Just catching my breath after going straight from Kirkwall to Lerwick last weekend. It was good to be part of another great CPD event. My thanks to all the participants who took part and they can get a set of notes in my previous festivals post. The scenery, as always, was spectacular and the weather included, gales, hail, rain, sunshine and snow (as you’ll see from the photo show below!)

It was great to get time with Sarah Henry (the new CPD manager for Shetland Islands Council). She did a great job of the two-day event and she will be a great addition to the CPD Network.

I have just finished a couple of workshops at Orkney Islands Council’s Integrated Children’s Service Learning Festival. A bit of a mouthful but well worth the visit. Marilyn Richards oversaw an impressive range of both local and imported CPD talent and, as is always the case, the hospitality was tremendous! It was a coincidence that Marilyn won the ‘CPD Puggy’ prize in my workshop, honest!

 It was also great to welcome a new member to the CPD Network, Carol McManus (pictured above), who has taken on the CPD management remit in Orkney. What was less than great was the flight to Lerwick in the height of the storm! I have included a wee slide-show below of the highlights.

I am in Stockholm with Simon Macaulay of the EIS and Tom Hamilton of GTCS. We are taking part in a seminar with Lärarförbundet, the largest educational trade union in Sweden. If you are visiting the blog from Sweden, do please leave us a comment! Tack så mycket!

These are Simon’s slides…

I am having a whale of a time doing the rounds at CPD Festivals, Scottish Learning Festival seminar, Orkney Integrated Children’s Services Festival and Shetland Islands In-Service event. Here are the links I promised all the participants.

Influences

Collegiality and impact - Richard Elmore’s work is highlighted here

Types of CPD - See a previous blog post on this topic

To find out more about the 4-stage model of CPD, read Margaret Alcorn’s paper on Teachers for Excellence 

Seen it, done it and bought the virtual T-Shirt

For general CPD information - try CPDScotland

For specific CPD opportunities, try CPDFind

To find out more about Glow, visit www.glowscotland.org.uk

To get regular CPD updates subscribe to the CPD team email bulletin

John Johnston and his CPD Collective can be seen on OpenSource CPD

Read and comment on Don’s Ledingham’s Learning Log

Even though we never got to see Andrew Brown on Glowmeet, please drop him a comment on his blog

Find out more about CPDReflect here   

If you have a Glow password

• why not join the CPDCentral professional community?
• Or try CPDReflect for yourself. You’ll be one of the first, so please feel to drop me a comment above

Finally here’s the t-shirt I promised all who attended!

Jim Keegans and I had the good fortune to be invited by the GTCS for a conversation with a group of visitors from Victoria State Parliament in Australia. The session was short but we discussed a number of topics including accreditation of CPD providers, verification of CPD plans and records, Glow, online CPD, and flexible routes. The conversation focussed loosely around the work of the CPD team (summarised above). I promised a copy of some of the slides and a collection of links and here they are!

CPDFind, CPDReflect summary, CPDScotland, CPDConfer home page, Information on Glow

The National site on Glow now has a central, professional community for CPD, called (what else CPDCentral?), where you can get CPD news, see feeds from CPDFind, share resources and discuss various CPD issues. When I say ‘you can’, it’s in a very embryonic state at the moment, but we are getting there!

To access the site you need a Glow account, I’m afraid. If you have one, click here and you will be prompted on how to join the community.

If you don’t have a Glow account yet, find out where your local authority is in its engagement with Glow. There may well be a user ID and password waiting for you!

We are still hopeful of arranging Glow guest access for members of the CPD network, so if you are interested, keep checking this blog.

I am very grateful to Andrew Brown (of the Glow team) who was great in helping me design the structure and get it going.

Let’s get it populated, as they say in the web world!

I spent today with Aidan Melling of NCSL  (the National College for School Leadership) at their very impressive Nottingham centre. The reason for getting together was sharing where we are with online CPD.

NCSL has an impressive online CPD pedigree going back to the Talking Heads online community. Their website (www.ncsl.org.uk) gets 100,000 plus visitors per month and hosts a variety of CPD and leadership resources, tools and programmes. Much of it is on public view but some of it is only available if you are subscribed to one of their own programmes.

Available to all (follow the links and see if you are as impressed as I am!)

Information on their blended programmes for:

• Mid-level leaders, aspiring, new and experienced headteachers and school business managers
• An impressive research publications area featuring works by a wide variety of experts (some of them weel-kent in Scotland like Alma Harris!)
• Stand-alone sets of resources on subjects like succession planning, leadership where Every Child Matters, on safer recruitment and a smashing e-learning facilitation toolkit (this one is particularly timely for all of us planning professional communities on Glow!)

Other resources made available through NCSL Learning Gateway to registered users are equally interesting, including:

• a 360 degree diagnostic tool which guides participants to tailor NCSL programmes appropriately
• a Virtual School where you get to make leadership decisions (or not!) and see their effects
• Talk2Learn (a Talking Heads type forum but no longer restricted to just head teachers)
• a Leadership Library with a wide range of resources from Harvard Business School and Ashridge Virtual Learning resource centre

As with the visit to the Highland Council, I intend to make sure at least some of these resources are captured on CPDFind.

In return, I shared with Aidan our work in Scotland on CPDScotland,  CPDFind,  CPDReflect and Glow.

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!