MPTCA 2025

Discover how coding with Microsoft Makecode Arcade can revolutionize your classroom by bringing abstract concepts to life across various subjects. This workshop will equip educators with the skills to use Makecode Arcade to create interactive and engaging projects that represent key ideas in math, science, social studies, language arts, and more. Through hands-on activities and collaborative learning, participants will learn to design and implement coding projects that enhance student understanding and engagement.

Session Objectives:
1. Educators will learn to use Microsoft Makecode Arcade to create projects that represent concepts in math, science, social studies, and language arts.
2. Educators will develop strategies to make learning more interactive and engaging by incorporating coding activities into their lessons.
3. Educators will gain the ability to design coding projects that encourage students to think critically and solve problems creatively.

Join your fellow educators for a practical session on "Mastering AI Prompts," you will learn the art and science of crafting high-quality prompts to maximize the potential of AI tools in the classroom. By the end of this session, you will have a toolkit of prompt-writing techniques that will empower you to leverage AI for enhanced classroom productivity and enriched learning experiences.

Session Objectives:
1. Crafting Effective Prompts: Learn strategies to formulate prompts that yield accurate, relevant, and useful responses from AI.
2. Time-Saving Techniques: Discover how well-designed prompts can streamline lesson planning, grading, and administrative tasks.
3. Enhancing Learning Experiences: Explore ways to use AI prompts to create engaging, personalized, and high-quality educational content.

Now, even your most reluctant writers will have fun learning the basic skills for writing a story! Using LEGO bricks, figures, plates and special software, students work collaboratively to create visual scenes that they write down, photograph, publish and share with others. Using LEGO takes away any stress associated with staring at a blank page while trying to come up with something. Ready to see students excited by the process of writing and proud of the results they come up with? This is the workshop for you!

Session Objectives:
1. Educators will use LEGO bricks and figures to help students collaboratively create and write stories, reducing the stress of starting from a blank page.
2. Educators will encourage students to use LEGO sets to build visual scenes that inspire imaginative storytelling and creative expression.
3. Educators will implement methods to assess students writing and storytelling skills through their LEGO -based projects, ensuring a fun and engaging evaluation process.

As a teacher, I always wondered what the admin was doing in those offices. Now, after 8 years, I think I'm starting to understand. If you are interested in administration or are in administration and want to hear some random thoughts, I encourage you to come for a visit. I will share my 13 tips for survival and have an open conversation about modern school leadership.

Session Objectives:
1. Leadership Quality Standard
2. Burn Out
3. Humor

Find ways to charge your battery as an educator by incorporating mindfulness and social-emotional learning into the classroom environment! We will explore the proven scientific evidence, anecdotes, and testimonials about how and why bringing mindfulness and SEL into your daily routines/classroom environments is beneficial to you and your student's mental, emotional, and physical health. Simple and easy-to-use tips, techniques, and methods will be explored, and a handout will be provided, where you will then be able to practice them in the session and conveniently incorporate Mindfulness and Social Emotional Learning strategies into your daily life and classroom! We will end the session with a longer, relaxing group mindfulness session/reflection to send you blissfully on your way! All experiences are welcome!

Session Objectives:
1. Improve a sense of overall awareness by reflecting on personal wellness areas
2. Explore SEL and Mindfulness Techniques as they apply to wellness personally, professionally and in the classroom
3. Set goals and practice and integrate SEL/Mindfulness Techniques into daily and classroom routines

Do you struggle engaging your students with the topics of government and economics? Want your students to think critically and build skills? This session will walk you through a variety of different tasks that can be interactive, develop critical thinking skills, work to apply knowledge and interpret a variety of sources. Tasks range from government simulations, YCJA scenarios and trials, cross curricular ELA texts/resources, economic simulations, videos to support learning, propaganda, etc.

Session Objectives:
1. Interactive Activities (Government and YCJA)
2. Cross curricular resources
3. Economic Simulations

Are you struggling to develop your student s academic social studies writing skills? This is the session for you! We will be focusing on paragraph structure building towards essay writing and interpreting sources and developing critical written responses leading to the source analysis. The scope and sequence from grade 7 to high school written tasks will be examined. We will be providing powerpoint lessons, tasks, templates and exemplars for a variety of different grades and abilities.

Session Objectives:
1. Academic social studies paragraph writing
2. Essay Writing
3. Critical written response to sources

Want to bring conflict and military history to life in your classroom? Want your students to connect to different challenges associated with people's experiences with conflict? Want your students to think critically and build skills? We will be looking at a variety of different conflicts connected to the curriculum (EG: War of 1812, Conquest of the Americas, Remembrance Day, etc.) in social studies as well as a variety of different ELA texts that have conflict as a theme (EG: The Sniper, War Poetry, songs connected to war and peace, etc.). Students get to explore and understand situations where individuals are interacting with conflict and war and the consequences individually and for society. There are many connections to be made to other times in world history to allow students to critically think about the movement of peoples. You will walk away with the complete lessons, activities, projects and resources.

Session Objectives:
1. Social studies learning tasks connected to conflict/war
2. Language Arts texts connected to the themes/topics of conflict war
3. Engaging Projects