Manitoba Education has discreetly dropped Grade 10 exams from its annual system-wide assessment schedule. The evaluations were originally designed to measure strengths and knowledge gaps up to and including Grade 9 content to inform teacher instruction for the remainder of a cohort’s high school career and provincial planning, policy and resource decisions. They never made […]

Transcona’s school board has decided to stop paying for teachers and other employees to participate in U.S.-based education conferences and training opportunities. The River East Transcona School Division, which operates 42 schools in northeast Winnipeg, is the latest to promote domestic tourism — in the form of student field trips and staff professional development — […]

The University of Manitoba Students’ Union has issued an alert about an “accidental disclosure” of member information to candidates running in an upcoming campus election.  Student names and identification numbers, as well as their school emails and faculties, were mistakenly shared with 30 campus leader hopefuls via email on Feb. 12, per a statement on […]

Canada’s privacy commissioner is investigating a cyberattack involving a popular education technology software vendor used by the majority of Manitoba’s 38 public school boards. PowerSchool recently informed its local clients — many of which pay for its student information system — that an unauthorized third-party had accessed their data over the winter break. Schools across […]

One year after AI-generated nudes of underage students from Winnipeg sparked a Canada-wide conversation about sexual violence in the age of artificial intelligence, the school division at the centre of the scandal has come up with a new protocol. The Louis Riel School Division released guidelines for teachers and other staff members working in classrooms […]

Manitoba Education made sweeping changes to speed up the teacher-certification process by slackening training requirements — even though confidential documents reveal there was reasonable support for moderate tweaks among key stakeholders. There is a stark contrast between a spring blueprint a senior bureaucrat, citing early feedback from employers, union leaders and faculties of education, described […]

A POLICE officer, a First Nations lawyer and a community-health program manager are among a dozen people who’ve been chosen to serve as panellists in disciplinary cases involving teachers under a new Manitoba Education Department professional registry and complaint process. Bobbi Taillefer, the province’s first independent education commissioner, has the discretion to dismiss or investigate […]

The Manitoba government has scrapped plans to create a centralized database for student registration, report cards and other information at a cost in excess of $50 million. The Free Press has learned the initiative is not moving forward — unrelated to a series of recent cybersecurity incidents, although the Opposition Tories argue the shelved proposal, […]

The majority of Manitoba school divisions have been impacted by a data breach involving a popular software program used to track student and employee contact information.  More than 20 superintendents have informed families in recent days that PowerSchool — the owner and operator of their shared student-information system — was hacked in late December.  Customers […]

“While we are dealing with the disruption to international education domestically it may seem counterintuitive to work with our existing and new international partners,” president and chief executive officer Fred Meier wrote in a mass email to employees on Nov. 1. “However, now is perhaps the most important time to foster those relationships and showcase […]

Teachers, students and support staff in the Pembina Trails School Division remain without Wi-Fi more than a week after a cyberattack resulted in a network-wide outage. Among many disruptions in recent days, phone lines temporarily went down, laptops were declared “corrupted” and educators have been asked to put files onto USB sticks in order to […]

Manitoba Education has abandoned plans to create an entirely new online high school to increase access to remote learning and expand e-course offerings coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. The department’s planned takeover of InformNet — a Grade 9-12 remote learning program operated by Winnipeg’s St. James-Assinbioia School Division — appears to be collateral damage […]