Spring?

Even if Spring isn't here the snowdrops are.

This week saw me promoting the Subject Networks at a Curricular Area meeting at Stevenson College attended by the Associate Principal, Head of Section and 7 practitioners. An update on our latest developments and the Z cards with all the project information was well received. The Associate Principal was particularly interested to learn about our links with the Sector Skills Councils and information about labour market intelligence.

The monthly Mentor's meeting was held Edinburgh's Telford College where we had a presentation from representatives of Coleg to discuss their latest developments and how we might collaborate with our 'Swop Shop' for the benefit of all practitioners. Coleg will be launching their new repository at the end of April so watch this space.

Christine, the Care Mentor, and I met to update and plan our College visits programme.

New name

We are now officially called Business and Administration which fits the curricular area well. Thanks to Murray and Penny for their help with this.

Spent time this week encouraging and enlisting recruits to my Advisory Group. Now have a good group of eight enthusiasts and look forward to working with them more closely in the near future. A bonus has been inviting those Colleges we have visited to join the group - was that clever or what? Thanks Genevieve for that good idea.

Requests for College visits are still coming in and Christine and I have been invited to Inverness College sometime in May - date to be confirmed. Updating the web site with latest news (thanks Murray) and checking that resources are still current.

After technical failure spent a few frustrating hours listening to a continuous collection of Creedence Clearwater Revival (remember them?) whilst trying to get a response from my ISP who will remain nameless but whose contract is about to be terminated! Now I am 'live' again I can get back to business.

This week

Enjoyed the Moodle demo at Cardonald last week - thanks Tony. Have been playing around with this trying to get familiar. Am getting more confident with the Blog and may try an upload soon!

Meeting at South Lanarkshire College went well. Met with Karen Cleary, Curriculum Manager for Business and two members of the Care team. They demonstrated where they are at with the BlendEd resources. A staff member has been seconded 2 days per week to work on this and has several units loaded on their VLE ready for use when they move to their new college in August.

We demonstrated the PP site and the Cookbook for the BlendEd materials where the methodology and templates can be accessed and staff found this very useful.

Thanks to Christine for driving in such awful weather conditions we got home safely with no further delays.

This week's activities

Another eventful week. Several accidents, flurries of snow and an overturned lorry on the Forth Bridge conspired against me today. However, following a 2 hour car journey from Edinburgh to SFEU to meet with Christine we eventually made the Mentor's Meeting at Cardonald College in Glasgow - only 1 hour late. Unfortunately we missed the tea and scones.

Going off to South Lanarkshire College this afternoon to spread the Subject Networks' word and discuss the BlendEd resources for Care and Business Administration. See next week's post for news on this visit.

This week

This week some of the mentors joined the Hairdressing and Beauty Advisory Group for Sametime training at SFEU.

Sametime is a secure system that can provide presence awareness, instant messaging and Web conferencing. Sametime helps speed communication and reduce travel expenses. Practitioners can immediately and easily interact with one another and collaborate in real time. For further information and to get involved log on to Practitioners Plus.

NQ Business Management event - Wednesday 6 February 08
SFEU and SQA Academy are holding a blended learning event for staff delivering NQ Business Management programmes. The event comprises an online component and a workshop at the Carnegie Conference Centre, Halbeath, Dunfermline.

Still practising

This has been another busy week with Blogs, Bloglines, Practitioners Plus and the Mentor's Forum providing sources of information and communication.

As part of our project Christine Mathers (Care) and myself visited Reid Kerr College to promote the subject networks, BlendEd and the other e-transformation projects at a Heads of Department Meeting. In addition we were able to plug Practitioners Plus, the Swap Shop, SameTime and Annamarie's workshops.

It was a successful session and there was genuine interest for the new initatives. Hopefully we have enlisted some new recruits.

Here goes

The promotional materials and e-zines have generated a lot of interest for the BlendEd materials which are the subject of the project for Christine and myself. This week we met to discuss and arrange our forthcoming visit to Reid Kerr College who have requested a visit to support the use of these resources and an information session about the Subject Networks in general.

Still trying to get to grips with the Blog and Bloglines so watch this space.