CPD Team

I was invited along by Richard Benjamin to have a chat with some of his colleagues at Respectme. They are funded by Scottish Goverment Schools Directorate to support ant-bullying in Scottish schools.

Respectme work with carers, parents, young people and educators and have developed a number of resources and CPD materials many of which can be seen on their web site.

Their vision is ambitious.

“… a respecting, just, equal and inclusive Scotland in which all children and young people can live free from bullying and harassment and are encouraged to reach their full potential.”

We had a very good discussion about how this vision could be better realised through online CPD including:

• Support for LTS and Scottish Govt colleagues on national Glow groups
• Development of online CPD resources
• Making sure the wide range of CPD that Respectme provides (not just their excellent training courses) are advertised on their CPDFind area

I look forward to helping them with this journey if I can.

This is a cross post from the team’s CPDAnswers blog as it may be of general interest

CPDFind is a national database of CPD opportunities which has been developed as part of the collaboration between the National CPD Team and LTScotland. The opportunities (not just courses!) come from a wide range of providers including LTScotland teams, HMIE, SQA, private providers and universities. In addition, we are seeing some local authorities (eg Aberdeen City) using CPDFind to advertise their local CPD to a wider audience.

You might be interested in CPDFind for a number of reasons:

• your own professional development (just type a keyword into the CPDFind search box)
• to support your colleagues in their professional development
• to promote CPD that you deliver or enable.

All the providers on the system have gone through a registration process. If you are interested, contact cpdregister@ltscotland.org.uk

There are plans to further develop CPDFind by March 2011, including:

• local versions for both authorities and school establishments
• streamlined entry for CPD providers

CPDFind is part of the CPDScotland project, led by Con Morris, which also includes:

• promoting Glow for CPD purposes
• gathering good CPD practice using the CPD Team blog
• the CPD website
• a PRD toolkit called CPDReflect

I met with CPD colleagues from Orkney Islands Council on Monday to look at ways that CPDFind can be used to promote local CPD. Luckily, I had the excellent work of Andrew Jones and Aberdeen City Council to draw upon. I worked with Carol McManus (CPD manager) and some of her team Alison, Kelly and Rachel, ably assisted by Graham Bevan, a weel-kent figure in both CPD and ICT networks. The end-result was we came up with a plan for a low-cost (ie free!), reasonably efficient advertising and booking system using a combination of CPDFind and Microsoft Outlook. Carol and her team are now in the process of testing it before its possible use for the Orkney Learning Festival in October.

As a result a group of CPD network colleagues are getting together to take this approach further in Aberdeen on the 25th June. If you are interested in the detail of this or joining us, just drop me a line. I’m not that hard to find!

South Ayrshire Council

I spent this morning with colleagues in South Ayrshire including Fiona Taylor (erstwhile member of the CPD Team) and Alastair Smith. Among many highlights were a discussion on how CPDReflect could be used as a way of supporting the PDR process with colleagues across the whole of Children & Families work in the council.

As a first step, and with some support from the CPD Team, they are hoping to build on a mapping from SAC’s own leadership framework and the Standard for Headship.

Alastair and Fiona also demonstrated the considerable progress made in designing professional communities on Glow that align with CfE and outlined the plans to integrate them into CPD. We finished the formal part of the morning with how CPDFind might be the very tool that helps integrate CPD provision right across the authority. After all this hard work, Fiona kindly treated us to lunch!

Journey to Excellence is an excellent, online CPD resource which covers 10 dimensions of excellence with a comprehensive set of video and downloadable think-pieces. Look out for the specialist CPD trails through the materials!

CPDFind links

1. The J2E  provider complete list

2. look also at the associated providers on the CPD Register; HMIE Publications and HMIE Good Practice

The CPD Team and LTScotland have been listening to CPDFind users and we are happy to tell you about some recent changes to the system:

• the search page has been simplified
• the categories have been removed from the search
• you can now refine your search by additional keywords or by delivery mode

Look out for the recent posts elsewhere on the CPD Team blog on how to access free CPD using CPDFind.  

Thank you all for your support for CPDFind and don’t forget if you want a magic button for your CPD site, just point your browser to this page here!

There are lots of different ways to undertake your professional learning and they don’t all have to eat into your valuable CPD funds! Over the next few days on this blog, the National CPD Team will highlight just some of the free CPD available to Scottish education through CPDFind.

Most of the CPD opportunities are available with Internet access and no special passwords. If you see the +Glow logo, then you can access even more through the Glow community. If you are not sure  about your  Glow user account, have a look here.

And if you can’t wait…

Visit CPDFind and enter cost:free in the search box. You’ll get a list of all the free CPD that providers have amassed so far!

If you are an educational leader (aspiring or otherwise) you will be interested in the latest provider to CPDFind.  The National College for School Leadership (NCSL) website has a wealth of online leadership opportunities and has kindly given LTScotland and the CPD Team permission to highlight some of them through a partnership provider on CPDFind.

My own particular favourite, 50 lessons!

All these opportunities are in the public domain already but we will be featuring more soon that are only available through the NCSL Learning Gateway and explaining how Scottish teachers can access them.

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!