The Portage la Prairie School Division (PLPSD) welcomed teachers from across the province to Portage this month. They hosted the Build Your Teaching Experience, or BYTE Conference, February 17th at Portage Collegiate Institute.

"It's a rotating conference that moves around the Province," says PLPSD Technology Coordinator Cheryl Robinson. "It was hosted by the Brandon School Division the previous two years and it was our turn to host it this year."

"The focus is really on keeping teachers up do date with professional development. So the conference is teachers teaching teachers, and we have classroom teachers from different divisions around the province," says Robinson. "Our own teachers offered workshops, people from Manitoba Education came out to give workshops, we had a professor -- Rennie Redekopp -- from the University of Manitoba come out and give a workshop too. So there are quite a variety of workshops for teachers, and it's a K-12 conference so there is quite a range of grades and subject matters to cover."

Robinson says teacher's liked the fact that the workshops were run by fellow teachers. "It's not somebody that's never been in a classroom telling teachers what it's like, or what they should be doing. It's their peers, who are sharing what they do in their classroom that works, and there's a lot of hands-on activities in the classroom. So if someone is talking about how they use video in their classroom, the teachers will experience the video software that the instructor has been using and try it out for themselves. I think that is a very important reason for why this conference is so widely accepted."

She adds it was a wonderful opportunity because it can be pretty expensive sending teachers out to conferences. It's hard to find subs for them, and they can only afford to send a few people.

The conference is in Virden at the Fort La Bosse School Division next year.