Community Development Agents (CDAs) are gathering in Quebec City early this month for their annual professional development. LEARN’s Provincial Resource Team (PRT) hosts an annual training event to support CDAs working in schools and centres across the Province. 
 
This year’s training theme was The Amazing Space: Where CLC Magic Happens, held at the Eastern Quebec Learning Centre. CDAs from all over the Province got to visit Quebec High, where students, teachers, and partners showcased CLC Magic in action. See it on the map. Go to site

LEARN’s PRT has invited Frontier College to lead a workshop on Literacy and Poverty. It will help equip CDAs with the tools to communicate effectively with members of their community, regardless of their literacy level. As a complementary approach, many of our CLC schools offer early literacy intervention and lifelong learning opportunities to members of their community. By working in a holistic approach with school and community, CLCs help promote the success in students’ academic achievements through opportunities to enhance the vitality of the English-speaking community, and vice-versa.

Would you like to learn more about some of the Amazing CLC Projects in your community?

Check out the CLC Stories page throughout the school year, where we will be highlighting some of the Amazing CLC Stories from our Network. 

Here is how you can get involved:

TEACH

Teachers, principals and school staff interested in developing school-community partnerships can contact LEARN’s Provincial Resource Team for resources and to connect to organizations that offer services to the English-Speaking community.

LEARN

Parents and community members who would like to learn more about the projects and partnerships available in your community are invited to visit us to locate your nearest CLC. Go to site

HELP

If your organization would like to offer services to the English-Speaking community, create partnerships with schools, or you would like to participate in the next network-wide conference, contact the Provincial Resource Team for more information. 

One of the main goals of LEARN’s Open Creative Space/STEAM initiative is to help educators foster student engagement through active learning with high and low-tech materials. This can include, but is not limited to programming, using microcontrollers, robotics, constructing with cardboard, working with e-textiles and paper circuits, as well as designing and creating simple machines. But more importantly, we put an emphasis on the process of design, creation and collaboration and the maker mindset. It’s not really about the product, but about the learning that is happening throughout the process and the reflection on the learning, for both the teachers and the students.

Our objectives are:
 
•    To make STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) more accessible through learn-by-doing and encouraging collaboration with community in open ended/semi-structured settings
•    To model the Maker Mindset for educators through a variety of professional learning opportunities
•    To build capacity at the school board level to support school-based initiatives
•    To develop partnerships with the educational community and other organizations

During the 2015-2016 school year, our own team began to explore emerging technologies such as microcontrollers and Raspberry Pi’s to see how they might be used in an educational context. We pooled our resources and knowledge and got our feet wet. We learned so much from the experience and wanted to pursue it.
 
Later that year, we thought that it would be important for educators to feel like learners again and join us in our explorations. We started hosting Open Creative Space sessions with educators at our office and it became our living lab. We hosted a session a month, and asked people to simply sign up, show up and get their hands dirty – no lurking allowed. They just kept coming and we knew we were onto something…
 
We also began working with specific schools and school boards on a variety of levels. Many schools were interested in setting up Makerspaces but didn’t necessarily know how to begin. Our team provided support and PD sessions with staff to help them build a vision of their spaces, but with a focus on learning and process, rather than the “stuff”. We also began piloting a series of STEAM challenges in the classroom with teachers and their students. We needed to model the open-ended learning situations for the teachers with their own students, because they needed to see how it plays out in their classrooms.
 
In 2016-2017, we continue to work with many English schools and school boards across the province. Our goal is to build capacity at multiple levels in the system, by working with school board staff, pedagogical consultants, RECIT and ICT consultants, administrators, teachers, community learning centre development agents, librarians, lab technicians, and students alike. We are also looking to expand our community partnerships, because we can’t do it alone. We need to pool our experience to create sustainable spaces for our learners. We see that this kind of approach can provide opportunities for intergenerational exchanges, life-long learning and the sharing of expertise from the local community to enrich the learning experiences of the students and those who support them. Our schools need to be connected to what is going on in the broader context of innovation, what is happening in the ‘real world,’ in order to stay relevant.

For more information visit our OCS site. Go to site

Usito

Les enseignant.es et les élèves de la communauté anglophone du Québec ont maintenant accès à Usito. Entièrement conçu au Québec, à l’Université de Sherbrooke, Usito est le premier dictionnaire disponible en ligne à décrire le français standard en usage au Québec. Usito, c’est 12 dictionnaires en un (orthographe, conjugaison, gentilé, féminisation, etc.). L’accès au dictionnaire est instantané et des liens hypertextes assurent le passage direct d’un mot à l’autre. Bref, c’est un outil d’aide à la rédaction vivant, rapide et simple d’utilisation. Usito est continuellement enrichi par l’actualité et par les besoins exprimés par ses usagers. De plus, Usito offre un service d’accompagnement linguistique en ligne qui répond à vos questions lexicographiques, la plupart du temps dans les 24 h. Pour en savoir davantage, consultez le lien suivant : https://www.usito.com/entreprises

Pour accéder à Usito, vous devez cliquer sur le bouton Usito situé dans votre page personnelle de LEARN accessible par le portail de votre commission scolaire.

As an educator in the anglophone sector, your subscription for CAMPUS and Curio.ca is provided to you by LEARN.

Curio.ca

Curio.ca gives teachers and students streaming access to the best in educational video and audio from CBC and Radio-Canada. You'll find documentaries from television and radio, news reports and more. The content is available in both English and French.
Their collection features thousands of programs and hundreds of teacher resource guides carefully curated to support provincial K-12 curricula and post-secondary courses across the country. Curio.ca gives teachers and students 24/7 access to a wealth of primary-source content in English and French. It’s a great tool to help students develop critical-thinking skills. Every week, they add new content selected for its educational relevance, always commercial-free, including the latest from CBC’s award-winning documentary, news, drama, and children's programming (e.g. Doc Zone, The Nature of Things, The Fifth Estate and The National).

To access Curio.ca, you need to click on the Curio button on your LEARN homepage which is accessible via your school board portal.

CAMPUS ONF/NFB

CAMPUS is a rich and relevant collection of 5,200 documentaries, animated films, interactive productions, and short films in English and French, with more than 1,700 exclusive titles. It is a treasure trove of educational resources that foster deep learning and creativity, sharpen critical thinking, promote digital literacy, and shape global citizenship and a wide selection of study guides, a chaptering tool, and learning bundles with clear connections to today’s major issues. CAMPUS is more than just a media portal. It’s your digital gateway to grasping the world we live in — and a set of educational tools designed to help learners make a difference.
To access CAMPUS, you need to go to https://www.nfb.ca/edu/learn/ and follow instructions.