GREC Teacher Wade Leonard To Receive National Medal

Craig Bakay | Oct 25, 2023

A couple of weeks ago, Granite Ridge Education Centre geography/science teacher Wade Leonard was coming out of the ophthalmologist’s office when he received an email on his cell phone.

“I couldn’t read it so I got my son to read it to me,” he said.

The message? Leonard had just been named a recipient of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s Gilles Gagnier Medal for Innovation in Geographic Education.

“It took me by surprise,” he said. “That’s not something that happens every day — getting a national award.”

Now anyone associated with GREC, along with many members of the Sharbot Lake area community will already be familiar with Leonard’s innovative teaching methods. He’s created one of the few drone mapping programs anywhere, let alone at the high school level and his students’ work is familiar with many lake associations in the area including Malcolm Lake and its milfoil issues. One such student, Ryleigh Rioux, created her own drone mapping company and is currently working in Nunavut.

But now, it seems others outside the area have begun to take notice. Leonard will be honoured with a medal Nov. 17 in Ottawa.

“It’s an immense honour, rewarding,” he said. “Friends, family, colleges have been incredibly supportive.”

It’s a relatively simple concept — use a drone to take footage of an area and map what’s there. The difficulty comes in that drone technology was very much in its infancy when he began and while the cost of equipment and availability of software to make sense of the pictures has come a long way, they’ve literally had to make it up as they went along, and that’s OK with Leonard.

“When we were doing the Malcolm Lake project, we were getting reflected sunlight affecting the shots,” he said. “But then we realized anglers use polarized glasses to combat this and so we added a polarizing filter and that worked.”

Coming up with these kinds of solutions is very much part of Leonard’s game plans, especially making students part of the process.

“We’re trying as much as possible to not predetermine what they’re going to learn,” he said. “It’s very much a collaborative process with the students.

“I try to say ‘I genuinely don’t know the answer to this but we’re going to co-learn together.’

“We’re still working on trial and error techniques.”

Leonard got interested in drones in 2017 when the Leonards had a fish farm near Verona.

“Professor Yuxiang Wang was researching blue-green algae blooms at Queen’s and we decided to do a collaboration,” he said. “Then, H. T. Lui, dean of aeronautics and aerospace at U of T showed up with a drone.

“After 15 minutes, I was hooked.”

He still is. He sees his program as something of an apprenticeship in that it’s important to get the controls of the drones into students’ hands and let them guide the mapping process. He hopes they’ll be mapping a path for future generations with baseline data.

“We’re staring down the barrel of environmental issues and information is power,” he said. “I’d like to see a day when students and teachers can fly their own drones hopefully to protect what’s important to them.

“It gives people the ability to understand a problem by looking at it.”