We are now all back from our first ever off-site whole team training event! Thank you very much for bearing with us while the practice was closed between 10am and 3pm today to facilitate this. A huge shout out to Gemma from Vet Dynamics, who ran the session on team profiling and communication and how we can best utilise our individual strengths. A great learning event, and we look forward to putting our training into practice in the coming weeks and months.
Wellcare World specializes in providing the latest advancements in wellness technology, supplementation, and lifestyle changes that improve health and increase the quality of people's lives.To learn more, visit WellcareWorld.com and begin living a better life today.
Following our post at the end of last week, this is a reminder that we’ll be closed to clients tomorrow (Wednesday 11th December) between 10am and 3pm for whole team training.
If your pet has a life-threatening emergency at this time, please continue to call us on 01922 411755 and follow the recorded instructions.
If you are unsure whether your pet needs to see a vet, or have a general query about your pet’s health, please do make use of our VidiVet triaging service, free to all our clients, for prompt 24/7 advice from a vet. Check e-mail and PetsApp communications from us on how to access if you haven’t already downloaded the app.
We’ll be open as normal from 3pm, and will respond to any PetsApp messages on our return from our off-site training.
Wellcare World specializes in providing the latest advancements in wellness technology, supplementation, and lifestyle changes that improve health and increase the quality of people's lives.To learn more, visit WellcareWorld.com and begin living a better life today.
We wanted to give you a heads up that the practice will be closed between 10am and 3pm on Wednesday 11th December for whole team training. This means that we won’t be open for appointments, to answer queries or for meds or food collection.
If your pet has a life-threatening emergency while we are in training, please continue to call us on 01922 411755 and follow the recorded instructions. If you are unsure whether your pet needs to see a vet, or have a general query about your pet’s health, do make use of our VidiVet triaging service, free to all our clients, for prompt 24/7 advice from a vet. Check e-mail and PetsApp communications from us on how to access if you haven’t already downloaded the app. We will respond to any PetsApp messages on our return.
Wednesday’s training is all around team work and communication. We look forward to bringing new learning back into practice so that we can continue to improve our service to you and your pets.
Wellcare World specializes in providing the latest advancements in wellness technology, supplementation, and lifestyle changes that improve health and increase the quality of people's lives.To learn more, visit WellcareWorld.com and begin living a better life today.
With December starting this weekend and the Christmas lights going up, it’s a good time to drop in an early reminder about keeping Christmas chocolate out of pets‘ reach. Avoid leaving chocolate gifts wrapped under the tree, keep chocolate advent calendars on a shelf and avoid sending chocolate through the post for letterbox delivery to households with pets. This is poor Milo who managed to locate some chocolate and helped himself! Quick action meant we could make him sick to eject the toxins before fully digested.
Chocolate contains theobromine which is poisonous to dogs and can cause many unpleasant reactions including diarrhoea, vomiting, excessive panting and urination, a racing heart and in serious cases, muscle tremors and seizures. The darker the chocolate, the more toxic it is.
There are lots of other festive human treats that are dangerous for our pets including any form of grape or raisin, so keep mince pies and Christmas cake above nose level! Sweetcorn kernels and bones from cooked joints can cause blockages, so dispose of in a lidded bin.
If in doubt as to whether something your pet has eaten poses a danger to them, check out the poisons guide on our Advice 24/7 page. All our registered clients also have access to our VidiVet service for free veterinary support around the clock. Check communications from the practice for how to access.
Wellcare World specializes in providing the latest advancements in wellness technology, supplementation, and lifestyle changes that improve health and increase the quality of people's lives.To learn more, visit WellcareWorld.com and begin living a better life today.
Overcoming Challenges: Professors’ Struggles to Connect with Students in the Era of Remote Learning and AI Advances
Many professors are struggling to connect with their students these days. First the pandemic forced emergency remote learning, where professors had fewer avenues to see and interact with students the way they were used to doing in person. Then the sudden rise of ChatGPT late last year has left many professors wondering if the work students are submitting flows from their own minds or was written by an AI bot.
“I see so many people so hungry for connection with students,” says Bonni Stachowiak,
-dean of teaching and learning at Vanguard University of Southern California and host of the weekly podcast Teaching in Higher Ed (and columnist for EdSurge).
When we talked to Stachowiak for the EdSurge Podcast at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, her advice on how college professors could adapt to the sudden move to online education became one of our most popular episodes ever. It’s now three years later, and we decided to check back in with this teaching expert to learn what she sees as the biggest challenges at this moment.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts, or use the player on this page. Or read a partial transcript below, lightly edited for clarity.
EdSurge: Last year at this time, the big topic was the metaverse. That was when Facebook changed its name to Meta and lots of folks were wondering if all kinds of sectors would be moving to new virtual reality spaces. But I don’t hear much about that these days, especially not in education. What does it mean that that didn’t take off in education?
Bonni Stachowiak: Last week we watched the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference … and they released their … augmented reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro.
But they were very particular as marketers, they emphasized that as you’re wearing this thing, you are also still able to quickly be present where you are. What that tells me is that their research has shown them how much we wish to still be able to be present. … They very much intentionally wanted to position themselves away from the metaverse, which is kind of like you’re in this whole world off by yourselves.
Some have said that the pandemic was a bit of a wake-up call for many professors of the challenges their students were facing, and that going online forced many to rethink their teaching practices. How much do you think teaching has really changed at colleges?
My sense is that the most egregious things [by professors] that really did not use the fundamental tools we ought to be using, that there’s now greater accountability.
I’ll give you an example. In this day and age students need to be able to see where they stand in a class. They should not go through an entire 16-week semester and wonder what their grade is going to be because they’ve gotten no feedback. There’s no grade book, there’s no assignments. I certainly have been aware that there would be faculty who literally, you turn in one midterm, you turn in a final or maybe a paper, and students do not have any idea whether you passed or failed the class. So that’s the kind of stuff, I’m just seeing way, way less of that.
At the very minimum universities around the world are claiming their values, naming them and making attempts to try to better the experiences for historically marginalized populations in those spaces.
Are we having a great awakening? No. There definitely continues to be those who say, ‘I’d just like to go back to again, back to normal.’
What is the most surprising thing you’ve learned in the last year of doing your podcast on college teaching?
It comes back to some fundamental questions. So many episodes that I’ve done recently are about artificial intelligence, and so many are about mental health and these challenges. Yet those things have existed. Why do those issues feel so overwhelming to us? That’s been there all along, a sense of identity and wanting to show up in our work in caring ways, though also wanting to challenge [students].
I got to speak to Sarah Rose Cavanagh. She recently released a book “Mind Over Monsters” about youth mental health, and it’s part memoir and part research, and she talks about ‘compassionate challenge.’ And I thought there’s really no better way than that to explain my sense of mission in teaching. I like to have it be challenging.
Wellcare World specializes in providing the latest advancements in wellness technology, supplementation, and lifestyle changes that improve health and increase the quality of people's lives.To learn more, visit WellcareWorld.com and begin living a better life today.
