Greetings, Shiga.
This is in regard to the Shiga ALT Skill Development Conference (previously known as Mid-Year Seminar) for the 2011-2012 year. The official notifications of the confrence have not been sent out to your schools yet, but should be in the next few days. However, I wanted to post some information to give you an idea of the schedule planned for this year. As many of you are aware, there has been a third day (held in October) added to the previous two for this year's conference. The dates of these conference are as follows:
October 27th (Thurs), 2011 -- 9am - 4:30pm
November 24th (Thurs) & 25th (Fri), 2011 -- 9am - 4:30pm
The November dates will be organized and run in the same manner as the previous Mid Year Seminars, held in the Piazza Omi Bulding. For the additional day, however, the event will be held in the Collabo Shiga Building. A map of how to get to these locations will be provided with your official notices to your schools. However, if you do not recieve this, please let me know as soon as possible.
Although the plans for the additional day are still being finalized, the general idea for this day is that we will have a few presentations in the morning and the afternoon will be more along the lines of the previous "Block Meetings" that were held by James and Brian last year in order to discuss issues and share ideas that ALTs might have had. Given the feedback of last year, these meetings were largely successful and we are hoping to continue and improve upon the success of those meetings this year. With that being said, we will most likely be sending out a survey or outline for you to fill out about possible discussion topics and ideas in order to keep the discussions as streamlined and relevant to you as possible. In the meantime, I urge you to please check here on ShigaJET's "MYS" section in the forums (MYS is a better acronym, honestly) and please post any topics that you may want to discuss. In addition, I ask any of the selected presenters for the November dates to please take a minute to post some ideas for topics you may (or may not!) want to present. Our goal in this is to make this meeting benifitial to you as ALTs and hopefully gives you something to walk away with and use postively and effectively within your classroom and work enviornments. We cannot make this relevant to you, however, without your feedback. So please take a few minutes to write a few things on the forums about ideas you may have. Also, I know that some people do not have access to ShigaJET.org at school. In that case, please email me at KenchoPA@gmail.com with ideas you have if you wish to share.
Hopefully, this additional day will provide all of us with an opportunity to be able to discuss and share creative and effective ways to help improve ourselves as ALTs. I hope that it will also serve as a springboard to help aid the presentations in November to give a clearer idea of our collective "needs" as ALTs.
We will be sending additional information in the coming days to your schools. But, if you have any questions or concerns about any of these days or it's contents, please let me know.
Thank You,
Dominick Sileo
Shiga Prefectural Advisor
School Education Division
Do you have the list of people who will be presenting at this?
There won’t be any ALTs presenting during the Oct date, but we will probably ask a few ALTs to moderate some of the groups. We will send out notifications about that in the next few days. As for the Nov dates notifications have already been sent out to the presenters schools!
Cool beans, thanks.
Nevermind- just got the fax with a map.