BC TEAL 2025 Annual Conference

BC TEAL is proud to present our 2025 Annual Conference: Disruptive Educational Practices: Strategies for Transformation.

Please note that the Friday evening event, the TEAL Charitable Foundation Awards & Fundraiser, requires an additional ticket purchase. Please register here to secure your spot and join us in celebrating the awardees while fundraising for a better cause in TEAL.

Educators shine in times of change to face unexpected challenges. This is when creativity flourishes by combining proven practices with fresh and innovative ideas. These times call for transformation which can be rooted in tradition or experience, or it can arise through unexplored approaches. The synthesis of old and new ideas drives meaningful progress. Join other insightful and creative educators as we flourish within the power of our community.

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10:00am PDT

Maximizing Tutela

Saturday May 3, 2025 10:00am - 10:45am PDT

TBA

In this session, participants will review the following:
1. Best practices for searching on Tutela.
2. Favouriting, Previewing and Downloading resources including H5Ps.
3. Tutela/Avenue Integration
4. Importing H5Ps to Avenue.ca

Speakers

Diane Ramanathan

Community Outreach Coordinator, Tutela.ca

Diane Ramanathan is the community outreach coordinator for Tutela.ca. She is also a LINC Home Study instructor and part of the TESFL team at Algonquin College.

Saturday May 3, 2025 10:00am - 10:45am PDT
TBA

LINC, LINC

11:00am PDT

How New Directions used AI to Transform and Improve Assessments

Saturday May 3, 2025 11:00am - 11:45am PDT

TBA

New Directions and Roshi.ai are the proud recipients of the TEAL Charitable Foundation Settlement Language Resource Award. This workshop intends to tell the story of the transformative initiative that the award enabled us to undertake, and to share the practical knowledge we’ve gained in the process

Since the start of the year, we have set out to reimagine the process of creating CLB-aligned modules for LINC teachers across Canada. Born from the challenges of creating differentiated materials for diverse learner levels, our project harnessed AI to develop materials that include the following:

Real-world documents such as forms, brochures, and invoices
Situational dialogues with high-quality voices
Interactive exercises such as matching exercises and questions
Detailed rubrics for any CLB skill and level
Full assessments comprised of all the above
AI-generated assistance in writing feedback for students
Training resources for the AI tools used

This presentation will walk you through our story—from the initial challenges to the breakthrough moments that redefined our approach. Along the way, live demonstrations will illustrate how we used our AI tools to create interactive real-world tasks, generate assessments, and dynamically adjust lesson material levels.
The workshop is structured as a narrative interwoven with practical demonstrations, culminating in a Q&A session where you can ask about the tools, the challenges we encountered, and how you might apply these techniques to your own practice.
Rough Outline:

Introduction: Who we are and the challenges we faced
Project Vision: Our proposed solution using AI

Speakers

Jonny Kalambay

Founder, Roshi

Jonny is an education technology expert and the creator of Roshi.ai, a tool used by teachers across Canada to create lessons and assessments.

Saturday May 3, 2025 11:00am - 11:45am PDT
TBA

LINC, Assessment/Testing

1:00pm PDT

Orientation to CCLB Literacy Tools, Task Analysis and Resource Alignment

Saturday May 3, 2025 1:00pm - 1:45pm PDT

TBA

This CCLB session will present a quick review of key ideas from CCLB resources such as the CLB: ESL for Adult Literacy Learners (ALL), the CLB document, the ESL for all Support Kit as well as other tools and webinars that guide ESL literacy best practices. The Tutela PBLA Literacy Checklist integrates these ESL literacy key ideas and best practices into a convenient checklist that allows instructors to see whether literacy materials are aligned to these best practices. This session will take a quick walk through the checklist then practice using the checklist with sample literacy materials from the Identifying Learner Literacy Needs and Task Analysis Professional Learning Sessions.

Speakers

Kathy Hughes

Project Manager, Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks

Kathy Hughes is a Project Manager with the Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks and has a strong background in project management for training initiatives.

Larry Iveson

Rana Ashkar

Coordinator and Content Developer, CCLB

Rana Ashkar works with the Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks, she has a Bachelor’s in Education, a Master of Arts in English Literature, is CTESL trained, and has a background in ESL teaching and project management.

Saturday May 3, 2025 1:00pm - 1:45pm PDT
TBA

LINC, LINC

2:00pm PDT

Getting the most from your Avenue Courseware and ePortfolio

Saturday May 3, 2025 2:00pm - 2:45pm PDT

TBA

We want to take teachers on a detailed tour of the new updates to the Avenue course-builder, e-Portfolio and Binder. The new course-builder is there to help the instructors to create their own classroom. During the session we will provide some tips and tricks to customize the Avenue courseware, so it makes the course page more user friendly and fast.

Topics covered include symptoms of a large course, using the Course Builder, creating a Sandbox Course/New Course, moving course content, using the Sharing Cart and Mass Actions Blocks, using Export/Import, using Back-up and Restore, removing topics, removing blocks, and large media files/YouTube streaming.

We have added more activity types that can be auto-collected to the e-Portfolio with tags, and these will empower teachers to create even more PBLA aligned material that can create e-Portfolio artifacts automatically for them.

We will also demonstrate several activity and resource types that teachers can leverage for things like Inventory Sheets, Skill-Using Tasks, and Assessment Tasks. Guiding teachers through the process to set up these materials and demonstrating in real-time the time-saving potential inherent in the Avenue e-Portfolio through the use of sample students and the artifacts created during the session.

Speakers

Paul Carter

Online Resource Developer and Mentor, New Language Solutions

Paul Carter supports teachers across Canada and BC as a LearnIT2teach Mentor, Live Help Assistant, and Avenue/CanAvenue Resource Developer for New Language Solutions.