‘When the winds of change come, some build walls, others build windmills” - Ancient Chinese proverb.

Today I had the privilege of attending the ‘Building Windmills: Ayr’ event taking place in the new building of Kyle Academy in South Ayrshire. There, I joined with all the Head Teachers of South Ayrshire for day one of a two day CPD event looking at what they collectively can do in this time of great change. (If you want to see what was tweeted about it, follow the hashtag #bwayr)

I was lucky enough to be presenting this morning – you can find my slides embedded here:

This isn’t the first Building Windmills event I’ve attended. I was fortunate to be in attendance in Feburary of this year when Con Morris brought his astonishing idea to life in Stirling for all the CPD Coordinators for the 32 local authorities, and indeed, fortunate enough to be speaking then too. (If you’ve got a Glow account, why not check out the Glow group for the first Building Windmills event?)

My thanks to Fiona Taylor and Alastair Smith for inviting me to speak to their Head Teachers in the Local Authority. I know time is precious, so I really appreciate the attention they gave me for my session, and for the amount of time they as the senior managers in schools are devoting to this activity. They meet 5 times per year, but this two day event was an addition.

What did I make of day 1?

The day started with a thought piece from John McCarney of RM. I’ve never actually hear John speak before, so it was good to hear the thoughts of the man behind education at RM speak on a subject close to his heart. Of the thinkers John chose to illustrate, I was reminded once more of the work of Prof. Wim Veen on what he chooses to call ‘Homo Zappiens‘, and how radically different the information rich, connected world is of our young people today compared with that in which I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s. Times really are a changing.

I followed John, covering what I like to call the three ‘elephants in the room’ – the things we know we need to talk about, but don’t feel comfortable doing. The three things I think leaders need to address in their establishment to make more effective use of technology are 1. access to technology, 2. teacher competence, and 3. collaboration. This promoted a lively debate about what kit schools are allowed to purchase, and how much time we devote to CPD.

After I had spoken, we had lunch, closely followed by Ollie Bray covering a whole host of new technologies that he feels Head Teachers need to know about. I could listen to Ollie for hours on this subject, as he has so much to share and puts things in such simple terms that people can easily identify with and understand. He covered a great variety of tools including Google Alerts, Google Reader, Delicious and Twitter amongst others, each with a grounded story of why they have made a difference to his competence and ability as an educator. The furious scribbling I could see from the participants proved to me that he had given a great many ideas for them to follow up.

After Ollie, Mr. CPD himself Con Morris took to the floor. He led the group in a specially prepared version of the Random Activity Generator to help us all think creatively. The topics ranged from ‘professional competences as product packaging’ to ’support for NQTs as a weather forcast’. Initally, this activity was met with what would be fair to say were looks of shock (you want ‘me’ to do ‘what’?), but very soon, folks seemed to get into the swing of it.

That ended our day. Unfortunately, I’m not going to be there for day two, so I hope they get the chance to build on what was covered today. Tomorrow, there’s another thought piece from Ollie, and then a look around the great use of Glow around the country from my colleague Katie Barrowman, and then a further task session led by Con.

What did I make of the event?

I always seem to be impressed by what I hear South Ayrshire do at the moment. It’s no surprise to me that they have the vision to try out this event in their own locale, and I hope that other Local Authorities follow suit. Any local authority that has the conviction to spend such an amount of Head Teacher time on a development challenge is going to reap what it sows. If we want to see change in our education system, then it needs to be led by example. The discussions I was involved in today, lead me to believe that South Ayrshire are facing this challenge head on.

The south-western coast of Scotland is notorious for it’s windy conditions. I don’t expect the educators of South Ayrshire to be building walls to deal with this in the future.

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Today I’m taking part in a CPD Challenge session in Optima for around 30 colleagues from Learning and Teaching Scotland.

The format of the day will see people selecting from 10 challenges to develop their presentation and networking skills.

You can find out more by viewing the prezi Con has set up for the day.

If you’re not actually here, why not consider taking part in the development opportunity anyway? If you have access to Glow, there is a Glow group created especially for this event.

UPDATE: I’ve added a couple of links for those starting out on finding creative commons images – creative commons, flickr, and Cooliris, a great tool to help people navigate through search results. Also, well worth a look for sound advice about presentations, have a look at Presentation Zen.

Any other suggestions that people should look at?

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Today I took part in a CPDCentral/CPDReflect workshop with CPD coordinators from some of the local authorities around Glasgow. This was the fourth of a series of workshops abley led by Con Morris of the National CPD Team.

So what was I doing there you might ask?

In order to answer that, I’ll need to tell you a bit more about CPD Central and the newly developed tool CPD Reflect.

CPD Central is a National Group inside Glow for anyone that is interested in CPD. It’s an area to share and make connections across local authorities. I had the pleasure of doing a demonstration of Glow and an introduction to this online community for those present at the session. What interests me most about this community however is not merely that it exists, but how it’s being developed. You see CPD Central is not being managed or administered from on high, but rather the members are deciding what they want to do with the space. To me, that screams collegiality and community.

I wonder if people are ready for that though? All too often in Scottish education we seem to have a ‘what can I get’ mentality when faced with using technology. Where does an online community begin? Does it start with ‘what can I give’ or ‘what’s in it for us’?

The second tool that we were looking at in the workshop sessions was CPD Reflect. I remember sitting down with Con a couple of years ago as he started to gather opinion and advice about what a reflective online CPD tool could be, and we spoke at length about how beneficial an reflective journal could be to a practitioner, and how valuable it would be to have a tool that allowed a practitioner to judge their own development against the standard for professional registration.Two years later, CPD Reflect is about to be launched on a unsuspecting nation of educators.

Off the bat I love the whole concept of CPD Reflect. I think it’s great that there is now a tool to help in the whole CPD/PRD process, and make it far more meaningful for those involved, instead of the ‘tick the box’ exercise I fear it is for so many in scottish education. I love the fact that using this tool, you can personally set targets an objectives for improvement in areas of your professional practice and let technology do what it does best – collate, track and share. How brilliant is it that this tool allows you to share what you want from your own area of CPD Reflect with others of your choosing?

Does this all sound too good to be true? I suspect there has to be a catch – I don’t know if teachers will have time to get the best out of this tool. It takes time to fill in sections of information. You’d have to commit to this tool to realise the benefits. Do teachers have time to do this in an already busy working day?

How often do we merely choose a CPD activity because we saw something we liked in a local authority calendar, or because it related to the school development plan? How closely do either of these factors relate to our own professional needs for development? CPD Reflect allows us to flip this model on it’s head, and focus instead on our needs for development. It allows us to recognise areas where we are merely beginning to adopt good practice, or integrate it into our working life. Perhaps the tools best strength lies in the ability to note not just where we are integrating, but where we are innovating in our work – connecting innovators with beginnners could work wonders on our profession.

CPD Reflect will be available soon through Glow – watch the CPD Scotland and Glow Scotland websites for further details.

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