With the holiday season coming up, our team has had a long overdue in person Team Day and we are also planning a virtual get together in a few weeks. These social activities are important to virtual teams, and I really value the opportunity to spend time with colleagues in a more relaxed way. Blended approaches to working together can help shape the dynamic of the year, and punctuate long periods of remote working with…
Category: staff development
We are currently recruiting for a Chief Operations Officer for ALT, and I couldn’t be more excited! It’s always great when you get to grow your team, particularly when there are only seven of you and each individual makes a big impact. Why this role, why now? We are the leading professional body for Learning Technology in the UK – and we have been pretty busy in the past eighteen months! Learning Technology has never…
Recently I was invited to take part in a seminar on ‘Technology and Education: opportunities and challenges for equality’ organised by the Technology Enhanced Learning Team at the University of Sussex. Here is what the seminar was about: Technology has always played a significant role in education – whether it was the fountain pen and printing press of the past or today’s mobile devices, online study and immersive technologies. It cannot be assumed, however, that…
In a recent post on positive feedback I talked about how to use positive feedback for personal & professional development. As I wrote the post I had an idea to try out a new approach to giving and receiving positive feedback in a virtual, distributed team: I made a template and sent an envelope to each of my colleagues in the post, enclosing a piece of positive feedback from me to them, as well as…
I recently came across this article in the Harvard Business Review on how to use positive feedback for personal & professional development. The article points to a tool/service but in itself contains useful pointers and ideas explaining why positive feedback is important, how to give/receive it and reflecting on why this may be difficult: ‘Most people are well-attuned to critical feedback; it is jarring, threatening, and emotional, and as a result, quite memorable. In contrast,…
Recently, I have started writing a series of blog posts with my colleague Martin Hawksey. It’s an interesting undertaking in which we take an open approach to leadership, to sharing our perspective on leading the organisation we work for through a period of change towards adopting a virtual mode of operating. And it’s got me thinking on parallel lines about my own professional practice and how it’s developed over the last 20 years, from being…
In my organisation I lead on providing CPD for a small team and providing meaningful, cost-effective opportunities for learning and gaining know how at a micro scale can be challenging. We’ve taken part in open online courses like Blended Learning Essentials and 23 things, we have a regular ‘show & tell’ slot at weekly team meetings, we take part in events and the networks we support and we sometimes have guests who share their work…
Every year around this time when I encourage my peers to submit proposals to the ALT Annual Conference, I reflect on the fact that as one of the organisers I can’t submit a proposal myself. And given that as a Learning Technologist this is one of the key events in my diary each year, I have often thought about what I would submit if I wasn’t affiliated with ALT. So here are some of my…
I recently wrote a post about contributing to a new book edited by David Hopkins called Emergency Rations #EdTechRations . Not everything I wrote made it into the final version and I wrote quite a bit about how I work in addition to describing the things I can’t do without. So below is my contribution with additional comments and images that shows what it looks like as work in progress. When I wrote the intro I thought about…
This post is inspired by taking part in a recent #LTHEchat tweet chat. If you haven’t yet discovered this excellent chat and have an interest in learning & teaching, go and explore their website before reading this. The topic of the chat was ‘what motivates us to use digital tools for learning and teaching’ and while the conversation was thought provoking the exchange that set my mind on a different tangent was the tweets pictured…