CPDAnswers

The post in which CPDCentral welcomes its 700th member and launches a free, CPDRequest service!

CPDCentral membership reached the 700 mark yesterday.  Our 700^th member is Joe Kane (a thoughtful and innovative faculty head from John Ogilvie High School in South Lanarkshire whom I have also had the pleasure to meet). Among many other things, Joe is interested in harnessing the power of a learning round to continue to embed learning through technology in his school.

To celebrate our 700th, we are offering our 1% CPD service, CPDRequest.

The National CPD Team at Education Scotland will arrange CPD for you on any topic, for free, if you can get 1% of the CPDCentral membership to join you in this topic. Here’s how it works:

• you come up with a topic and its likely impact on learning where you are
• 6 other CPDCentral colleagues join you
• we source an interesting practitioner in your topic area
• we arrange an online CPD opportunity for you (usually a CPDMeet)
• the CPD is made available to all CPDCentral members  through our online CPD catalogue

Oh, and for goodness sake, don’t tell a soul. We’ll be snowed under with requests for all this relevant CPD with real impact on learning!

Remember, 7 is the magic number!

CPDRequest is a service for CPDCentral members on Glow.

It’s a fairly simple concept. If  7 (or more) members of CPDCentral request CPD on a specific topic, the CPD Team @educationscotland will find someone to put it on for you (usually by CPDMeet). The service is free to CPDCentral members.

You can find out more on the CPDRequest page on CPDCentral or by following the short link (http://bit.ly/cpdrequest) (needs a Glow username)

If you are creating a CPDShort, the content can be just about anything. Some examples below and we will add some ‘how to’ links to this post as we go along

• video from YouTube, Vimeo, Ted Talks, Education Scotland site. (Hint : copy the embed code and put into an XML web part on the CPDShort page)
• PDF, Word document, Keynote or Powerpoint presentation (Hint: Add the document to the I-share area and link in a Text editor web part)
• resources (like local CPD toolkits) not on Glow or the Web. (Hint: Describe where the resources can be found in a few words in a Text Editor web part)

Many thanks for getting in touch with us about keeping your Glow account going. Here are a few points to note:

• Do not be surprised if you do not hear personally from us for a while. It’s going take us from June to August to process all the requests. That’s why we asked local authorities not  to ‘turn-off’ your Glow accounts in the meantime.
• At some point, your Glow persona will be ‘adopted’ by the CPDStepin community. We will be in touch when that happens with any action you may have to take.
• Join CPDCentral now. Get a photograph of yourself onto your computer and follow this link ; http://bit.ly/cpdhello. If you need help look at this CPDAnswers post http://bit.ly/glowhelp2
• Feel free to explore the services of CPDCentral

You can find out more about the CPD communities on Glow by following these links:

• What is CPDCentral?
• CPDStepin

This post will give more details on how to make full use of the new CPDFind administration system. You can find out more on the National CPD Team blog – CPDFind is changing

A CPD-focussed community which uses some or all of the CPDCentral features to ‘crank up’ the collegiality in the community. If I am a potential member of a CPD community, there are a number of benefits:

• I introduce myself just the once and can then take part in several CPD communities
• I can upload an item and share it across across several appropriate CPD programmes / communities
• it standardises the way I engage with CPD on Glow and removes some of the barriers to collegiality

For CPD community facilitators, there are benefits too:

• it cuts down time on footering with Glow web-parts and lets you concentrate on the CPD
• the I-intend system helps promote real, evidenced impact from your all hard work; “if it’s not happening in the classroom, it’s not happening” – Richard Elmore
• it increases interaction; “lurking is not a collegiate activity” – Con Morris

If you want to register for / learn more about CPDCentral affiliation, you can find out more on (you’ve guessed it!) CPDCentral!

What is CPDCentral?

RSS is a great way to gather up to date  information on one theme  into a single feed.  So, in CPDFind you could use the RSS feed option to keep up to date about  all available CPD on collaborative learning,  or modern languages for example.  You could also find out what CPD is available from a particular provider, or use it to get a feed of all the CPDMeets that are planned or have been recorded.  It’s easy to use, just follow these simple instructions:

1. Go to CPDFind.

2. Enter your search term in the search box.

3. Click on the “latest opportunities for this search”  lnk and then “subscribe to this feed”

You’ll then get a frequently updated feed on that topic to keep you up to date with the latest available CPD.

The CPDNet community is for members of the CPD Network in Scottish Education. It uses Glow as its collegiate toolset. To check you are fully registered:

1. Make sure you have your Glow username and password handy
2. Check to see if your picture appears here.
3. If it does, go straight to the CPDNet home page and start sharing with CPD Network colleagues
4. If your picture doesn’t appear, add it using this handy, online form
5. We keep a special eye out for CPDNet colleagues, but email cpdcentral@educationscotland.gov.uk if you want to be on the safe side
6. Wait! We’ll email you as soon as we can.

Help will follow here shortly when the new look CPDFind goes live (around April 2011)

The CPD Network is a group of colleagues who lead and manage CPD in their local authorities, universities and national organisations. It is supported by members of the National CPD Team, who currently arrange the thrice-yearly meetings and facilitate CPDNet, the community on Glow.

While in its early years the main focus was on supporting the local authorities and the universities, its reach has broadened to include colleagues from EIS, SLS, SQA Academy, HMIE, LTScotland area advisers, representatives of ACTS, GTCS and many more organisations that provide CPD for Scottish educators.

It has its own professional community on Glow; CPDNet. See the ‘Change here for…‘ section of CPDCentral for more details on how to take part.

If you want to find out more about the CPD Network in Scotland, contact Margaret Orr on cpdanswers@ltscotland.org.uk