Standard 7: Educators engage in professional learning.

“Educators engage in professional learning and reflective practice to support their professional growth. Educators recognize and meet their individual professional needs through various learning opportunities. Educators develop and refine personal philosophies of education, teaching and learning that are informed by research, practice and the Professional Standards for BC Educators.”

Standard 5 states that all teachers must continue to learn and grow so they can provide the best education for their students. Teachers must continue to learn and be curious, partly because that’s what keeps us young, but also so we can introduce new ideas into our classrooms.

ARC-BC presentation with Victoria Woelders – Thursday, November 21st

Click here for more information on ARC-BC

ARC-BC is an “online repository of digital textbooks and novels for students with perceptual disabilities” such as learning and physical disabilities and visual impairments. Victoria showed us how they make the digital books by “slicing and dicing” the hard-copy books.

A Perceptual Disability results from “difficulties seeing, holding, or understanding a work in its original format.” Someone with a perceptual disability can benefit from the ARC-BC centre.

I learned that Schools Districts in BC have Accessibility Committees. These committees are strict in their composition. At least half of the members must have a disability and one member must be Indigenous.

It was very helpful to know that, as a teacher, we’ll need to make our communication to parents as accessible as possible since we won’t what barriers a parent may have. When we are writing, there are many ways that we can make our communication more clear:

  • The font style that works best if Calibri, Arial, Verdana, and Tahoma.
  • The font size should be higher than 11
  • Using a colour contrast is very helpful.
  • When using hyperlinks, rename them so they are descriptive
  • For hashtags, use camelCase or PascalCase but NOT Kebab-case or Snake_case

To ensure that we are using accessible communication, turn on your accessibility checker in Word – Review, Check Accessibility.