We hope that you all had a wonderful break over the holidays and are ready to make 2017 a fantastic year!

It’s hard to believe we are already at the halfway point of this school year. We have had a busy first half, including a successful round of school visits around Calgary and the surrounding area with Daniel Shoemaker, as well as making progress on new course developments.

This year, we will be finishing off several projects, including our Heavy Machinery – It Always Wins course and two ground disturbance programs (one high school and one elementary school program). We are also building new partnerships with organizations in Alberta and Saskatchewan to build more new courses and expand our program into more schools.

There are a lot of exciting things going on this year at Safety in Schools. We encourage you to keep an eye on this blog for regular updates on the work that we are doing, follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our quarterly newsletter if you haven’t already.

Teacher’s Conventions 2017!

One of the things I am most looking forward to in the coming semester is the opportunity to attend and present at several teacher’s conventions. I always love getting the opportunity to meet some of the teachers I already work with and finally put faces to names, and the chance to meet new teachers who may never have heard of our program before.

Admittedly, I get a little excited when I start to tell a new teacher about our program. This year, I’d like to encourage teachers who are using our program to attend my session at your region’s convention and bring a colleague with you. These sessions are a great opportunity for teachers who haven’t used our program to learn about it, and for you to hear more about all the exciting ways that our program is growing and changing.

We’ll be talking about new courses, in-school initiatives, expanding our reach, and how our success in Alberta is driving the potential for expansion across other provinces.

I’m also going to take the opportunity at the end of each of my sessions to do a bit of a focus group type of discussion about how we can improve our program, both in terms of content and delivery, and to learn from the teachers present who are not currently using the program what they are looking for in a safety training program.

I will be updating my list of teacher’s convention speaking sessions as proposals are accepted. Please check this blog post closer to the date of your convention to see if I will be hosting a session.

Course Development

With our program of new course development (funded through the Alberta Creative Sentencing Program and Alberta Occupational Health and Safety Innovation and Engagement Grants) we aim to provide students with a more meaningful look into the real-life consequences of failing to work safely.

We have developed and discovered a great deal of capabilities that will allow us to continue strengthening the quality of our program and providing a wider selection of courses, videos and other valuable content. The course development that we have completed over the past year and that we continue to make progress on has allowed us to flex our muscles when it comes to graphic design, videography, audio and video production and editing, and content development. This has been a massive learning experience for our team and we are looking forward to many more opportunities to utilize these capabilities.

Over the past year, we have made progress toward the completion of several new online courses:

1. Life Lessons – Learning the Hard Way (Complete)
2. That’s Got to Hurt! Lessons from the Workplace (Complete)
3. Heavy Machinery – It Always Wins (In Progress)
4. Ground Disturbance – Children’s Online Program (In Progress)
5. Ground Disturbance Gone Wrong – Societal Impact (In Progress)

Read more in our 2016 year-end report.