ATLE Convergence 2024

Come hear from a panel of educational technology experts from around Alberta about the use of AI in schools. With a variety of experiences and systems in place our panelists will share their policy making procedures, considerations, and discuss the ethical dilemmas that come along with the use of AI.

Fear is the mind killer. Trying to teach subjects that cause fear in students is an impossible challenge, but immersive simulations offer an approach that leverages 'respawn and retry' gaming culture to put a pin in that fear balloon and get students into the zone of proximal development. Instead of scared and unengaged, tackling subjects like cybersecurity or quantum technologies, that many find overwhelming, through immersive simulation brings iteration and fear free experimentation into the equation in an emotionally empowering manner.

Explore Black Gold School Division's journey in SDWAN as an alternative to supernet bandwidth increases. What is it? What advantages does it provide? What are some of the challenges? Does it work?

Many of us have been in technology in Education for many many years. Some of us are just getting started. No matter how long you’ve been doing this, the pace of change is not slowing down. What are we doing to keep ourselves and our IT teams ready for the challenges ahead? How are we keeping them upbeat and encouraged while the number of things vying for our time explode?

Are you struggling to keep talent? Do you understand what truly motivates and engages your team members? Are you new to a leadership position and would love a simple and fun tool to quickly help you improve engagement and retention?

Taking learnings from the Centre for Talent Retention, this session will provide an overview of a hands-on tool that captures the variables impacting why people join, engage, and stay within organizations. Starting with a card game, the presenter will walk attendees through three simple steps to move managers away from the ineffective, "How's it going?", to increased engagement and productivity.

Exceptional leaders understand their people, know their individual motivators, and are able to focus on “hot buttons” to improve morale, attitude and results. This session will provide actionable steps to retaining a happy and productive team.

This will be an interactive, hands-on session where you will have an opportunity to play with some of the amazing robotics/coding resources available to use with students. The workshop facilitators will share what they have done/are doing in their divisions/schools with STEAM and show you some FREE and paid resources that will amp up your Computer Science program(s).

For part two our panel will dive specifically into AI policy sharing. Participants will be encouraged to ask questions of the experts.

The "End of Year" Process can honestly be considered to start as early as December in many cases. Planning for, and managing, the transition of student information from one year to the next is a months long process that touches on multiple disciplines. This session will explore this process through several different lenses, all tracking the decisions and processes which successfully move a student's record through the end of year process.

2020 changed how education was delivered to students across the province. The fall of 2020 saw districts creating programs to address students learning from home. I was one of the teachers in my district that built this airplane while flying it. Four years later, this program has only grown in our little corner of the province. Remote Learning has evolved and taken hold in Alternative Education and it is not just for pandemics and homeschooling. We now have students and families who seek out Alternative Education programs because it works for them but also allows students who are in rural areas to access courses they might not be able to due to a variety of reasons. But how do you engage students from all around to not just learn the content, but also engage with teachers and other students to form community in a virtual world? How do we navigate the world of synchronous vs asynchronous learning? How do we address attendance issues? And what about credits for high school? Can students really learn if they are online? Answers to ALL of these questions and more will be addressed in this session! I will show some tools that I use in my virtual space to help engage. I will address the expectations and communication with parents and students that help with course completions. Also the scheduling that is needed to meet the needs of a synchronous online program. We need to revolutionize remote learning to provide students with creative and innovative education opportunities.