Students First

Deep Learning Through Music

It’s not every day you meet a music/ math polymath, but some lucky kids at St. Martin de Porres Catholic Elementary School in Kanata get to meet one every school day. Natalie Andrews is a teacher who is as gifted with equations as she is with the oboe. After exploring a couple of earlier career paths, Natalie eventually followed in her family’s footsteps into the joy of the classroom. Mum Diane is a retired supply teacher and sister Norina teaches high school, so it felt like family fate was moving the spirit. “I do believe with my faith that things happen for a reason,” Natalie shares. “I love what I do and that I’m meant to teach. I want my students to know that God does have a plan for all of us.”

Like most musicians, Natalie began her instrumental studies at an early age. After graduating from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Natalie moved back to Ottawa and began teaching privately and free-lancing around the Ottawa area. Natalie applied her devotion and energy to developing a new extracurricular music program at her first permanent teaching position at St. Elizabeth School. Over her 11- year tenure, she directed school choirs, beginner and advanced ukulele and recorder clubs, and a bucket drumming club.

Natalie is in the early stages of developing a music program at St. Martin de Porres, where she is now in her second year. She’s already established a choir “that my principal is very proud and supportive of,” she

beams. The choir performs at Masses, liturgies and a variety of small concerts, including a recent and very exciting first-time appearance on Rogers TV. Her hard work was recognized by the Sharon Hiscott Creative Arts Award in 2017 which is given to an elementary school teacher of the Ottawa Catholic School Board (OCSB) for significant contributions to the creative arts.

s Natalie Andrews (left) and the choir members at St. Martin de Porres Catholic Elementary School in Kanata.

is thrilled by the initiative. “The Board really committed funds to seriously support the arts,” she says. “We’ll have 67 schools involved by the end of this school year!”

Natalie received a $10,000 grant from MusiCounts Band Aid in 2017, a national charity that donates new instruments to school programs across Canada. Her success prompted an invitation, along with 3 other educators, from Kristen Charles, the OCSB’s K-6 Arts Consultant to participate as mentors and facilitators in an inspiring venture in music and education called the Deep Learning Through Music Network. Deep Learning is an educational framework that supports “authentic learning experiences through voice, inclusion and agency for all students,” says the OCSB.

Deep Learning Through Music assembles an OCSB-wide network of junior teachers (grades 4 to 6) who are not primarily music instructors but whose musical knowledge can be supported to help enhance music education. As Kristen Charles explains, “A music facilitator will personalize the learning based on yours and your students needs. As part of this network, your school will be receiving two class sets of instruments in your school colours (bucket drums and ukuleles) as well as a global rhythm kit.” Natalie Musicians hear it all the time, something or other about being good at math. Perhaps it’s because music and math are the only two disciplines that have invented a written language to communicate and formulate abstract concepts. Natalie the musician has now additionally become a Math specialist in the primary/junior division by taking Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association (OECTA) courses over the last few years. “I really do believe that music is a foundation for learning so many things. It teaches perseverance and practice,” says Natalie. “Think about how many brain centres music activates, and how it supports the learning of math and languages.”

Natalie’s goal is to build a slate of music clubs at St. Martin de Porres and get kids in front of audiences. “It’s the performer in me. I’d much rather be in front of a crowd than in one.” The school and the community will be richer for it n

5G Primer Long gone are the bleeps, bloops and wait times of 56K dial-up modems. In the split-of-a-split second 5G world whole vineyards can be monitored in a matter of minutes.

Instead of walking many hectares of rows every week, irrigation, disease, and overall quality of grapes can be monitored with sensors from above in a matter of minutes. M adison Avenue’s knack for hyperbole would have us believe that every new product is revolutionary rather than a mere upgrade. Bells and whistles do not a revolution make, as in; so what if my refrigerator spits out ice? Automobile basics have not really changed since the Model-T, nor has assembly line mass manufacturing. Renewable sources aside, the electrical grid and the dissemination of cheap power has not changed since the lighting of cities at the end of the nineteenth century. Information networks date back to encoded data transmission via telegraph wires and voice over the first Bell lines. 1G (first generation) mobile analog voice networks (and your medieval cell phone) only untethered us, eons before 4G LTE ushered in the mobile Internet and a society addicted to staring at a magic rectangle. If you feel the Internet is already too intimately grafted to your visual cortex, then look out (or at least up). Here comes the 5G revolution. Tech news these days is dominated by 5G, so if you’re flummoxed by what it all means, well, you’re not alone. But while the impending effects of mobile data’s fifth generation remain fuzzy, its business impact is already being felt here at home. Quebec’s Videotron recently signed a 5G deal with Samsung, marking the first time the S. Korean multinational conglomerate is supplying network solutions in Canada. Videotron President and CEO Jean François Pruneau stated, “LTE Advanced and 5G will undoubtedly revolutionize [there’s that word again] the way we interact with our loved ones and the environment around us.” Translation: Our relationships may be further virtualized, and; the Internet will become ubiquitous. The New York Times dubbed the iPhone the holy grail of technology; a consumer network device into which just about any function could be installed. It was the dawn of the 4G mobile Internet. Technology progresses in a chicken-and-egg fashion. Innovations in hardware spawn new user experiences, demanding greater network capacity, speed, etc. Try to tally the flood of new services and products since the advent of smartphones 12 years ago, so many of which may be of dubious value. If you were a fan of HBO’s Silicon Valley, you may recall a term coined by the Satan-worshiping data scientist Gilfoyle: solutionism. Create a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist; hence, household appliances that stealthily monitor your conversations and spit out to-do lists. The impact will be felt across the full spectrum of applications, and companies are preparing for roll out. Huawei has an invitationonly presentation centre in its Markham facility designed to the eyeballs to showcase its 5G vision. Room after room, phones and displays installed like artwork, the polyphonic tide of the company’s futurist dream dazzles the visitor. Picture the bridge of the USS Enterprise with complimentary Nespresso. Leo Seto is Huawei Canada’s senior solutions manager and he loves to talk 5G. “Canada is a bit behind when it comes to 5G deployment,” Leo says. “Bell and Telus went with fibre covering about 80 per cent of urban

So what are the differentiators and advantages of 5G over current 4G networks? Essentially, 5G delivers faster, higher quality mobile broadband services. All network generational like connected refrigerators assume the kitchen to be the centre of the home, and potentially the centre of a domestic digital ecosystem. That inky whiteboard on the fridge door is replaced by a touchscreen connecting car, phone, home security, and virtually everybody and every Internet thing inside and out. company’s Markham office featured a dairy cow munching on the lawn with an unusual device around her neck. Bovine estrus is mission-critical in a herd, but traditional monitoring is insufficient for the farmer to get the timing right. Its occurrence and duration are somewhat random, but farmers need to be notified immediately in order to increase yield. 5G provides a cost-effective solution with wide, reliable network coverage and low battery consumption by the wearable monitors.

Farmers need to be notified immediately (of bovine etrus) in order to increase yield. 5G provides a cost-effective solution with wide, reliable network coverage and low battery consumption by the wearable monitors.

upgrades have, but 5G is going to be a big, big leap because it can expand into new highly demanding, missioncritical service areas that require ultralow latency and a super high degree of speed and reliability.

Latency, that delay between machinetalk “knock-knock” and “who’s there?” must be split-split second tops for applications that will become a part of our daily lives. One day soon, safetyrelated systems in autonomous vehicles will require connectivity to everything in and around them, meaning massive data in sixteen lanes of the 401 crossing the GTA. Industrial/robotic controls, real-time medical applications, and drones operating in controlled airspace are all mission-critical services.

5G is all about the Internet of Things (IoT), that stuff beyond your desktop that makes computing and networks more and more ubiquitous. Products

Entire prototype communities are on the horizon. Google-affiliate Sidewalk Labs is developing a smart neighbourhood on old industrial waterfront in Toronto. The idea is to populate an eco-friendly neighbourhood with robots and sensors that collect a wide range of data about urban life in order to design better and greener communities.

The original proposal of 0.7 sq. km has been scaled down to 4.8 hectares. Privacy activists want to know why a company that already owns over 90 per cent of search has been given such a sweet deal by the city. Advocates believe it prepares Toronto for a new generation of start-ups. For better or worse, only 5G networks can enable this kind of world.

On the better side, Leo Seto has a catalogue of incredible Huawei demonstrations. Brace yourselves: connected cows. A recent event at the Huawei Canada’s Intelligent Winery Event in August 2019 demonstrated the use of aerial drones for monitoring the health of a vineyard. Willow Springs Winery in York Region has signed a 5-year deal with Huawei to research agricultural applications. Instead of walking many hectares of rows every week, irrigation, disease, and overall quality of grapes can be monitored with sensors from above in a matter of minutes. Daily reports can be sent anywhere in the world. Drones can even act as scarecrows. They’re already delivering wine and glassware to wedding guests and other visitors to Willow Springs. And again, only 5G can do this.

We can’t quite grasp what is going on around us, submerged as we are in media and technology. “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future,” once wrote an Elizabethan poetry scholar. It will be a while before we can understand the impact on human intelligence of asking Google to turn off the lights, but we’re seeing clues.

A 17-year old cyber-Bart Simpson recently hacked into a family’s home network in the US and tormented them for hours. 5G is enabling remote surgery. Pop culture is imagining robotic tattoos over distance. Videotron’s 5G promises to enhance “the way we interact with our loved ones and the environment around us.”

Our devices may very well become our loved ones, and more and more our environment will become the Internet of Things.

It’s a clean, reliable and affordable energy source that powers our homes and businesses.