SWATCA 2025 - South Western Alberta Teachers' Convention: Full Schedule

Welcome to SWATCA 2025 on SCHED!

Here you will find the list of all the great sessions, speaker information, exhibitors and more! Check back here often for information on draws, prize winners, session updates and more!!

IMPORTANT REMINDER:
Please ensure that you are completing session evaluations - this helps our SWATCA planning team immensely in preparing for future events! You can evaluate all sessions in the session itself at the bottom of the SCHED. Thank you!

10:30am MST

Finding Home on The Range: Exploring Alberta’s Wildlife and Conservation Agriculture

Thursday February 20, 2025 10:30am - 11:30am MST

M1040

Join Inside Education for an introduction to agriculture in Alberta's Grasslands region, exploring ecosystem health, impacts on wildlife and agriculture practices addressing climate change. This session covers biodiversity, climate change, and conservation agriculture, aligning with grade 5-6 Earth Systems, grade 6 Living Systems, grade 7 Interactions and Ecosystems, and grade 9 Biological Diversity. In addition, we’ll highlight our full suite of additional support through classroom programming, field trips, youth summits, learning resources and teacher PD. We will showcase 3 interactive low-equipment Monday-morning ready classroom activities, adaptable by grade: -An active reflection game that explores students' connections to agriculture and the food system. -An immersive group game on habitat in the grasslands -A high-energy game show about native grasslands species, innovation in the region, and more!

Speakers

Inside Education

Inside Education is an Alberta-based, environment and natural resource education charitable society. We have been supporting teachers and inspiring students to think critically about natural resource topics since 1985! With our full suite of no-cost teaching resources, youth summits... Read More →

Thursday February 20, 2025 10:30am - 11:30am MST
M1040

Environmental & Outdoor Education (TQS 3), Gr 4-6, Gr 7-9, Gr 10-12

12:00pm MST

Future Stewards: Building Critical Thinkers for a Sustainable World

Thursday February 20, 2025 12:00pm - 1:00pm MST

M1040

Join Inside Education for an engaging and interactive session where we will equip teachers with essential strategies to foster stronger critical thinking skills, informed stewardship, and a deep understanding of natural resource education among their students. We will demonstrate how experiential learning opportunities benefit all learner levels and leave you feeling empowered to teach across a diversity of literacy and numeracy skills. This session focuses on sharing practical, hands-on approaches and activities that Inside Education integrates into each program, empowering students to critically navigate and evaluate diverse perspectives while inspiring ethical decision-making through real-world environmental issues.

Speakers

Inside Education

Thursday February 20, 2025 12:00pm - 1:00pm MST
M1040

Environmental & Outdoor Education (TQS 3), Gr K-3, Gr 4-6, Gr 7-9, Gr 10-12

1:30pm MST

Science on a Budget: Bringing the New K-6 Science Curriculum to Life Indoors and Outdoors!

Thursday February 20, 2025 1:30pm - 2:30pm MST

M1040

Join Inside Education for this dynamic interactive workshop for K-6 teachers where we will delve into the environmental science and natural resource components of the new Alberta Science Curriculum. We will share hands-on tools, tricks, and methods to use inexpensive classroom supplies for engaging educational experiences both inside your classroom and in your outdoor classroom space. Not only will we teach you some Monday-morning activities, we will also showcase our new no-cost outdoor-focused toolkit to help scaffold learning through the new Organizing Ideas. Three lucky teachers will walk away with their very own toolkit! Every teacher will leave feeling inspired and prepared with resources and activities to foster inquiry-based learning, critical thinking, and environmental stewardship skills within their classrooms.

Speakers

Inside Education

Thursday February 20, 2025 1:30pm - 2:30pm MST
M1040

Science (TQS 3), Gr K-3, Gr 4-6

3:00pm MST

How to succeed teaching sky science

Thursday February 20, 2025 3:00pm - 4:00pm MST

M1040

In our time together, Rod will provide examples of teaching methods along with visual resources to make learning sky science both memorable and effective. We will become aquainted with space, its size and scale, its contents and our place in the observable universe. Astronomy fills our every day culture. We actually know more astronomy than we realize and Rod will uncover these amazing cultural touchstones. For example, how the artcic gets its name, what the "dog days of summer" really means, or what does a zoo have in common with the zodiac? We will use visuals, hands on demonstrations as well as a PowerPoint presentation.

Speakers

Rod DeVries

Owner/Operations Manager, Eagle Butte Observatory

I have worked in the FASD field for 15 years and currently work as the FASD Prevention Conversation Facilittor in the SE of Alberta. When not working my day job, I spend as much time as possible in Eagle Butte Observatory hunting down faint and distant deep space objects. As owner/operations... Read More →

Thursday February 20, 2025 3:00pm - 4:00pm MST
M1040

Science (TQS 3), Gr 4-6, Gr 7-9, Gr 10-12

10:30am MST

Evolving Ideas on the Fabric of Space

Friday February 21, 2025 10:30am - 11:30am MST

M1040

This is an informal, round-table like, discussion on the evolution of physics based paradigms. We’ll be watching and discussing a podcast on the fabric of space & reality after a brief into. Things will cover a brief background on the path from Aristotelean logic to Newtonian equations to probabilistic quantum calculi. Then we’ll introduce new perspectives on computation, as described by Stephen Wolfram, and represented by the current AI revolution. We’ll see where it goes from there. This is a discussion not lecture based session.

Speakers

Chris Goble

Westwind

Friday February 21, 2025 10:30am - 11:30am MST
M1040

Science (TQS 3), Gr 10-12

12:00pm MST

AI & Learning Strategies

Friday February 21, 2025 12:00pm - 1:00pm MST

M1040

The usability of AI is growing in leaps and bounds. How can AI be used to assist students learn how to learn? We’ll focus on a couple of the most common ways AI is used in educational circles: 1) as an idea generator and muse; 2) as a writing coach and exemplar generator; 3) as a content synthesizer and question generator; and 4) as a socratic coach and conversationalist. We’ll pay close attention to the idea of epistemological resonance; matching the way people learn to process and code information with the way AI’s generate and present information. While you can fight AI, we’ve found some amazing parallels with respect to it and the way you teach gifted students with overbalanced analytical tendencies. When teaching with AI’s, meta-cognition matters. Discussion is related to high school humanities courses, but it’s general enough to apply to any Div III or Div IV teacher.

Speakers

Chris Goble

Westwind

Friday February 21, 2025 12:00pm - 1:00pm MST
M1040

Educational Research (TQS/LQS 2), Gr 10-12