Yesterday was conference day here at Church Teachers College! Every year my professor Dr. Stevens helps organize a special education conference that takes place on campus. When they started 5 years ago they had 80 participants, this year they had ~600!!!! WOW.
Something I find kind of interesting and again speaks to the culture is that the night before the conference the number of people registered was around 400. So that means 200 people called in the evening/ early morning or just showed up on day of! Don’t get me wrong, we were all excited but wow!
The topic that My partner Lizzy and I presented on was picture communication. Our session was called: Giving Students a Voice: Symbols for Communication. We talked about how teachers might utilize symbols as a means of communication for students who are non-verbal. This would allow them to participate more fully in their education and give them a voice they didn’t have before.
After giving the audience the critical information, we had them create their own set of picture symbols and also explained how to create a visual check list for students.
I would say we had around 100 people at our session (we ran out of that many copies of our materials!) it was great to be able to share this information and many said they were going to try it with their students. It’s a truly amazing feeling to know that by sharing some information and methods you could be giving someone else the tools they need to engage learners that would otherwise not be able to communicate.
So after we were done it was work time for them and we were an hour behind schedule because of the opening ceremony starting late so I told them that when they were done they could leave to lunch! ( I was also excited for lunch!!) What I didn’t realize was that the moderator wanted to collect feedback forms (which I didn’t know people had) and present Lizzy and I with a gift of thanks for presenting. So when she realized what was happening she stepped in and finished off with those two things to a half-empty room (... my bad...). Overall though it was a great day with many amazing presenters and speakers. Not to mention that I LOVE being able to put presenting at an international conference on my resume!!
Out of Many, One Education.
Something I find kind of interesting and again speaks to the culture is that the night before the conference the number of people registered was around 400. So that means 200 people called in the evening/ early morning or just showed up on day of! Don’t get me wrong, we were all excited but wow!
The topic that My partner Lizzy and I presented on was picture communication. Our session was called: Giving Students a Voice: Symbols for Communication. We talked about how teachers might utilize symbols as a means of communication for students who are non-verbal. This would allow them to participate more fully in their education and give them a voice they didn’t have before.
After giving the audience the critical information, we had them create their own set of picture symbols and also explained how to create a visual check list for students.
(People in our session!)
So after we were done it was work time for them and we were an hour behind schedule because of the opening ceremony starting late so I told them that when they were done they could leave to lunch! ( I was also excited for lunch!!) What I didn’t realize was that the moderator wanted to collect feedback forms (which I didn’t know people had) and present Lizzy and I with a gift of thanks for presenting. So when she realized what was happening she stepped in and finished off with those two things to a half-empty room (... my bad...). Overall though it was a great day with many amazing presenters and speakers. Not to mention that I LOVE being able to put presenting at an international conference on my resume!!
Out of Many, One Education.
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