PRPS Teachers Showcase Knowledge at Teachers' Convention

Corey Steeves - School Administration Leadership

Corey Steeves, principal at Foremost School, gave a presentation on strategies to elevate and flourish as a school leader. “I’ve been doing some research the last couple of years on strategies as a school leader to support well-being and I’ve always had a passion for speaking.” Steeves put together a presentation based on his research to share strategies with other school leaders. 

“Being school leader is a complex job with lots of moving parts and sometimes they feel like they are on their own. I’m going to talk about the power of social capital, or who is in your support network. Education is a learning ecosystem where you have all these other parties that help each other out, leadership is the same,” stated Steeves.  

He feels fortunate to be part of the School Leader Wellbeing Generative Listening group started last year in partnership with Horizon School Division. Principals and division office staff from PRPS and Horizon meet once a month to discuss school leader wellbeing. “That’s a part of social capital,” explained Steeves, “we leave that meeting feeling as good or better than when we walked in.” He also talked about contextual literacy, which is knowing context and understanding communities.  

Kelli-Ann Nixdorf - Canva in the Classroom

Kelli-Ann Nixdorf was a teacher at Eagle Butte High School before becoming an Instructional Coach and finds the best part of this new role is being in every school across all grade levels within the division. Both presentations by Nixdorf were on Canva, the first on the Education Library and the second on Magic Studio.  

“Canva has a massive library with thousands of templates and resources for K-12, including activities, worksheets, full lesson plans and presentations.” said Nixdorf. Her first presentation's aim was to give participants a clear understanding of how to access and filter the library to access material or information required. 

Last year the Canva education library was limited, but now it is fully loaded explained Nixdorf, although it can be overwhelming if one doesn’t know where to look or if they haven’t used the program before. After a quick demonstration on how to access the education library and how to filter, Nixdorf turned the session over to the audience to make it interactive and help those in attendance find resources on topics they were interested in.  

Nixdorf’s second session on the Canva Magic Studio was content driven. The magic studio contains AI tools that have ChatGPT in the background with Canva-added filters to make the AI more user-friendly. The design feature of the studio can, for example, create a six-slide presentation on the water cycle and will provide five different versions for the user to choose from. Depending on the reliability of the WiFi at MHC, Nixdorf was planning to demonstrate how to use Magic Convert, which will take a presentation and convert it into a digital or printed handout. 

Cammie Kannekens - The AI Frontier in the Classroom

Instructional Coach Cammie Kannekens, who was an English and Social Studies Teacher at Eagle Butte before moving into her current role in 2017, gave two presentations on AI, the first more general knowledge and the second on the generative AI frontier in the classroom.  

Using an alphabet wheel, Kannekens discussed a topic related to AI with the letter the wheel landed on. “It’s a fun one to do with random, internet things people haven’t seen before. This will be the first time I’ve done it with AI because it is fairly new,” said Kannekens about her first session.  

Regarding her second session, Kannekens added, “in the last year, we’ve been able to say this is a great tool for teachers, here’s lots of ways AI can save time and make you more productive and maybe help to have a higher quality output in a shorter period of time, that part is fairly straightforward. Right now, we are on that precipice with some teachers using AI and tools that are more for students, but there is a lot of ethical, moral, safety, and privacy issues once you start looking at using AI with students.” The goal of this presentation was how to teach students about AI, both the benefits and shortcomings, along with giving teachers ideas of on how to shift their teaching so it is more appropriate in an AI world.  

Nichole Neubauer - Agro Food Kits

Nichole Neubauer is Coordinator of the Agricultural Discovery Centre (ADC) at Irvine School. “This year’s Teachers’ Convention will mark the official launch of the EQUS Agro-Food toolkits. These resources were created thanks to a generous donation by EQUS and will be housed at the Irvine School ADC. They are designed to be an outreach tool for teachers who might not be able to get their students to a farm, so instead we’ve found a really fun way to bring the farm to them.” 

Neubauer had a table in Centennial Hall with examples of several toolkits available and during her presentation on Friday afternoon, she will go into detail about one of the kits. They are available to teachers at no charge thanks to the EQUS grant with each one on loan for about one month. All teachers throughout each of the three school divisions in the Medicine Hat area can request a kit, along with those from other communities EQUS serves, which are Claresholm, Onoway and Innisfail. 

Chicken hatching cycle, growing crops, hydroponics and aquaponics (growing plants in a soilless environment), honeybees and vermicomposting are all available. Links are provided so educators can create activities connected to the curriculum using supplies within the toolkits. For example, the vermicomposting kit will have a vermicomposter, worms, activity suggestions for students K-6, microscopes, spray bottles, petri dishes, and suggestions for experiments to make the learning fun and hands-on for each student. 

By Samantha Johnson, Prairie Rose Public Schools Content Writer