Welcome to the BC Fast ForWord Consortium site.  We are a community of educators from Coquitlam, Burnaby, Sunshine Coast, New Westminster, West Vancouver, Surrey, Vancouver, North Vancouver and Greater Victoria. As well, we have participants from northern BC, Kelowna/Okanagan and Alberta.

   Our intent is to deepen and share our understanding of the use of Fast ForWord as an intervention to support our students. Feel free to browse the site, add your comments and questions.  

  Nov 5th Window into the Human Brain.doc 

ATTENTION ALL SITES - EARLY MEETUP - Tuesday NOVEMBER 5, 2013 [3:30-6:00)

New Westminster Secondary LIBRARY; 835 Eighth Street New Westminster [map]

Featuring:  Dr. Urs Ribary  (3:30 - 4:30) Window into the Human Brain: How we Perceive and Process the outside World. 

(*Open to anyone!  This is a presentation you won't want to miss)

Dr. Ribary is Professor and BC LEEF Leadership Chair;  Cognitive Neuroscience in Childhood Health and Development; Director, Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Institute, Department Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Department Pediatrics and Psychiatry, University of British Columbia,; Fellow UBC Institute of Mental Health and Investigator Brain Research Centre.  

4:45-6:00 Table discussions on implementation processes (successes, challenges, sharing)

          **Please come with your questions or post them here so we can all think and perhaps bring information to share. 

Thank you to New Westminster District for hosting!  

Please let us know if you are planning to attend.  Or email Janet.Chow@sd41.bc.ca  OR  akarsan@sd40.bc.ca

SEPTEMBER, 2013

Welcome back everyone! Can you believe it's September.  We're so excited to be back and getting into the groove of plans, revisiting goals and moving ahead with more learning.  

Some things to entice you right out of the gate:

• planning a gathering of the Consortium and any interested individuals to a Connections Party [held in New West - date to be confirmed.
• Webinars on Scientific Learning site. Register at http://www.scilearn.com/ 
•  Reading Fluency with Timothy Rasinki (Sept 11; 1pm)  
• Neuroplasticity Revolution with Norman Doidge (Oct 2; 10am)  

MARCH, 2013

Attention Everyone! Our Consortium group is meeting - mark your calendars for Wednesday March 6, 2013 [3:45-5:30] at Schou Education Centre, (4041 Canada Way, Burnaby).   Come prepared to share what you're doing in your district, get ideas from others to add to your toolkit.  Please email (janet.chow@sd41.bc.ca) your attendance or contact your district facilitator. 

December, 2012

Like many of you, it's been a very busy term with changes happening on all fronts.  From all of us to you and your families - best wishes of the season.  We plan to meet up in the new year.  

October, 2012  - Happy Autumn

  We all understand that having current information about a student's learning helps in guiding our practice.  When there are so many things that compete for time in our day, sometimes it's difficult to get to those formative assessments. And it's in these times that I find efficiency and speed is my friend.  That's where the tools from Intervention Central are great.  Consider going to CBM Reading Passages and CBM Maze Passages.  These two generators allow you to create your own One-Minute Fluency (running record) or Maze Comprehension measures [with readability levels].  Take your favourite passages and copy/paste into the boxes and a pdf is generated for you to use.

June, 2012

A group of us met at WhiteSpot to catch up on how things were going, to welcome back old friends (Alysha) who took a bit of leave, to consider future plans.  A great time was had by all and we left with a renewed energy to move forward and to coordinate more events to share our experiences, our interventions and to generally be a connected supportive group.   For now, we'll say... put the headsets away, bring down the posters... 

We wish everyone a well deserved holiday, filled with family and friends, much joy and happiness.  See you all in the Fall. 

May, 2012

 It's hard to figure out just where this year went.  Like many of you, our district has launched into iPads and a frenzy of questions along with learning this new device have added to the excitement. Some of the questions we're asking are: how does this device support students in developing their literacy skills, what apps are more conducive to what purpose, how do we set up schoolwide accounts, how does a device aimed at personal use be repurposed to be shared...  

   On a more basic note, I've been hunting for a speech-to-text software that is better suited to younger students (and Dragon just doesn't do it) and I think I've found it.  

PaperPort Notes for the iPad is a coordinated effort (Nuance and Noterize) to do almost everything. It has an incredibly powerful speech-to-text synthesizer (simple tap and record), drawing, keyboarding.  As if that wasn't enough, it includes the ability to insert images, sticky notes, and web-clippings. Options for saving include Dropbox, Box, GoogleDocs,...  Definitely a handy app to have in the toolkit.  Only problem-needs access to wireless. 

Is your District converting over to the new Platform (MyScilearn) this summer?  

We would love to hear your thoughts on how the process is going. Drop us a line - drop a comment in the box here. 

  Happy New Year!

On  Wed. February 1st, 2012 , a wonderful group of energetic people gathered together at Schou Education Centre, Burnaby (3:45-5:30) to learn from each other and share their ideas.  Click here for notes on our meeting.  If you find more ideas, please email them or add them to the Meetings area.  Thanks for all your contributions in the conversation! We hope to have another one some time in the spring.  

Click here for Archived News...