Professional Development Workshops

As part of the implementation of the E-Portfolio to students in the Accounting and Computer Education department we will be developing professional development workshops. Every week there will be two hours included in the student’s schedule for professional development and every semester will focus on how the students can expand and modify their portfolio as they learn new skills. By establishing regular classroom sessions students will be given direction on the creation and maintenance of their portfolio in both a group setting and individually. The importance of these workshops will be to prepare students for their co-op and industry project work terms and ultimately their job search for full time employment.

In the first semester students will be learning about what a portfolio is, how to create it, what to include in it and how to document their learning. At the beginning of each subsequent semester students will be taught how to reflect on their learning from their previous semester and include examples of the skills that they developed in and out of school. In the second semester the focus will be developing and enhancing their portfolio further and preparing for an industry mock interview.

In addition to the E-Portfolio students will be learning job search skills, cover letter and resume preparation, interview skills as they prepare for co-op. Students will be able to reflect on and get feedback on the co-op process as they apply for jobs and experience industry interviews. During their work term and upon return for their final semester students can use this time to add relevant skill sets to their portfolio and document their learning. In their final semester students will reflect on their overall learning, academically and from industry to modify their portfolio into a document that will impress employers.

As you have seen in previous blogs we are currently training to be able to show learners how to use an E-Portfolio and build it through Mahara. There are 8 staff members from the ACE department that are among those taking an 8 week course in E-Portfolios. We are looking to implement the concept of E-Portfolios to the Business Technology Management students in the second half of this semester. Then we will begin the Professional Development workshops in September for both the current BTM students and the new intake in the fall.

We have just started into another iteration of the Business Information Technology (BIT) industry project course. We hope to continue giving students great learning opportunities building solutions from inception to delivery where all the things that can happen on a project – can and do happen.

I have found that some of the most valuable learning experiences that come out of project are born from, as one instructor described, “chaos in learning.” The unexpected will occur, assumptions that you made about the products you are creating turn out to be wrong, technology doesn’t co-operate, and communicating and dealing with your project team turns out to be harder than you thought. The students have to deal with all of this, and have the added pressure of interacting with and delivering to a real-world client. All of these aspects give the students the learning experiences that we can’t give them in the confines of a usual classroom setting.

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The Solar Panels

Red River College solar panels

Designed and installed by Solar Solutions in 2002, the Red River College Exchange District Campus had a solar energy system installed on the side of the Princess building that was, at the time, the largest of its kind in Canada. These environmentally friendly solar panels were installed to provide the college with energy that could be collected from the sun and used by Red River College students and staff. As time passed, these solar panels were left to do their job and were otherwise forgotten about.

Laptop connected to control panel

This past summer (summer of 2015), a team consisting of Haider Al-Saidi, Miguel Guzman and Sylvia Froese set out to find out more about these solar panels. The team wanted to know how much energy was being produced by the panels at what times, what these panels were powering and how they could use this data for educational purposes throughout the college. Read More →

Student Life App

Team Members: Jie Chen, Fiona Grant, Samara Hoffmann, Skye Valde

Goal: Support students’ decisions when coming to Red River College by presenting pertinent information and leading them through a process of LIFE (Living, I [as in me], Finances, and Employment) self-assessment so they can consider how ready they are for college life.
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Team Members: Aaron Bao, Cole Denslow, Samara Hoffman (shared)

Goal: Allow anyone to easily upload static digital images (either flat, two-dimensional images or fully spherical 360-degree panoramas) and overlay clickable “hotspots” to create interactive augmented reality “panos” that can be published and shared over the Web.
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Food & Farm Discovery Centre

Team Members: Parminder Singh, Skye Valde (shared), Chris Xuan

Goal: Staff of the Farm & Food Discovery Centre (FFDC) will be able to easily create and maintain a wide variety of digital content (text, images, video, interactive augmented reality, virtual reality, simulations) that can be delivered via the Web (to any computer or mobile device) or on-site displays and installations. Read More →

A very successful spring and summer project semester (May through August) just wrapped up with our last two Brazilian students heading back home this week. Now a new group of eight BIT students is getting up to speed in the Massey Building (standing, left to right: Skye Valde, Jie Chen, Samara Hoffman, Cole Denslow, Parminder Singh, Aaron Bao; crouched: Chris Xuan; not in photo: Fiona Grant).

Their assignment: three separate fall projects (PanoPlā, Student LIFE App, Food & Farm Discovery Centre). Read More →

Four TOTT skilled trade examples

Apprenticeship Manitoba (AM), a long-time client of Red River College’s Teaching and Learning Technologies Centre (TLTC), dreamed mid-2014 of a game that could engage middle-school kids and introduce them to the world of the skilled trades. The vision was an immersive 3-D virtual world where custom avatars used all kinds of tools and materials to build cool stuff. But with a small budget and only a few months to deliver, it was a tall order. Read More →

This is Miguel, one of the three nerds working on the ACE Technology Corner Project. My responsibility in this project so far has been to obtain all the information that is being received while the solar cells are in operation.
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End of Sprint # 3 and our Brazilian BIT students continue to impress. BIT Space Development’s overarching goal is the delivery of gamified 360-degree panoramas, but its framework’s success hinges on the open-ended set of integrated games and activities that it will house and launch. To reach the broadest possible audience, that impressive collection of learning components (or activity types) is being called PanoPlā (pronounced pano play) and will deploy over the Web to any browser or mobile device. Read More →