minister's Award for Teaching Excellence for his outstanding achievements in teaching. Steven has been a constant innovator over his 15-year teaching career and has been a pathfinder in integrating new technology into the classroom. His doctoral research, which describes how Novas Scotia is in need of workers with literacies for the 21st century and who are flexible and can work collaboratively, informs his teaching. Steven is a pioneer in adopting many new teaching technologies, including Moodle, software for producing Internet-based courses and Web sites that emphasize collaboration and building on students’ ideas to inform learning. He regularly works with students and teachers in other disciplines to produce student performances, with history students doing research, English students writing the scripts and drama students performing them, while the band plays and choir sings, and art students display response pieces in PowerPoint presentations designed by technology students.