ARCHIVED—John Harris
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Year: 2008 – Province: British Columbia
Certificate of Excellence Recipients
School: Lochiel U-Connect Education
Centre
1460-224 Street
Langley, British Columbia
V2Z 1L3
Principal: Vanessa Jaggi
School Telephone: 604-534-4020
School Fax: 604-534-4052
School Email: scott.wouters@lpsd.ca
School Website: www.sd35.bc.ca/uconnect
Subjects and Grades Taught: Science and technology, social studies
and music in Grades 2 to 9
Teaching Approach
- Draws out student potential by challenging, inspiring and encouraging students, emphasizing respectful listening with effective communication skills.
- Passionately integrates research supported information technology into most classes, often writing original online software applications that are customized to meet individual student needs.
- Develops partnerships with many local technology companies and parents, who are welcome in classes and are encouraged to use their expertise to help develop school programs.
Outstanding Achievements
- Founded a school, now called Lochiel U-Connect, which endeavored to be the first B.C. publicly funded program to blend face-to-face instruction with online and home learning. Launched in 1997 with an initial enrollment of 20, the school has grown to approximately 200 students, with a waiting list for most years.
- Developed a popular robotics program, created a multidisciplinary course linking oceanography with varieties of ROV hardware and software, and developed social studies and science courses utilizing Multiple User Virtual Environments, 3D simulations and a wide range of "global positioning system" devices.
- Coached student online software development teams who not only have won many national and international awards, but who have also developed applications that are used by many schools globally and that have been reviewed and recommended by numerous international publications.
- Directed a wide range of musicals, choirs and an extracurricular string orchestra of 30 students.
Rave Reviews
"When I first met him, Mr. Harris did almost everything. He planned field trips to correspond to what he was teaching, he taught music, violin and choir, arts, social studies, science and computer programming, ran a club for developing educational computer games, and coached kids on how to build a robot for a competition at NASA." Parent
"Mr. Harris is a teacher with a long and varied career and multiple passionate interests practiced to a level of excellence. Musician, philosopher, historian, mathematician, scientist, technologist, lover of English, and humanitarian, he is a very rare type of individual. These exceptional characteristics are a gift to every child he teaches." Parent
"If Mr. Harris were teaching a course on how to dig a hole in the back field, my daughter would take it." Parent