Last week I received an incredibly exciting email – I have been accepted into the STEM X Academy for January next year!

This is a week long intensive PD, and for those that know me, I love me some good PD!

Here is a link to the website if you are interested in checking it out.

For those who can’t be bothered exploring the website, here is the description:

The STEM X Academy is a five-day residential teacher professional learning program open to Australian teachers across all sectors and levels of experience. Held in Canberra from 8-13 January 2017, STEM X Academy is run in partnership with the Australian Science Teachers Association (ASTA), Questacon and CSIRO.

It doesn’t matter if you have been in the classroom one year or twenty, if you come from a rural/remote area or an urban area – STEM X does something else no other program does. Rather than providing you with a package of resources to use in the classroom, STEM X helps you to acquire the skills and confidence to design, develop and implement your own STEM-based teaching resources.

The main focus of the program is the development of hands-on, enquiry-based lessons and activities using available materials, and adapting activities using methods to suit your classroom. Science in the 21^st century does not work in isolation and STEM X believes neither should teachers. As scientific inquiry becomes more collaborative, multidisciplinary and engaged with pressing real-world challenges, STEM X helps teachers to connect their classrooms both to this broader framework of research activities and to each other. The outcome is a dynamic network that is sharing ideas, resources, experience, encouragement and engagement with innovative teaching tools that are relevant to the world of science today. 

Teachers walk away with confidence, enthusiasm and ability to create high-quality classroom activities that tap new ideas in STEM, along with membership to an innovation community that can now more properly extend from research laboratories to the science classrooms of primary and secondary schools across Australia. 

I am very excited to participate in this program. I love finding new ways to present content, and I really feel like I will benefit from learning how to create better resources. My lessons traditionally are not very enquiry-based, mostly because I don’t really know how to do it, so I will relish this incredible learning opportunity.

I’m looking forward to exploring laboratories and educational facilities, meeting and networking with new people, and expanding my teaching and learning knowledge.

While I am there, I will aim to write about my experiences to keep you all updated, and share resources I come across/create! It will be a very busy and tiring week, especially as it is the last one of my school holidays, but what better way to get back into the swing of education!