Achievements

Presentations and Workshops

I have always enjoyed sharing, collaborating and interacting with my colleagues in a positive learning environment, so presenting at workshops is a natural combination of my desire to improve my teaching practice, increase my comfort with public speaking and connect with my colleagues.

Below is a list of some of the presentations I have given at workshops and in-service training sessions.

“Study Skills for Home: Linking School with Home”

At the SIS Parent Support Association Morning Coffee Meeting (October 2012)

Click Study Skills for Home to view my presentation.

This was originally a Keynote presentation, but I have changed it to a PDF for PC accessibility.

As a member of the Parent Support Association (PSA) for Shekou International School, I offered to share strategies with the parent community on supporting learning at home.  As a teacher, I often have parents asking me for how they can help their child with homework and learning.  My presentation offered organizational strategies to help with students with planning and time management, as well as, studying to learn strategies for literacy, social studies, math and science.  The feedback from parents was very positive.

“Blogs, Glogs, and Storybird”

At the ACAMIS EAL Conference hosted by SIS (April 2012)

During this workshop, I discussed how these three technology mediums (Storybird, Glogster, and student blogs) could be used to differentiate instruction for EAL students.  I shared examples of student work and teaching strategies.  Teachers had the opportunity to play with these mediums, ask questions, and discuss how they might use these in their own learning contexts.

“Using Student Blogs”

At the Integrating Technology workshop hosted by SIS (December 2011)

This presentation was part of an in-service workshop where teachers had an opportunity to share how they were effectively integrating technology in the classroom.  During this presentation, I shared my experiences using http://www.kidblog.org and WordPress.  I shared examples of my students’ blogs and discussed how I used blogging to differentiate instruction, increase student reflection, and create an collaborative atmosphere in my classroom.

“Supporting your Child’s Reading at Home” at the SIS Parent Curriculum Night (October 2011)

I had the opportunity to co-present with a colleague of mine during the Shekou International School Parent Curriculum Night.  As educators, we both noted parents’ high level of inquiry about supporting their child’s reading at home, so we decided to address this during Curriculum Night.  We shared reading strategies for fiction and non-fiction texts, how to find a ‘just right’ book, and how to engage with children about reading and comprehension.  Parents found the workshop to be very informative and helpful.

“Using Ministry Rubrics for Standardizing Assessment”

At the DMLIS English 10 New Teacher Training Sessions (August 2007 and August 2008)

As the English 10 Department Head at DMLIS, I was responsible to provide teacher training to both the returning teachers and new teachers on the English 10 team.  In British Columbia, teachers use a provincially standardized rubric for assessing student writing.  The first year that I was Dept. Head, there were 15 teachers on the team and the second year, there were 20 teachers, so ensuring that all the teachers were interpreting and applying the provincial writing rubrics to student writing consistently was extremely important.  During these training sessions, we used student writing samples to cross-grade and discuss our grading results.  As part of the training, I needed to ensure that teachers had similar understandings of the rubric.  In order to be competent as the team leader, I went to a Provincial Monitoring Sessions where teachers from all regions of the province came together to cross-grade and discuss the rubric, as it was being applied to student writing.

“Creating a Literature-based EFL Lesson”

At the SMLIS New Teacher In-Service Training Session (November 2006)

I was asked to give a presentation to the EFL teachers at SMLIS  that would share strategies for using literature to integrate English language learning.  During this presentation, I discussed how grammar, oral language skills, reading and writing could be applied to different pieces of literature to provide a multi-dimensional approach to teaching language.