It’s been a little over a year since the Edith Lando Virtual Learning Centre opened its “doors” and our first year has been a big success!
The year started when Edith Lando VLC Director, Jennifer Jenson, in collaboration with other faculty members, developed four highly successful workshop series. Over the last fiscal year, we offered a total of 10 workshops and reached over 1000 educators through this programming. Each of these workshops has been recorded and added to our YouTube page and online resource library. By allowing educators to access this incredibly important information when it’s most convenient for them, we are greatly increasing the number of people who can connect with this work.
This year we also partnered on projects with a number of fantastic organizations that we hope will become lifelong partners for us:
- Coding Pals Foundation
- Science World Professional Development
- Dr. Leyton Schnellert and the BC Rural Education Advisory
- Immigrant Services Society of BC
- BC Association for Advancing Communications
- Burnaby Association for Community Inclusion
- Vancouver Community College
We also awarded five Digital Literacy Lab Grants and can’t wait to see the projects come to fruition. The applications submitted to us this year were greatly varied in nature and bring new and exciting perspectives to the Edith Lando VLC:
- Dr. Janet Jamieson – Improving deaf/hard of hearing accessibility for the Early Childhood Education Program.
- Dr. Eva Oberle – Creation and implementation of a virtual dashboard that tracks child development across the Province.
- Dr. Laurel Forshaw – Her project aims to bring Indigenous culture and history into traditional higher music education as a way of creating space for open dialogue and reconciliation.
- Peyvand Fralick – Virtual book club concentrating on the five communities of focus for the Edith Lando VLC as themes.
- Dr. Kshamta Hunter, Meghan Wise and Peyvand Fralick – A collaborative project focussed on climate anxiety in teens, with the goal of offering a safe space for youth and parents/teachers to discuss their climate fears.
This past year was full of great accomplishments, lessons learned and lots of fun. Feedback from the community has been outstanding, and almost all who have participated in our programming have really enjoyed it. The online format has allowed us to reach a greater audience and we continue to work with educators to offer programming that suits their interests, needs and schedule.
