In case my title didn't give it away, my travels combined with the whirlwind that was the Westcast conference provided very limited time to work on ICT. Now that I've come back and I am a week behind in all my work I must admit that my anxiety levels are becoming more and more difficult to ignore. Time to get one thing off of my To-Do list at least, let's blog about it!
The conference itself was excellent. Though the Wednesday Evening Gala preceding the formal conference left a lot to desire (I mostly sat in the corner with a small Brandon University contingent eavesdropping about how students from other universities had this trip paid for in full), Thursday morning washed away the bad taste in a hurry. I attended this conference with the expectation that the key note speakers would be very sought after and far too expensive for Brandon University so I was very excited to get a taste of high quality. I was not disappointed. The first key note speaker goes by the name of Shelley Moore and is pursuing her P.H.D. in inclusive education. Oh my goodness are her metaphors on point. She really spoke to me when she described education throughout the twentieth century alongside a picture of a automotive factory in Detroit. She explained that the way we used to teach students worked great for assembly line workers, however she showed a second picture from the same angle taken from the last year or two and those workers were all replaced by machines. Her point was that we can now make machines well enough to do mechanical jobs. What we need to train students for now are the things that machines cannot do. She is an excellent human. I will be posting a video of hers onto the G+ community as well.
One of the more impactful takeaways from Westcast (at least from my point of view) wasn't necessarily any of the content but rather my impressions of education in the rest of the country. In this faculty we don't go a week without someone pointing out that Manitoba is one of the weakest provinces in terms of education so we get the feeling that the grass may be greener elsewhere. Similarly to my first year of university in which I attended Minot State University however, I realised that these people were not smarter than us. From what I could gather from a few short presentations and mingling with peers it seems that Brandon University is preparing us at a level that is at least on par with other provinces. Moreover, we have a longer program to receive certification and we spend much more time student teaching. I can confidently say that some of the presentations I've witnessed throughout the past six months in our class are at a generally higher level than some of the presentations that peers from other universities brought to this conference.
Now that I've gotten this brief blog post out of the way I am hoping to have some time to catch up on the other things I missed in ICT. I haven't fooled around with photoshop for a number of years but creating a poster should be a nice refresher. I am pleased to notice as well that tech task #8 involves the use of animoto since Miranda used some of those for our presentation. The easiest way to catch up is to find out that you were ahead before you left, it seems!
Hopefully my next blog post will be on time but if someone sends me two time zones over again my blog will once again have to wait until Tuesday morning.
Nice post, Cam. It sounds like a good time and thanks for the observations and positive thoughts about our program. I would comment about hearing how bad ed is in MB - imho that is total BS - this is all based on 1) standardized national /international tests whose results are often taken out of context or knee jerk reactions are taken. 2) If you do look at these tests, Canada, as a whole does very well - top 5 in many cases i the world. So, if MB - with high child poverty, etc is near the bottom of Canada - well yes we have to do better and there is always room to improve, BUT we are still doing well in comparison to other jurisdictions, including the USA.
ReplyDelete