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

CPDStepin (the national community for supply teachers on Glow) is hosting a major online event for educators in Scotland in the week beginning 13^th June. Each evening at 7pm, we will feature a CPDMeet on the theme of Additional Support for Learning:

• Monday 13th – Suzanne Morris, Understanding and supporting children with Autism Spectrum Disorder 
• Tuesday 14th – Margaret Orr, The relationship between CfE and ASL legislation
• Wednesday 15th – Hilery Williams, Understanding and supporting children with dyslexia
• Thursday 16th – Kate Coutts, Child at the centre or centre of the child?

 All educators with a Glow username and password are very welcome. For more details and sign-up, please see the CPDStepin Summer Summit on Glow

CPDMeets

CPDmeets are lively, quick, convenient and informal CPD opportunities which use Glowmeet to connect educators around a theme of common interest. Coming soon …….
• SQA Academy on Glow (http://bit.ly/cpdf1628) is hosting a series of CPDMeets starting on May 17th at 12 noon. Each CPDMeet in this series will be on a different aspect of e-assessment, and if you are interested in these CPDMeets, please sign up for the first . It is hoped that a wide range of interested parties, including students, will take part in these discussions to help shape the future of e-assessment
• Catriona from the team will also lead CPDMeet 31 on intercultural awareness and MLPS on May 18th at 4pm. Please sign up
• Guitarmeet was so successful we’ve planned a follow-up on Monday May 23rd at 18:30 Sign up here: http://bit.ly/cpdmeet32
• Pam Currie from the Glow team will also be exploring making learning relevant and the cross-curricular potential within the daily online newspaper for students, the Daily What! On Tuesday June 7th at 4pm. SHope you can join us for one or all of these – all the meetings take place in our CPDCentral discussion room. Hope to see you there.

George Smuga, former government adviser and headteacher lead a really successful CPDMeet on Monday 21st March on Building Your Curriculum: moving into the senior phase. Participants tuned in from all over, including Shetland and the Highlands to share insights and issues into how we are approaching curriculum planning for this stage. The discussion was wide-ranging, and time didn’t allow as full an exploration of this issue as we felt we needed, so it might be something to revisit. You can see the recording at http://bit.ly/cpdmeet27 so why not have a look with some colleagues and if you feel you would like to take this issue further, add your thoughts to the discussion in the i-share area.

The conference for the National CPD Network in Scotland will take place in Stirling Management Centre on 9th / 10th March. The theme is “Donaldson and us – to boldly go..,”. The conference will focus on building wisdom around the recommendations of the Teaching Scotland’s Future report and its recommendations.

The first day will provide opportunities for shared discussion and reflection on a range of the recommendations linked in particular to the four big themes of:

• building leadership capacity
• partnership working
• coaching and mentoring
• impact

On day two, Graeme Logan will be attending as a contributor and participant.  The focus on the second day will be to develop and share strategic planning proposals around the themes identified above.  These proposals will  be circulated to the Scottish Government, Teachers’ Division, GTCS and SEQIA.

 A number of colleagues will be offering their insights and current responses to Donaldson in five minute “thought pieces” over the two days.   

 The network meeting gives an exceptional opportunity for educators from all the interested parties to come together for an extended period to reflect on and offer ideas on the way forward, ensuring that our partnership working will be authentic and will have impact on learning.  

 The whole event will be supported by the CPDNet community on Glow, including a sharing tool specially devised to bring out practice, issues, ideas and insights around each of the recommendations. Participants will be using laptops throughout, so keep an eye on the #cpdnet11 if you cannot make the event.

The complete agenda

Day 1

0930 – 1000              Coffee and registration

1000 – 1200              Discussion groups on the big themes

1200 – 1300              Lunch

1300 – 1630              World Café – reflecting on shared perspectives

Day 2

0930 – 1000              Coffee and registration

 1000 – 1130              Graeme Logan – presentation and discussion forum

1130 – 1200              Strategic planning – setting the agenda

1200 – 1300              Lunch

1300 – 1500              Strategic planning – the finished product!

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

We’ve been working hard to bring a new look to the CPDMeet experience for you! Our commitment to offer at least one CPDMeet per week (of term time) is on track and we kick off the 2011 programme on January 12th with CPDMeet18: Louise Jones of Highland Council on their approach to  e-safety, a subject that no educator can afford to ignore. With a few details to finalise for  CPDMeet 19 which will hopefully take place the following week on Tuesday 18th, the next in the series is CPDMeet 20  on Thursday January 27th , and it will be of interest to many educators. Graeme Logan of the Teacher Education in Scotland Review Group  will lead a discussion on the findings of the review, and we are hoping that many of our colleagues in Teacher Education Institutes will be able to join us on Glow  for this one.

The teacher education theme is continued in CPDMeet 21 with Dr Dan Tierney of Strathclyde University talking about the MLPS experience in Scotland – have we got it right, and inviting interested professionals to discuss and offer their own suggestions as to the way forward for primary languages in Scotland. CPDMeet 22 is slightly different as it will consist of a follow-up discussion from CPDMeet 17,  where Ian Stuart inspired a group of CPDMeeters with his discussion on using wikis for collaborative learning. Ian has set up a wiki in the share area for CPDMeet 17 for attendees to experiment with. CPDMeet23 takes on technology; Brian McLaren, formerly of the Consolarium team takes us through games-based learning on February 24th and the last planned one in this series so far takes a look at interdisciplinary learning in secondary, with Mary Smith of Montrose Academy sharing her experience in CPDMeet24.

The programme will continue and further dates will be posted here and on Glow.  You will notice that the sign-up process has been streamlined: the new design offers one space where you can not only sign -up for the CPDMeet, share any relevant ideas, issues,or  interesting practice and meet other interested CPDMeeters beforehand; you can also make your CPD experience matter afterwards by endorsing it through CPDFind, by setting yourself a follow-up intention , by recording the experience in your CPDReflect, or by finding out more about CPDMeets and the topic for discussion. All of this brought to you cost free, straight to your desktop. Happy Christmas from CPDSanta!

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

It is fair to say that the noticeboards at Stirling Management Centre on Thursday 18th and Friday 19th November weren’t displaying their usual lists of meetings. Yes, Scotlands’ Colleges were there,  NAR people were there along with a few more seasoned regulars but one event stood out from the others:  Hoo tae luik guid glaikit. This was a two day creative hothouse to give CPD leaders and managers from local authorities the opportunity to  “makeover” their online communities, with the help of the National CPD team and Glow development officers.

Con Morris orchestrated the session, outlining in his introduction the drivers behind the “Glaikit” concept: not just tightening purse-strings but also the massive potential there is in Glow as learning and sharing platform, and how having it brings a  responsibility to use it for sharing at every level especially nationally.

Anna Rossvoll from Aberdeenshire gave a local authority perspective on Glow communities which then lead into groups establishing their priorities and principles for online communities , before getting down to some practical work, expertly supported by the Glow development officers, Katie Barrowman, Sarah Burton, Alan Hamilton,Charlie Love, and of course each other!

As the day evolved, a really useful “makeover sample book” started filling up with useful short “how – to guides”  on using web parts in Glow. A thought-provoking discussion on levels of participation online – the #Glaikit Lurkers Debate began to  probe our understandings and beliefs on communities, sharing, participation and responsibility( collegiality), and spilled over into Twitter, where some people were following our hashtag with interest and joined the debate.

Progress was shared via the trusted puggy machine at the end of Friday afternoon, and before departure people were invited to share their intentions for their communities in the dedicated glaikit i-share area, which will be revisited.