2018 Innovator Award for Administrator – Josée Landriault

Josée Landriault is the Principal at the brand new Gaétan-Gervais High School in Oakville, part of the Conseil scolaire Viamonde. With over

20 years of experience in education as head of departments, Vice-Principal and Principal of several schools, she is a woman of vision and action with a strong interest for the technology-oriented 21st century learning experience.

Driven by her passion for technology, Josée was determined to make her school the first French language high school in Canada to get the Microsoft Showcase School designation.

Thanks to Josée’s strong commitment to include technology in the school’s daily operations and her efforts to share the program with other schools and demonstrate the benefits of innovative teaching in the class room, Viamonde’s Jeunes sans frontières High School earn the coveted designation.

Inspired by the model of the Microsoft Camp 21 she attended with her team, she has since developed the vision to amalgamate French culture with technology workshops. With this goal in mind, she created and hosted the first Viamonde technology camp called Pantech at Jeunes sans frontières high school. The camp consist of two days of collaborative learning between students ranging from grade 6 to grade 12 and is exclusively in French and free. The camp, now in it’s third year, has been a great success. Since becoming principal at Gaétan-Gervais high school, Josee also created and launched GageTech so that the students and the teachers could learn and benefit from this one of kind experience.

Josee works with a team of very dedicated, innovative and creative people inspiring her to go beyond boundaries and strive for excellence.

She is also mother of two fantastic young men : Richard (18) and Alex (16). Richard who has an autism spectrum disorder, a reality making Josée a strong advocate for all students with special needs.

2018 Innovator Award for Classroom Educator – Scott McKenzie

Scott is an elementary teacher with the Waterloo Regional District School Board. He currently teaches Grade 3/4 at New Dundee Public School. He has shared his learning at Connect and Bring IT Together conferences. He was honoured to speak at TedxKitchenerED in 2014. He is a strong believer that all children should feel successful at school, and he utilizes technology to meet the needs of all learners in his classroom.

In 2014/2015 he connected his class to other classes in Cambridge, Mexico, and Korea for a year long collaboration. They created a Global Classroom for the year using Minecraft Servers, Google Sites, and Google Hangouts.

In 2015/2016 his class connected with a local High School class to work on a passion project to help an endangered species (Little Brown Bats). They used technology to connect the classes, and the Elementary students had the opportunity to work in the Construction shop building the bat houses with High School mentors.

In 2016/2017 Scott worked with a team of teachers on a project integrating coding, and robotics as tools to deepen student comprehension in Mathematics and Language from Grade 1-6. He presented Scratch Jr. and Sphero coding workshops at Wilfrid Laurier’s Faculty of Education.

2018 Innovator Award for Technician – Jamie Sinclair

Jamie has worked at the Halton District School for the past 19 years. He has been in the Manager, Information technology position for the last 9 years. Jamie’s teams are responsible for web development/support, databases, Application Support and Gsuite for Education administration and training.

His accomplishments include the implementation and system wide use of Google in all schools K-12 across the Halton District School Board.

Jamie supports all administrators, teachers and ICT leads in the use of current Gsuite applications. As a result of his work, teachers and students are increasingly immersed in the effective use of google classroom, hangout, docs, sites and Google + communities. He believes that living in a technology-driven, globalized world requires our schools to be responsive in the way we provide and use technology as a teaching and learning tool. He promotes the deepening of global competencies and digital citizenship through the responsible use of technology to collaborate and share information.

Jamie has been an influential leader in developing a comprehensive plan for the HDSB so that the most current resources are being used by educators and encourages an innovative approach to digital communication skills. Jamie has inspired educators and fellow staff members to think outside the box by modelling a growth mindset. As a result he has been instrumental in promoting opportunities for students and teachers to work creatively and effectively as lifelong learners in a rapidly changing digital landscape.