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As the 2024/25 school year gets underway, there is plenty of anxiety around tech in the classroom. Students and teachers are navigating new provincial cellphone bans, and no fewer than nine Ontario school boards — including the TDSB and TCDSB — are engaged in a class-action lawsuit against social-media giants such as Meta, TikTok and Snapchat. While parents, educators and policy makers are worried about the negative impacts of devices and digital tools on children, the path forward isn’t necessarily so black and white. “Banning cell phones may or may not be a good idea,” says Annie Kidder, the executive director of advocacy group People for Education. “But it’s a very simplistic response to the concept of technology, which is pervasive and could be used for good.”
Anyone close to a school-aged kid is all too aware that the public education system is in rough shape. Some of that is due to the lingering effects of the pandemic, but the whole sector has been in shambles since long before COVID-19, when the current government started increasing class sizes, slashing school board funding, scaling back investments in school repair and maintenance and decreasing special education budgets. And the cuts keep on coming. Last year, the TDSB received $1,110 less per student, in inflation-adjusted terms, compared to five years ago. Wages for Ontario education workers have been cut by nearly 11 percent, also adjusting for inflation, over the past decade. And more than a quarter of Ontario schools experience teacher shortages every day, and nearly half experience daily shortages for educational assistants, leaving many principals with no choice other than to have unqualified or uncertified personnel to cover these absences.
Given the current state of public education, it’s time to go beyond the status quo and look at innovative solutions, including novel tech tools. The good news is that many of these options can be found in our backyard. There are more than 2,000 startups in the GTA alone and, according to the Toronto Business Development Centre, at least 75 of them are dedicated to education technology (or edutech), while many others are working on complementary ideas and products that can be applied within the education system to improve experiences for students and teachers.
“The system is having a hard time staying in step with technology,” says Kidder, who suggests that ensuring that public education remains relevant in an evolving (and plugged-in) world is more imperative than banning cellphones. Achieving this priority, she adds, may require developing new approaches to work with private companies, many of whom offer novel solutions to the issues plaguing Ontario’s classrooms.
The air that a kid breathes plays a key role in how they learn. Not only can poor indoor air quality contribute to respiratory conditions like asthma, it can impact cognitive skills including concentration, memory and problem-solving while increasing stress and anxiety. On the flipside, health, attendance and academic performance have been shown to improve with better air quality maintenance. Without proper ventilation, schools can be petri dishes, whether you’re talking about a typical flu season, a stomach-bug outbreak, or the current back-to-school landscape, with COVID levels surging and the rising threats of other transmissible diseases like monkeypox and whooping cough.
As students returned to the classroom in the fall of 2021, the Ontario government recommended that schools with mechanical ventilation use the highest grade air filters available, preferably with a “minimum efficiency reporting value” of 13. (Pre-COVID, the minimum requirement was around 8 or 9.) The filters are much better at preventing the flow of particulates, including viruses and bacteria — but there was one problem. “The HVAC systems in most schools can’t handle MERV 13 filters,” says Aeden Fida, co-founder and CEO of Blade Air, a Toronto-based company developing tech to clean the air. Using higher-grade options in a system designed for lower-pressure filters can actually cut off airflow. “Then you’re just moving dust and dirt around in the classroom,” explains Fida. Or filters could be changed more frequently, but few schools have the money for that kind of maintenance.
As part of a $25-million plan to improve ventilation in schools, the Toronto District School Board put standalone high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters in each classroom. But teachers often received inadequate guidance: some were told to run the noisy devices at lower speeds during the day, which engineers say is less effective. In many instances, HEPA filters were left unplugged or turned off. The challenge is to find solutions that improve air quality while easing the burden on educators and admin — within a tight budget. Blade Air offers one promising option. The company’s electromagnetic Pro Filters, which are being installed in four school boards across Ontario this fall, capture particles forty times smaller than traditional filters of the same MERV rating, and they’re low pressure, meaning they won’t burn through school HVAC systems.
While Pro Filters cost more than conventional options up front, Blade Air says they last longer and require less maintenance, leading to a 50 percent reduction in operational costs. “Budget concerns are the first thing school administrators worry about when approached with new technology,” says Fida. As a member of the Ontario Education Collaborative Marketplace, Blade Air can sign service agreements directly with school boards instead of going through the public tender process, giving the company more control over pricing. This approach to procurement can make the process more flexible and accessible for individual vendors.
Between 2020 and 2022, Ontario students missed out on 135 days of in-person learning due to COVID-related closures. Years later, we’re still playing catch-up. A 2022 report by the Program for International Student Assessment, which examined the academic progress of 23,000 Canadian students, found that Ontario’s average math score fell by 18 points compared to 2018 scores. PISA defines a drop of 20 points as losing out on a full year of learning, meaning students are behind by nearly 11 months. Reading scores fell 12 points, representing a loss of more than half a year of learning. Policy makers have sometimes blamed school boards and educators for falling test scores, obscuring their own responsibility in relation to funding cuts and a lack of resources.
An additional hurdle is figuring out how to capture the attention of students who are still re-acclimatizing to IRL education and struggling with pandemic-related social and developmental lags. Creative tech tools offer one way to meet kids where they are — which, these days, may involve a screen. Prodigy Education is a game-based learning platform that currently offers two products, one for math and one for English. Players explore worlds, encounter opponents and complete quests, all while answering curriculum-aligned questions that allow them to progress through the game. The company’s adaptive algorithm aims to keep kids in what’s called their “zone of proximal development.” “We want them to be challenged and engaged, without the content being so hard they get frustrated and give up,” says co-founder and co-CEO Rohan Mahimker. After piloting the platform in private schools, Prodigy spread by word of mouth through the public system. It didn’t hurt that the company’s content can be accessed for free by teachers and that students can engage with the core gameplay experience for free as well. Revenue comes from the five percent of users who pay for a premium membership, which provides access to game add-ons and supplementary features for parents.
On its own, technology isn’t a magic bullet, says Mahimker, who notes that it can be tricky to define how such tools can and should be used in schools. “It’s key that tech like Prodigy be used to augment, not replace, traditional classroom teaching,” he says. “But there’s a lot of need for remediation and I think edutech tools can be a big help. We just need a more standardized evaluation and procurement process to ensure the rigorous assessment of how well a tool works in driving intended outcomes.”
According to a 2023 report by Ontario’s Education Quality and Assessment Office, just 27 percent of grade 9 students with special education needs met the provincial standard in reading. Some simply aren’t getting as much time in class as they should — more than 60 percent of elementary school principals and nearly half of secondary principals report that they have felt compelled to ask a special education student to stay home due to staffing shortages. The implementation of de-streaming across Ontario high schools has been bungled, in part due to promised class size reductions and increases in learning supports like educational assistants failing to materialize. According to a report by People for Education, principals said it was difficult for teachers to support struggling students without having access to more time, more resources and smaller class sizes.
To facilitate more assessment, intervention and support for neurodiverse students, the process must be agile and effective, and the tools must appeal to both students and teachers. The answer, if you ask Vinay Singh, the CEO of Toronto firm Orange Neurosciences, involves innovation — the earlier, the better. “Ages 5 to 12 — those are formative years,” he says. “If you want to fix the system, do something for those students.”
Orange Neurosciences has developed a gamified learning platform to improve reading, writing and comprehension capabilities in students with autism, ADHD, dyslexia and other exceptionalities. Using AI and machine learning, the technology homes in on skills that need work and provides targeted game-based exercises to strengthen them. Singh’s dream is for Orange Neuroscience’s tools to be built into the school system as a standardized test, providing support to neurodiverse students without requiring any additional infrastructure or excessive teacher training. But although the platform is used by thousands of students in eight countries including the U.S., South Africa and India, and Orange is launching a pilot in Alberta this school year, Singh has struggled to get a toehold in Ontario. The bureaucracy of the province’s public school system can be a barrier for innovative approaches that don’t fit into existing categories.
The missing link is a set of standards for evaluating potential new digital tools. As People for Educations Annie Kidder notes, there’s no existing protocol to separate the snake oil from the viable possibilities. “Right now, it’s being left up to teachers,” she says. Indeed, as with the example of Prodigy, individual educators are also often the ones doing the research and pushing for a new product to be implemented. Investing in proactive, thoughtful quality control, says Kidder, could do wonders in bringing Ontario’s classrooms into the current era — responsibly. “We used to have a whole government department dedicated to evaluating textbooks. Some kind of expert guidance would be really helpful, because right now, it’s the Wild West.”
Image source: Adobe Stock
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