CPD Team

Sometime ago, we came up with the idea of making the key CPDCentral features available to other ‘affiliated’ CPD communities. You can find out more in What is a CPDCentral affiliated community?

Features such as the About Us profile, I-share, I-intend and the CPDMeets programme can be made available to any CPD leader for use in more specialised communities than CPDCentral.

We already have a number of these communities up and running:

• Games-based learning and design (cpdconsolarium)
• Internet Safety and Responsible Use (isru)
• Early Years
• Gaelic (dachaigh)
• CPDLead

There are several more in the pipeline; for example Perth & Kinross, Positive Relationships, and Probationer Supporters, Aberdeenshire, University of Aberdeen, Journey to Excellence.

Over the coming 2 months, Catriona and I will be ‘on the road’ helping colleagues from all over Scotland. We have an understanding with these colleagues that these workshops will be open to others who are keen to build their own communities.

Some of the dates are below:

• Monday 4^th July – Dumfries
• Tuesday 5^th July – Dundee
• Thursday 7^th July – Aberdeen
• Thursday 21^st July – Hamilton
• Monday 1st August – Ayr
• Tuesday 2nd August – Edinburgh

If you want to find out more, look me up on CPDCentral, where you can also find out more on the CPDCentral affiliation area (http://bit.ly/cpdcaffil)

Thanks

Con Morris

This is a call to bloggers to promote their blog on CPDCentral

I watched an interesting thought-piece from Dean Shareski (aka @shareski on Twitter) which got me thinking that ‘keeping our stuff’ to ourselves runs counter to calling ourselves educators (You can see the thought-piece on CPDCentral – CPDShort 8 or on the K-12 online educator site)

Many CPDCentral members have already taken up the challenge of sharing using the I-share area. However, like Dean, many Scottish educators also share on a regular basis using their blogs. Rather than ask these colleagues to share again on I-share, we have developed an area for showcasing these educators in CPDCentral (http://bit.ly/cpdcbloggers). A ‘slideshow’ of the latest posts can also be seen on the main I-share page.

So if your blog is not featured, let’s hear from you and give all CPDCentral members the benefit of your sharing. Here’s how:

• If you’re already a member of the CPDCentral community, click on your picture, edit properties and add your blog name and link in the area provided
• If you’re not a member, see What is CPDCentral? blog post on how to join

PS – if you’re new to the world of educational blogging and want to find out more, try tackling CPDChallenge 9 set by Andrew Brown

CPDLead is a professional community on Glow for all leaders of CPD. It will be particularly useful for establishment CPD Coordinators, QIOs in local authorities and LA and national development officers.

It is a work in progress but it will be all the stronger for your involvement! CPDLead is facilitated by Catriona Oates of the National CPD Team.

To find out more and join CPDLead, see the ‘Change here for…’ panel on the front page of CPDCentral.

It’s back!

The National CPD Team, the Glow Team and  other teams from LTScotland are getting together to help each other improve our online CPD provision on Glow. It will take the format of a ‘Glow makeover’ of CPD communities. See Catriona’s post on what happened at the last one.

Aims

1. To examine how Glow / other online tools can be used for better value CPD
2. To familiarise ourselves with existing CPD provision on Glow

We will be concentrating this time on a few of the national communities on Glow, but if you have a Glow CPD community of your own, we’ll try and squeeze you in! Contact Con for more details

Regular readers of our blog will know about CPDStepin (the community for supply teachers and other colleagues who have difficulty accessing CPD through the ‘usual channels’)

Anne McGhee will be leading an introductory practical session for such colleagues in Broughton High School on 26^th January. This will be the first of, we hope, many practical sessions around Scotland to further encourage use of the Stepin community.

The CPD Team are particularly pleased that the Cabinet Secretary, Mike Russell, has kindly agreed to lead a discussion as part of the session.  The theme for the discussion is “The challenge of keeping your skills up-to-date for CfE when not fully employed”

The discussion will also be webcast as a CPDMeet on CPDCentral, the national CPD Community on Glow. The practical session begins at 4.30pm and the discussion at 5.30pm.

Please help us support this session and CPDStepin:

• Are you on supply or are under-employed, see this CPDAnswers post to find out how to get a Glow username and password and becoming part of the CPDStepin community
• Are you a CPD manager in a local authority? Please alert teachers on your supply list. See also this blog post if you want to book a similar session for your supply colleagues
• We ask all our readers to pass on the word about CPDStepin to colleagues not currently fully employed.

Related links:

1. More information about CPDStepin and how to join
2. How to sign-up for the 26th January practical session and discussion
3. How to sign-up for the 26th January discussion only
4. Anne McGhee’s blog post on Engage for Education
5. Follow CPDStepin on Twitter

This is a guest post from Sally Fulton of HMIE.

HM Inspectorate of Education are looking to further improve the Journey to Excellence website: www.journeytoexcellence.org.uk and we welcome your views to help us with this.  We have a new online questionnaire, which will enable us to find out how the Journey to Excellence website could me more helpful to you.

 The online questionnaire is voluntary, and will take around 5-10 minutes to complete.  It will be open until Friday 14 January 2011.

All responses to the questionnaire will be very much welcomed – we hope you can support us in contributing to shaping further improvements for the Journey to Excellence. 

The questionnaire can be accessed at http://tinyurl.com/extjourneytoexcellence

The National CPD Team is seeking tenders for some associate work on one of its online communities, CPDStepin. The work will be:

• based around the imaginative facilitation and promotion of CPDStepin
• approximately 20 days in duration
• on a call-off basis between start of term and March 2011.

The work will include:

• arranging a series of CPDMeets
• identifying and posting other CPD opportunities
• making links with other CPD communities such as CPDCentral and CPDLead

Tenderers are strongly encouraged to suggest other imaginative ways of building collegiality among this group of colleagues. Please email Ruth ruth@cosla.gov.uk with:

• a brief proposal on how you would promote and facilitate CPDStepin
• a brief outline of your own expertise in this area
• an indication of your daily rate

The deadline for receipt of tenders is 24^th August 2010 at midday.

I-share (or CPDShare) is a way of sharing your CPD practice in the Glow communities that are affiliated to CPDCentral.

There are four Is you can share with colleagues in your CPD community: Issue, Idea, Insight / research and Interesting practice.

To add your own, look for an Add button. 

You can also I-share across more than one CPD community by adding different hashtags. Using the I-share form is pretty straightforward. Watch this tutorial video clip if you need more help. It’s a bit dated but will still give you an idea of why sharing is important and how to use the I-share form

Thanks to everyone who has been spreading the word about CPDStepin, the new GLOW group for supply teachers and unemployed teachers, and a big welcome to those who have already become part of the group. If you’d like to join in, but haven’t yet done so, then find out how here.

I was very pleased to do a Hot Seat for the CPDStepin community earlier this week, and really enjoyed talking to those who logged in. It was a small number, but the quality was immense!

From that conversation, it seems there is a problem for many supply/unemployed teachers in accessing support for their Professional Review and Development.  In an ideal world this should be part of an evolving relationship based on good personal knowledge of the teacher’s qualities, skills and priorities. This of course is very difficult when you are offered a number of short contracts in a wide range of schools.

So, if you are in this situation, what can you do?

• “Own” the problem yourself. It is very unlikely that anyone will knock on your door offering PRD, so you’re going to have to try to find ways to track it down yourself
• Do your best to identify a “host” school – somewhere you will be welcomed by the staff and given permission to join in school activities such as In-Service etc.  Use personal contacts, old college friends, long-lost relatives. If this doesn’t work, then contact your authority CPD manager and ask if they can help. Details of who these managers are can be found on CPDScotland.
• If this strategy works, you may still have a problem finding someone in the school who will give the necessary time commitment to support your professional learning. You might start with the  Probation Manager, or any colleague who you find has coaching experience.
• If none of these strategies work, don’t give up. Get together with a local colleague on CPDStepin, and arrange some peer review.

If you have any other strategies that have worked for you, please share them on CPDStepin!

There is more information on CPD for Supply/Unemployed teachers in the guidance issued by the team last year.

There has been some recent discussion about the usability of Glow. You may have noticed the recent changes in Glow’s interface at national level (see the National Site) or may have been following Andrew Brown’s initiated ‘Glowbetter’ work. While navigation through Glow might be a bit daunting, one of its saving graces for me has always been its ‘hyperlinkability’. It means if you put a resource on Glow, you can copy the shortcut and publish that shortcut anywhere you like, ie add a bit of Glow, or +glow it!

What does this mean? For CPD, +glow usually means ‘now with added collegiality!’. For example, I might recommend a CPD thought-piece (eg Temple Grandin’s TED TV talk – The World needs all kinds of minds). The problem with this approach is it’s an open loop – there is no feedback. I have no idea who follows the link, or what they think about it, or what one thing might they change in their practice as a result of watching and reflecting on the video. But more importantly, numerous colleagues from all over Scotland may be accessing the same video and not realising they have something in common, or know of better examples, or have CPD resources to support teachers of autistic students and so on.

I like the analogy of building escalators not just stairs. By putting that same video onto Glow and asking colleagues to ‘sign up’ you turn a stair into an escalator. Participants get to see the video and also get an instant snapshot of interested colleagues from around Scotland. They can start (or contribute to) a discussion and share practice collegiately.

Try the Temple Grandin +glow version by following the link from CPDFind. Of course, you will need a Glow password for this version.

We have been developing these +glow CPDShort thought-pieces since the turn of the year. A thought-piece doesn’t need to be a video. It could be a discussion paper, an example of student work, a vox pop, results of a survey, etc.

Furthermore, +glow doesn’t just stop at thought-pieces. In future posts I will look at how colleagues +glow lots of different types of CPD; newsletters, face to face events, skills training and more.

Go on, if you are on Glow, start building escalators instead of stairs. You rarely see an escalator marked ‘Out of Order’.  The worst that can happen when you build an escalator is that folk use it as a stair.

So, +glow those thought-pieces and send me a link!

image courtesy of victoriapeckham on Flickr