After a great March break holiday in the Yukon, I came back to a busy couple months to finish the school year. I worked with 3 schools (in Langley, Kelowna and Penticton) to better understand and implement the new Applied Skills, Design and Technology curriculum. I collaborated with teachers from grades 3 to 8 on coding, robotics, media arts, and digital citizenship. It’s great to see schools jumping on board and teachers starting to transform their teaching to include newer aspects of technology and digital literacy. I also got to teach several classes so that the teachers could observe and become more comfortable with programming in class. The students were great and produced some amazing work in a short time using Scratch and ScratchJr. Seeing those eyes light up and the excitement as they were creating their cartoons was fantastic. It made me miss being in a classroom!
From the end of March to mid May, I visited 8 schools around the province to give workshops on the new curriculum implementation. Because I have been developing and offering professional development for the past 4 years, the teachers know me well and we have a great relationship. This allows for some honest discussions about frustrations and challenges with regards to the transformation in education. Mostly, our teachers are frustrated that there is a lack of direction with evaluation, that some documents are still in the draft phase, and the lack of translation of some documents and curriculum into French. The quality of the French translation was also a hot topic. The discussions I had with these teachers, as well as those that my colleagues were having in the other schools in our school board, allowed us to rethink our professional development workshops for next year. I’m excited to put it all into place and see how it helps support our teachers!
Also, one of our dear colleagues is taking a sabbatical for the upcoming school year. Unfortunately, she will not be replaced. Next year, I will be responsible for science as well as technology, and we will be dividing the math task between a few of us. Therefore, I co-presented a grades 4 to 7 math workshop and a grades 4 to 5 science workshop to get a feel for the material. It’ll be a busy year, but I am looking forward to new challenges and to integrating math, science and technology into a new workshop for our primary teachers to be given this fall!
I am hoping that, now that I am on summer break, I will be able to keep up with the blogging. I just came back from a fabulous 2 week summer institute that I am excited to blog about. Hope to get it out by the end of the week!
Learn. Reflect. Blog.
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