Method
Our Education Model ensures that all students participate and all students learn. Courses are taught around a table in groups of 2 - 10 students. Teachers are participants in classroom discussions, guiding students without always lecturing.
To the right is a picture of one of our largest classrooms. The learning experience is always focused and intimate.
The seminar instructional approach strongly supports problem solving and deeper thinking for students at Cambrian Academy.
~Western Association of Schools and Colleges
Technology
Cambrian Academy's philosophy is to introduce cutting edge technology in a manner that complements our educational goals and objectives. In other words, we don't just throw in technology for technology's sake.
Current uses include: A web based gradebook program with the ability to provide parents with up-to-date information on their student's progress, assignments, calendar items, and email updates. Forums and blogs are used for project collaboration.
We are setting up one room for video conferencing. This will allow absent students to join a class from home or guest lecturers to join our students from anywhere in the world.
These technologies are then combined to do group projects with classes in partner schools around the world, thus making our small school part of a larger global community.
Our photography and journalism classes work on joint publishing projects using CMS systems such as Mambo and Joomla. Not only are they expected to publish, they are expected to review and compare the variety of open source CMS programs currently available. (and perhaps to Beta Test a new one)
 FALL 2009
In 2009, we expanded our use of technology. Using cloud server technology, our students become more closely connected with each other in collaboration and with their teachers in terms of feedback. Everyone will save time as they become proficient with file sharing. Online textbooks will replace many of the heavy textbooks normally carried by Honors and AP Students, and the use of netbooks will be a common sight on campus. We are entering an exciting time.
Of course, students will need to become proficient with a variety of presentation and productivity software packages.
2010
 Anyone who catches even a small glimpse of the implications of this new technology pictured at the right knows that we are in for a mind-boggling revolution in information management. How will students collaborate to obtain, organize, and process the unprecedented amount of information that is at their disposal?
The following 2010 prediction comes from an IBM Global Technical Services white paper published in July 2006, titled, "The toxic terabyte: How data-dumping threatens business efficiency."
It is projected that just four years from now, the world's information base will be doubling in size every 11 hours. So rapid is the growth in the global stock of digital data that the very vocabulary used to indicate quantities has had to expand to keep pace. A decade or two ago, professional computer users and managers worked in kilobytes and megabytes. Now school children have access to laptops with tens of gigabytes of storage, and network managers have to think in terms of the terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) and the petabyte (1,000 terabytes). Beyond those lie the exabyte, zettabyte and yottabyte, each a thousand times bigger than the last.
Even bigger masses of information will result from the efforts
of some nations to digitise whole populations. National health
services are moving to digitise patient records, including
the results of diagnostic procedures such as X-rays and MRI
scans, while the British Government aspires to a national
identity database covering more than 60 million people.
From the schoolgirl with her MP3 player and picture-phone to the
middle manager broadcasting memos by e-mail, from the doctor
calling up comparative images of a tumour to the policeman
checking a licence plate, the citizens of the industrialised societies
are using and creating data at a rate that's growing exponentially.
Knowledge is power - but only if it can be extracted quickly and
efficiently from an ever-growing mass of data. Businesses and other
organisations now see their information stocks snowballing beyond
their ability to manage them and beginning to work against the
health of the enterprise by damaging efficiency and bottom lines.
Our students will master the basic A-G courses required for university admission. They will do well on the AP exams that show their advanced academic ability. However, they will also need to learn how to make sense of the vast amount of data they will be facing on a day-to-day basis.
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