I spent much of Monday working with May Boyd, Margaret Tracy and Jim Reid of the South Lanarkshire advisory service. Together we ‘built’ a Glow group to help foster the professional community of CPD coordinators and QIOs in South Lanarkshire. May came up with the title, ‘CPD SLC’. I like it, it does what it says on the tin!

The CPD SLC group will use a lot of the Glow functionality to

• provide news and key links
• allow dissemination and sharing of resources
• promote discussion
• and it even takes a feed of information from the CPD Team blog and CPDFind!

I wish May and the team well and I am sure we will all benefit from this pioneering work!

The National CPD Conference is taking place in Edinburgh. Here are some of the presentations from day 1.  More details and commentary to follow!

Jim’s talk

http://voicethread.com/share/116220/

Mike’s talk

http://voicethread.com/share/116222/

Graham’s talk

http://voicethread.com/share/116224/

Graham’s handout

http://voicethread.com/share/117357/

Walter’s talk

http://voicethread.com/share/116226/

CPDScotland summary

http://voicethread.com/share/117248/

Glenn’s talk

http://voicethread.com/share/118508/

I had the good fortune to be invited to talk with Parental Involvement coordinators at their national conference in Edinburgh today. The conference was headed up by members of Scottish Government and the LTS Parental Involvement team, Celia Burn and Lorraine Sanda. It was attended by coordinators from all over Scotland and I outlined how some of the tools put in place by the CPD Team and LTScotland will help with the development of their CPD framework. The conference had already identified CPD as being a crucial part of their work.

Thanks to the work of Celia and Lorraine and others, it was great to be able to point to a wide variety of CPD opportunities on CPDFind, including the online opportunities from the Parental Involvement team and Dimension 6 of Journey to Excellence.

An excerpt from the presentation is available here. (I haven’t included the PRD Fortunes game, sorry you had to be there! Suffice to say the Uh-Uh sound was much in evidence!)

Celia (pictured here) is retiring in a short while and I for one will miss her enthusiasm, not just for her own programme, but also for the work of the CPD Team. Good luck, Celia!

I was invited by Bob McGowan (CPD manager of Stirling Council) to work with a group of secondary CPD coordinators on Tuesday. The topic was online CPD.

We concentrated on how CPDFind will help colleagues identify CPD now that there is a link from the Council CPD site (CEBAS) to the national database. It was also good to hear that Stirling have started to pilot Glow at Balfron High School.

I was joined by a colleague from LTS (Linda Christie) who is heading up the ‘Leadership for Learning’ courses that have been running for several years at Stirling Management Centre. Linda is keen that the online tools such as CPDFind, Glow and CPDReflect are part of the debate at these events.

As a result of my visit to Inverness (see blog post innovatively titled A visit to Inverness) we now have some of the HVLC titles described on CPDFind. I am grateful to Highland Council for their support in this (particularly Kevin Logan) and to Anne McGhee for the actual creation of the CPDFind entries. It was heartening to see colleagues from Stirling adding these to their wish-list of CPD opportunities at our workshop recently. It brought home to me the real power of CPDFind to share practice.

You can see the complete list of HVLC opportunities here. Just click on the View Opportunities button at the foot of the page.

The annual CPD conference takes place on 24th and 25th April. It features contributions from HMIE, Glenn Rodger, Walter Humes and Mike McCabe. New to the conference this year are ’spotlight’ slots for members of the CPD network to share practice.

This link (conference-agenda-2008.doc) contains the full agenda.

Delegates are asked to :

1. please bring along 6 copies of your PRD proforma to help the discussion in Glenn’s slot

2. note that David Pike, professional coach from firsteclipse, will be available on day 1 between 1100 and 1900 hours.   Those wishing a coaching session should e-mail Ruth (ruth@cosla.gov.uk) by 21st April.    Slots will be allocated on a first come, first served basis.