Gains or EduGains

Gains is a relatively new web page with strong ties to the Ministry.  It states that it is “built on the success of … [the Ministry documents]… Think Literacy Success, Think Literacy Cross-Curricular Approaches, Me Read?No Way, Leading Math Success, Targeted Implementation and Planning Supports, and Critical Learning Instructional Supports”.  It is very web 2.0 and encourages contributions from many sources.

It is a bit of “rag tag” fleet of stuff mainly to support Ontario secondary teachers of math, literacy and differentiated instruction with stated plans to continue to grow to support other subject areas. 

Literacy Gains includes among other things,  concise guides to listening, media literacy (I liked this one), critical literacy and metacognition.  Math Gains includes documents from a variety of sources and Boards, videos, Ministry documents, posters, software lessons (eg Geometers Sketchpad).  As my son would say “it is a bit random” BUT it does contain useful resources and is worth checking out.

A final comment: both the literacy and math gain pages include the following introduction “Reaching every teacher and student; gathering and sharing local evidence of promising practises; precisely personalizing instructional trajectories; harnessing collaborative technologies; establishing communities of practice at every level in the system”.   HUH? I am not sure what this means.  My recommendation would be to de-jargon and simplify this.

Rowan