+Glow and CPD In the National CPD team we like to make the most of everything, so if you’ve attended a face to face CPD opportunity recently with Education Scotland, you’ll be aware that as far as events go, we like to get as much as we can out of them by adding things into Glow. For us, this adds value in many ways. In a basic way, it opens up the event to other educators who couldn’t be there. So we capture videos of speakers and upload these into Glow along with the slides, images or documents they may have used in their talk. So people who weren’t able to be there on the day and sit through the talk or presentation can now view the same talk or presentation at a time and place convenient to them. That’s great, isn’t it? Well, yes, up to a point. The problem with this is that the only added value of Glow here is really availability and convenience. And the experience in either setting, whether live or recorded, is largely a passive one. This is relevant because we hold certain beliefs about CPD in our team – here are a few of them: the best CPD is collaborative CPD builds professional capacity CPD is central to leadership development and above all….. CPD must have impact on learning
And it’s not easy to identify where any of these might have something to do with either scenario described above, or how we would ever know if they did. So we have developed a way of working we call +Glow: adding value to CPD opportunities through Glow, and by adding value, we mean getting more out of the CPD we experience by keeping the above principles on the radar when we plan our work. Sign – up This is the first engagement you usually have in a face to face CPD opportunity. Knowing who appears on the list of participants is usually quite an important part of CPD events. If the opportunity is online, e.g, a Glowmeet/CPDmeet or a CPDShort, then the same holds true. It’s important to know who’s here and see who else is interested in the same sort of CPD as you. Even better if you can share email addresses and get in touch with colleagues you may want to collaborate with, so the sign up form for all our CPD opportunities invites participants to do just that. To make this easier, we invite participants to introduce themselves online on Glow with a photo and a few words about who they are and what they do. This usually happens at face to face events, so why not online? And why not in advance of face to face events as well? By +Glowing the sign up process a lot of time can be saved in trying to find the people that you really do want to talk to!
Discussion CPD opportunities always benefit from discussion. It’s often the best bit about it for many participants. Finding out and sharing what colleagues think, do and want to change is a rich source of collegiate CPD. But because face to face events usually always start with an input and discussion usually follows, it can lose out if timing falters. Unfortunate, when it seems to be what we like most about our CPD! Using customised webparts on Glow, we can encourage discussion and reflective questions on themes relevant to the CPD opportunity, and the real added value here is that the discussions can be active before and long after a CPD opportunity is over, whether face to face or online. In addition a bit of +Glow in your discussions quite often gives people a space to speak when they might not want to in a room full of unfamiliar faces, and it doesn’t have to be only for online CPD, it can easily be built in as a feature of face to face CPD as well. Sharing Sharing reflections, practice, examples is an essential feature of collegiate CPD and it’s a big part of our online CPD work. The benefits of this to face to face events are really quite significant. Using Glow, you can FLIP (see http://bit.ly/ CPDShort11) your CPD opportunity by sharing the presentation, document, etc that is the focus of the event in advance, thus giving over much more time to collegiate discussion. You can share pre-event documents or links to be read and tasks to be completed which will enhance participants’ experience of the event on the day. Items can be easily filtered to be gathered together by theme, and even more value can be added to this if colleagues are invited to comment on other people’s shared items. Again, with +Glow, the sharing can go on long after the event is over. Intentions Sorry if this is stating the obvious, but the most important element of any CPD experience is what impact will it have on the learning of the young people you are responsible for? Sometimes this is hard to work out, especially if you are never asked the question. And sometimes even if you do get asked and give a plausible reply, no-one holds you to account for what you claim might change in terms of young people’s learning. So what we do now instead of evaluating an event or experience is simply ask people to share their intentions which result from their CPD. We do this using Glow, and we ask people to declare their intentions publicly. This is done in a supportive way. You can set your own timescale for achieving your intention, and colleagues can join you in working on it. Follow up emails can be issued as reminders and experiences arising from the intention can also be shared. The added +Glow value of this? Impact on learning can be made visible, and linked to CPD.
So that’s how to +Glow your CPD events. We haven’t even started on different types of CPD; newsletters, face to face events, skills training and more. The possibilities are many. Go on, give it a try – Glow is there anyway. Contact Con Morris or Catriona Oates if you want any help.