Education

CIMA President arrives for World Conference

Gordon Grant FCMA, CIMA's President arrives in Colombo today. He is due to attend CIMA's first ever world conference as Guest of Honour. The event will be hosted by the CIMA Sri Lanka Division and held at the BMICH.

This year's conference brings together a panel of illuminating champions, speaking on Peace building, Innovation, Global branding and Leadership.

Scotsman, Gordon Grant, CIMA's youngest President for over 50 years, will speak at the conference inauguration on Wednesday 28 evening at BMICH, and is chairing the technical session on Leadership, taking place on 31 May Saturday morning.

He has said of his attendance to the conference, and the popularity of CIMA in Sri Lanka, "The city of Colombo is an ideal setting for this year's CIMA world conference, not only because of the popularity of the events organised by CIMA Sri Lanka but because the country has the second largest CIMA presence in the world after the UK."

"The quality of the speakers at the conference indicates how well respected this event has become. Those attending the conference have a passion for their particular fields of expertise and are often involved in ground-breaking work, so the conferences theme of, 'Igniting passion, blazing trails...' captures the spirit of the conference perfectly."

Gordon is currently the Finance Director of DEM Solutions Ltd, a rapidly growing software company based in Edinburgh, who are the global leaders in discrete element modeling solutions. Prior to this, Gordon was the Principal of NXFD from 2004-2006, which specialised in company growth and relationship management, as well as executive mentoring and exit implementation and planning.

From 1992 to 2004, he worked for Edinburgh Petroleum Services Ltd and was Finance Director for the group as well as serving as a Director in the USA, Mexico and Venezuela. He was also President of its manpower leasing company in Mexico. Before this, he was with Unisys Corporation where he held a variety of financial analysis roles, covering product assurance, engineering development and manufacturing.

He also gained a combination of industrial accounting experience with the printers, Tullis Neill Ltd and auditing experience with Arthur Young McLelland Moore, now part of Ernst & Young.

Gordon has served on many of CIMA's Policy Committees since 1996 and has been a Member of Council for 11 years. His involvement began at Branch level in 1986 as a student and he became President of the Edinburgh and District Branch in 1993.

Teachers back from Vietnam

Ready to broaden their horizons:

The 'Fourth Regional Innovative Teachers Conference' held at the Sheraton Hotel in Hanoi, Vietnam from April 8 to 10 recognized the creative and innovative work of more than 150 teachers and 100 senior Government and education officials, from at least 22 countries around the world.

This time too, three Lankan teachers T. Nimalan, S.D. Tennakoon and Vajirani Samarakoon who won three different categories at the National Competition held in February this year, got the opportunity to attend and share in this experience of a lifetime.

All the teachers in attendance at the conference were winners at their respective national competitions, where selections were based on their work and efforts in the pursuit of raising the bar on education standards through the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

Organised by Microsoft in partnership with UNESCO, this global conference acknowledges the often challenging work conducted by teachers who strive towards taking education to a higher level, via the use of ICT, and to inspire other educators to follow suit. The conference, in keeping with this year's theme, 'ICT for ESD (Education for Sustainable Development): Seeing farther, thinking deeper', created a platform for the advancement of best practices and adoption of innovation.

The 'Innovative Teachers Program' has two primary offerings for educators - the 'Innovative Teachers Forums' and the 'Innovative Teachers Network.'

The Forums are Annual events that recognize and reward innovative teachers who practice the elements of 21st century learning in their classrooms and then incorporate these skills into the student learning environment.

Whereas, the Network is a worldwide network of portals, local in their implementation, but global in their reach and scope that allow educators to share successful methodology and protocols from their own learning and practice.

Each teacher had to prepare a poster presentation showcasing their winning projects and present them to a panel of judges essentially comprising Senior Government Officials from across the globe. Anura Dissanayake, Project Director, Secondary Education Modernisation Project II (SEMP II) of the Ministry of Education in Sri Lanka, was also on the panel of judges.

A country winner too was adjudged through this process and T. Nimalan, from the Nilaveli Maha Vidyalaya, Trincomalee was presented with the Sri Lanka Country Prize for the 'Most Innovative Teacher' at the event.

All the teachers in attendance were also expected to participate in a cross group, multi-country collaboration project, which involved a few specific site visits followed by project work based on this years' assigned theme. Throughout the conference the teachers were exposed to teaching methods and material from other countries and had ample opportunity to interact with their peers.

In addition there was a one day field trip, poster sessions where the teachers shared their innovative teaching practices whilst competing for recognition as the "Innovative Teacher of the Year" award.

Advanced reading skills seminar

NLP together with Asian Center for Lease Education is introducing Advanced Reading Skills by Raymond Fernando who is now domiciled in New Zealand, a product of university of Ceylon, NLP Master Practitioner is coming back to Sri Lanka to share his knowledge and to train professionals in acquiring this new technique he learnt in USA from Learning Strategies Corp.

The course will be held at Taj Samudra for two full weekends from May 31 and will help the selected participants read faster, remember more, recall easily and retain longer.

The course is designed to suit Sri Lankan context for busy executives and decision makers who required to read a lot of reports in a short time will benefit tremendously. More details are at http://www.lakaruna.org/mind_power_appli/index.html