Cat's Pyjamas

After helping organise a staff development day about 21st C Learning (more about that later), I find myself musing on the link between feedback and encouragement as reciprocal actions.
This was a day with mixed ability and experience staff, all encouraged to take the next step up on their education technology skills ladder. They did this [...]

A few weeks ago, a Social Media Cheat Sheet was doing the round. A nice visualization of the pro’s & cons of each social media channel, but with a business/marketing focus. I thought I should do one for social media use in education. However for most of the teachers I work with, our Moodle (EIT [...]

This is a post about teaching teachers tools. I know, I know, of course the adoption of educational technology should be driven by possible enhancements in teaching & learning, not by the ’shininess’ of new tools. But in my experience, there is a group of teachers for who certain tools can work like a gateway [...]

I’m just starting up a new session of my Online Facilitation course and came across this resource I created over a year ago. Thought I’d share it with you all.
7 Habits of Highly Effective Online Discussion Participants
1. Use the subject line
2. Quote the other participants
3. Check in (nearly) every day
4. Use highlighting & lists for [...]

As an instructional designer some days you are more creative than others. I’m afraid that after a day of project planning or strategic meetings, teachers who meet with me about their online or blended course design run a particular risk of getting short-changed.
Coffee helps, but what you really want is a menu – a [...]

One my objectives for 2008 is to provide the conditions for a community of practice around e-learning to grow on our campus. We have many excellent examples of e-learning in the classroom and online, but so far haven’t really had a platform for sharing that knowledge & experience.
First things first, obviously sharing “knowledge, methods, stories, [...]

A very interesting post today by Injenuity, who articulated something I had been doing but didn’t really see as a strategy I was using – Viral Professional Development.
Just 3 examples of my PD which in the retrospectacles is VPD:

Used Moodle to prepare work for a F2F workshop and then collected participants’ brainstorm ideas in a [...]