FIREFLY to host two-day Virtual Conference in May
Jesse Bonello - Staff Writer
FIREFLY will be hosting a two-day Virtual Conference in May, providing parents, caregivers, educators, and healthcare workers a chance to learn about a variety of topics.
In a media release on April 21 FIREFLY informed, “On May 7th and 8th, FIREFLY is hosting the First Annual FIREFLY Virtual Conference… The conference will include presentations from Mental Health Counsellors, Speech-Language Pathologists, Occupational Therapists, Physiotherapists, and ABA Therapists. The sessions are designed to provide participants with relevant information, tools, and strategies to bring into their home, school, and community. We will be covering a wide range of topics including:
- Anxiety
- Healthy Technology Use
- Self-Regulation
- Attentive Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
- Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD)
- Autism Spectrum
- Disorder (ASD)
- Early Childhood Development
- Augmentative and Alternative Communication
- Additional Services Offered at FIREFLY.”
“We often don’t get a chance to do this type of thing because we’re so busy working directly with clients but this gave us the opportunity to have some time to reach out to the community, share some knowledge, and talk about the topics we see quite often in our kids at our schools, so we wanted to help build capacity in our community with those type of topics,” said Jocelyn Kennedy, Conference Planning Committee Chair.
“We put out the idea to our team at FIREFLY and everybody was really excited and enthusiastic about participating, so we left it open to our therapists to decide which topics they would like to present about. It ended up being a nice wide range of different topics,” she said.
FIREFLY will be hosting their Virtual Conference via Zoom, which is a platform for video and audio conferencing, collaboration, chat, and webinars. Kennedy said FIREFLY has been providing services to their clients through Zoom during office shutdowns due to COVID-19.
“When the shutdown happened, we got Zoom licences for all our therapists so that we could do tele-therapy with our clients and try to make sure we weren’t leaving our clients on their own. It made sense to use the Zoom platform because we were already using it for our tele-practice,” said Kennedy.
“The way that this conference is going to work is there will be one link that you can click for both days and tune in when you want to. I think the limit for Zoom is around ten-thousand, so there’s quite a lot of space there. We’re not setting any limits on registration at the moment,” she added.
By using the Zoom platform, participants will be able to attend sessions conveniently from home by using a computer, tablet, or smartphone.
“In these uncertain times, we are excited to be able to have the opportunity to connect with our community and share knowledge. We are hopeful that these sessions will help you in supporting children and youth in their social, emotional and physical development. We love our community and families and hope that you will join us for this Virtual Conference,” Kennedy concluded in the release.
A full schedule of the events, along with the registration link, is available on FIREFLY’s website at fireflynw.ca/events.