I haven't done a blog in a few weeks because I have been so busy with work and Camp Abilities Michigan. I went to a Goal Ball Tournament today at Warren Mott High School. At the event I was lucky enough to see some amazing athletes. I met a great group of female VI athletes as well. They call themselves "Live Wire". I went to their game today and saw Live Wire play a competitive game against Team Wisconsin. Through great efforts and through the use of excellent communication skills, Live Wire prevailed against Team Wisconsin.Here is a great link to an article about Live Wire and the sport of Goal Ball:Goal BallA picture from Live Wire's practice Quote of the Week:You don't develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.EpicurusVideo of the Week:An excellent video by the Adapted Physical Education channel about making equipment for a student with VI to help them with guided running. 

A few months back, Harold Jarche wrote a very interesting article about sense making with Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). Harold suggested a model that he uses to manage his personal knowledge and stay on top of his social media intake. I strongly suggest that you also look through the webinar he did on PKM at the LearnTrends conference. I think the article is a great reference for anyone that claims to be getting overwhelmed by the volume of information out there on the web. I have had this problem for ages as well and given that I'm a Getting Things Done (GTD) guy, I wanted to make my knowledge management fit into my regular scheme of life. So, at the very outset let me tell you that the names of the steps on my KM model are stolen from David Allen, though the content of these steps may be a little different from how Allen describes them in his book. Anyway, lets quickly look through the steps I go through to make sense of all the wonderful information that I come across on the big broad internet. The First Step - CollectionI like to keep my collection mechanism automated. I work at least 12 hours a day on a regular basis and with 8 hours of sleep added on, there's very little time I have to manually collect information. I'd rather have all the information collected for me in advance, so I can get to processing it thereafter. So here are my channels of collecting information: I use Google Reader to collect and aggregate all of my information from news sites and blogs;I use Twitter to collect and aggregate all of the information that my social network wants to throw my way;I often get information from some other sources like webinars, forums, IM and email;Here's a quick video tour of my most prominent channels to collect information and you can see how I ensure that the information stays contextualised in the right places. The Second Step - ProcessingOne of the things I know for a fact is that even when I have all of this information collected automatically, I'll never ever be able to keep up with everything. I was at DevLearn last year and Leo Laporte in his keynote said, "Its a river of information, dip your foot in whenever its convenient." So the first rule for me when processing stuff is not to fret about staying on top of everything. So here's what I do to process my 'stuff': If I miss something really important, my network will bring it to the surface again at some point -- so missing important stuff is something I try hard not to worry about. I set aside a few fixed slots of time each day to look through my various collection channels of information.During this time, I try to skim through all the information that has come my way, while resisting the the information to read through each of them.I ensure that everything I wish to ignore is separate from the things I actually want to pay attention to.I organise the things I want to pay attention to as I perform the processing step. The Second and a half Step - OrganisingI call organising the second and a half step, because I really almost do it simultaneously with the processing. My organisation revolves around one concept and one concept alone -- tagging. So here are my organising rules: If I receive interesting information on twitter, webinars, forums, IM or email I socially bookmark it on Delicious and add an appropriate tag to it.If I find interesting information from any of the blogs I follow, I share and tag it on Google Reader and at most times when I have the energy I add it to Delicious as well. (I've just started to do this with some discipline, so don't be surprised if my tags on reader in particular don't lead you to much)Here's a quick video of how I organise my information. Using my information - Reviewing & Retrieving Once my information's organised the right way, all I need to do is search on Delicious and/or Google Reader and I should be able to find what I need. What also helps with social tools like Delicious, is that you can benefit from all the PKM that everyone else is doing. So I have power users like Dinesh Tantri on my network and now, I have access not just to the information that I've put up on Delicious, but also to all the information that my network has put up on Delicious. So I combine the power of tagging and search to find what i need, just when I need it - yaay! Take a look through the video below to see how I usually get around my personal and social knowledge base. So since this blogpost was about how I'm managing my knowledge base, here are some of my aggregated resources that you may find useful. Firstly my shared items on Google Reader (not many right now, but will grow). Also, here are some news feed bundles I've created which you may find useful: Blogs from the Agile CommunityBlogs about Enterprise 2.0Blogs about Elearning and Learning TechnologyYou can also browse through my Delicious bookmarks and look at the bookmarks from my network. And just in case you got excited about RSS and twitter just because of this blog post, then do check out the links below:The RSS feed for this blogMy twitter handle - @sumeet_moghe As always, don't forget to let me know how you found this blogpost. Your comments are always welcome and I'd love to hear what you think.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

I recently had the pleasure to go to the grand city of Grand Rapids, Michigan to attend the state CEC. The CEC or Council for Exceptional Children conference, is a conference held annually for people in the special education field. At the conference there is many different vendors and seminars that deal with a variety of different subjects in the field of special education. I attended a variety of amazing seminars and I wanted to share the resources that I found and what I learned with this post. I will be sharing the best of the seminars I was able to attend. I will break them up into three different sections: the law, technology and inspirational.The Law:The first day that I went to the conference I was able to go to a fantiastic seminar titled "Transition Today, Outcome Tomorrow". The seminar was lead by the Office of Transition Director, June Gothberg and the assistant director, Maria Peak. They did a wonderful job covering what the current needs and focus of transition in our schools are and need to be. I have attached a copy of the PowerPoint they presented and I will highlight some of the parts that I found to be the most revealing. During the presentation, they gave us a few pair-and-share questions about the transition process for students with disabilities, that we eventually discussed as a whole group. These same questions were used for a study that the state conducted about transition. At the end of the group discussions, the presenters shared with us the actual results. The first pair-and-share question was about if we believed our schools were doing a good job preparing our students to be successful in the community. The second question had us analyze if our community was prepared to support those students. This was an opened ended question and the results found that many people pinpointed different strengths and weaknesses in our state's transition programming. The results showed that many felt that we excelled with community based programming, collaboration focused on addressing mental health needs, and with collecting and using data. The study also showed that many felt that we needed to make major improvements in providing more consistent services, helping families understand post-school options, and making connections with schools and outside agencies. This study is on page 14-16 of the PowerPoint.Transition Another presentation that I had the pleasure attending was "Discipline Considerations for Students with Disabilities". This presentation was done by Michael Ghareeb, the Assistant Director of Special Education for Kent ISD. This presentation focused on how the law describes what is legal when disciplining students with disabilities. One of the major concepts I was able to learn was that the law is specific about the amount of time a student can be away from an instructor before it is called a day removed from school. This presentation took a good hard look at behavior intervention plan(BIP) and manifestation determination plans. DisciplineTechnology:A great seminar I went to at the MCEC was "Technology Tools for Supporting the Common Core". As soon as you enter the room, the presenters set you up with a laptop and had you start following along with their presentation. Even though I was already aware of the majority of the websites and resources they shared with us, I still learned a lot from this presentation.Two of the most useful resources that I picked up are from the Google Chrome store. The free apps Readability and Speak it! would be a helpful tool for any special educator. Readability takes a website and gets rid of distracting pop-ups and advertising so only the text is showing. This is a great tool for any student who may be more interested in a dating website rather than an article about the Middle East. Speak it! is another free Google Chrome app that will read aloud text from a website. This app would be useful for making students who struggle decoding long articles but are able to comprehend the text independently.www.tagxedo.com is an awesome website the presenters showed me . It will take website, feeds, or Google searches and make a word cloud using whatever picture you can dream of! Here is a word cloud using the words from my blog.The possibilities are endless!Inspirational:Probably the most inspirational of the seminars I attended was the seminar in which Anthony Ianni was the keynote speaker. Anthony Ianni is not only the first person with Autism to play in the NCAA, he also won a  ring with Michigan State. He is currently touring as a motivational speaker throughout the state of Michigan. His speech covers a wide range of topics such as living with Autism, overcoming obstacles in his life, and anti-bullying. He would be an excellent speaker for any group of students. He shed light on Bullying and Autism better than most ever could. Check out this quick YouTube video of one of his speeches to get an idea of who he is and what he is trying to accomplish.Quote of the week:In times of great stress or adversity, it's always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive.-Lee Iacocca

Within the field of Training & Development the learning style of generation Y employees is a hot topic. The central question is how to prepare these youngsters for their role in the workforce. In traditional instructor-led courses this generation growing up with Social Networks and Instant Messaging will be bored within 10 minutes. Should we adapt training approaches to this new continuously multitasking and thrill seeking target audience or should we stick to our traditional approach and bore them to death? Since research has shown that most traditional training approaches have generate dissapointing results with other generations as well, the answer is clear.  UPS, global logistics services provider, already invested heavily in new approaches for training new employees. An interesting article in Fortune magazine descibes their approach. UPS found that the time-to-competency of most of their generation Y staff was longer than it used to be. That is why they shifted from their traditional Human Engineering approach towards Technology-Enhanced Hands-on Training. A shift from theory oriented instructor-led training towards instant practice in a safe environment with technology support where usefull. No computerized simulations or videogames, but a real-life experience in a film set like training center. UPS invested 34 million dollar in this new approach setting up its Integrad training facility. According to UPS the new generation can be seen as Generation Why? They don’t like following instructions and always question assumptions. Good traits for a new generation of learners I would say!

Camp Abilities Michigan just had a very successful card tournament fundraiser! So being so invigorated by the event, I decided to finally make our camp digital. The logo is a pairing of Michigan with a heart. Let me know which color you would prefer. Also there is a question about how engaging the website is.Use the images below to help you with the Survey:Logo 1Logo 2Quote of the day:"We must be the change we want to see." -Mahatma GandhiWebsite of the day: brailletranslatorA website that I used with the logos to create text to braille in a simple and quick way! It works just like Google Translate.

These are liveblogged notes from the ELearning Guild online forum on Building Effective Interactivity. If you're not a member yet, please enrol -- the benefits are tremendous. I loved Carmen's really interesting webinar about how you can capture your audience's attention during online webinars and in virtual classrooms.Carmen Taran: Managing Partner at Rexi Media. In the business for almost two decades. Author of the book - Better Beginnings.Do you remember your first kiss? Most probably yes! People remember first and lasts. How do we recreate the "You had me at hello" syndrome?Most online training and presentations are boring. And the problem is not that bad things happen, but really nothing happens. Most people multi-task at the time they're in an online training. There's so much information around people now -- we find it difficult to capture people's attention for full hours.Chase Manhattan has reduced their ATM waiting time by 18 seconds. That says a lot about people's value for time.So how do we create better beginnings -- as juicy as the first kiss?Create AnticipationHockey players run towards a puck. We love to look towards a future state. We enjoy anticipating what'll happen next. Newscasters do this very well -- "What will Apple unveil next? All of this and more at 10PM!"Easy technique: Use a key phrase. "At last" a software that improves productivity. "Imagine" what it would be like to disconnect from the brain chatter. This program will open a "new" world for you. Promise a reward -- for example a freebie you give away during the session.There is order underneath chaos -- if you can promise to reduce complexity, you'll have people's attention. People want to demistify complicated things.Don't be predictable. Include a touch of unpredictability. Keep them guessing what'll happen next. For example, you promise how something will work in the audience's specific situation. That way people will keep waiting to get that hugely contextualised session.What kills anticipation at the beginning of a training program?A narcisstic beginning -- presenters that begin with boasts about themselves or their company. Don't focus on your ego. Reserve the elements of building credibility for later. Use the unforgiving first minute to gain people's attention. Think about TV commercials, Reader's Digest, movie teasers. Teaching is the act of 'giving' - focus on what people want to know.IncongruityTaking your audience on one path and them leaving them on a concept that they wouldn't expect. Show how reality is incongruent to what they would naturally think. Surprise facts help do this. For example what did the first coin operated vending machine dispense?Holy WaterHow many countries are there in the world?176What's the difference between nerd, geek and dork?Do some research! :-)What's the best time to work late?Research says Tuesday nights between 6-9What such incongruent stuff can you share in the beginning of your sessions? Think of the crazy statistic that people will never imagine!ParticipationOne way Carmen demonstrated -- a contest to win the free book she promised. We live in the era of participation. People want to interact with everything. Tivo for example!Try:Asking a question! Chat is your best friend. The more you do, the more you engage people. The moment you ask a question, the brain is programmed to answer. So that means people are thinking immediately. Eg: Atlantic used to hide questions in muffins. These were really intriguing questions and Atlantic's circulation increased hugely during this time.Try an interactive game: Flashcom guru has multiple such games that you can use within Adobe Connect Pro. Make sure that its linked to the content you're presenting.Visual ThinkingThe power of visuals is quite well known -- Presentation Zen.Edge, Energy, Emotion: You have people's attention when your visuals actually use all three of these factors. Use images that are striking and create the right energies (post modern room vs clutter) When you create just the right visual, you create the right kind of emotion.This way you:save timeare more memorablekeep people focussedKeep in mind texture - you should feel like being a part of the picture. Keep in mind focus - what grabs your attention first? Use full size graphics. "Good design is design that makes you want to lick the screen."You cannot go wrong with red. Red captures attention and triggers a whole bunch of emotions! But again go with what your audience may like.Sometimes color can be a distraction. Consider every so often turning things to black and white and see if the meaning changes.Abstract concepts -- try visualising those with symbolism. For example barb wire for alienation. Try to brainstorm different ways to depict a certain topic.Remember, "Any good design takes three eye movements or less."Vocal VarietyThere's a huge amount of power in your voice. Monotones are always boring. Sound natural, passionate and friendly.As virtual presenters, we don't have the luxury of body language and beautiful facial expressions. We're addressing people who are multitasking. The voice is a transitory medium - we have only one chance to connect with people. We delete voice mails after listening to it for 10 seconds. No one has the time to listen to something very long. Add more melody and pitch to your voice. Modulate your voice and don't be predictable. Doesn't matter if you go up or down -- its important you change your tone. Try highlighting adjectives and adverbs in your speech and change your tone by stressing those. That creates a great radio announcer effect. The ear listens more when there's variety. Use your host, co-present your sessions if need be.Practice by picking an everyday phrase and say it with various emotions.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Last week I read an interesting article by Mirjam van Praag about training as development aid for entrepreneurs in Developing Countries. She describes an approach that combines microfinance for these entrepreneurs with training in business administration. This is not only lifting the success rate of the entrepreneurs, but it also reduces the risks for financials of offering microfinance to these entrepreneurs. And since microfinance have proven to be a succesfull means to fight poverty, adding training to the formula will make the success even bigger and more sustainable. Research by Karlan and Valdivia of Yale University has proven that the entrepreneurs that received training perform better. Striking is the fact that the entrepreneurs that were most sceptic about the training, had most benefit from it. The entrepreneurs received the training in 30-60 minute weekly sessions at their local Bank. They have discussions in entrepreneur communities and receive some homework. "With microfinance the coaching and guidance of entrepreneurs is just as important as the finance itself", is a well-known phrase that proves to be right. This sounds like a good opportunity for e-learning as well!

Last week I had the great privilege to be able to attend an assessment conference at Michigan State University. Keynote speaker Dr. Stiggins introduced the conference, "Re-envisioning Assessment, Accountability and Data Use to Support Schools". The conference had a unique format of having four different expert panelists present information to the audience about information and current trends in assessment.Having had the privilege of being able to go to multiple conferences across the nation in my short career, I must say that every aspect of this conference was spectacular. The panelists gave useful and cutting edge information, the format kept the conference fresh and invigorating, and the keynote speaker was beyond inspirational and truly struck a nerve in everyone who attended the conference.For this blog, I would like to summarize some of the information that was presented. To help organize the events, I will break them up into the keynote speaker and the four panels of experts; formative assessment*, teacher evaluation, parent and public use of data, and data assessment and Teacher Education.*I put the formative assessment session and the data assessment session together because they covered similar information. Keynote SpeakerAs a keynote speaker, Rick Stiggins, a man who has dedicated his life to creating quality assessments, was a phenomenal and inspirational speaker. Rick descended upon the education community by referring to it as an institution that is wrongly believed to have quality assessments. He respectfully challenged the audience to rethink the way we design assessments and wanted us to truly reflect on the purpose of assessments. Dr. Stiggins said it best: "decisions will be made based on these crucial assessments." Another major point that Dr. Stiggins made was that to be able to create a strong assessment, we need to set a clear purpose and target and create an assessment around it.With Dr. Stiggins' strong words, he advocated us to take a more conscientious roll in designing and administering assessments. He questioned the way we have been assessing students and asked us to ponder how we can improve upon these old ways. He asked us to grow as individuals, grow as a profession and grow as a community. Session 1: FAMEThis first panel was headed by principals and consultants who have implemented FAME (Formative Assessment for Michigan Educators) into their districts. They spoke on the value of having groups of educators come together and discuss formative assessments, how to implement them effectively, and how to use the data to strengthen instruction. This panel gave us insight on how the FAME groups are working together and able to use their information productively to drive instruction. Formative assessments (unlike summative assessments) are an ongoing process that consists of teachers and students interacting with one another throughout a unit of instruction. It is a process used during instruction that provides feedback to adjust teaching and learning to improve each student's achievement. Educators in classrooms are constantly using formative assessment, but the FAME groups help monitor the Formative assessments and look at how we can use the data in an effective way.Here is a list of some of the different aspects of FAME groups and what they should be focusing on during their meetings:FAME groups should be between 6-8 members. They should be lead be a facilitator and meet multiple times throughout the year. FAME groups discussions are to be lead by and decided upon by the group rather than an administrator.The learning group should focus on matters such as strong learning directions so students understand what is being asked of them and that students know what the criteria is for success. They should target key standards and identify them on assessments as well as projects.Session 2: Teacher EvaluationThis panel was made up of principals and superintendents from around the state. The major focus of this group was that teacher evaluations, although they hold a great deal of power, do not always translate to how effective a teacher truly is and how they can improve upon their craft. The discussions were on how we can better implement teaching evaluations to improve teaching. Here are a few ideas and questions that arose from this debate:Have 4-6, 15 minute teacher evaluations throughout the year rather than two 60 minute evaluations.Teacher evaluations need to provide relevant feedback that is relevant to the instructor.Paras/students/parents should be filling out evaluation forms as well, as they are interacting with the teachers on a more consistent basis than the administrator. How do we adapt state/district level testing to make it a more realistic assessment in the classroom?Session 3: Parent and public use of dataThe panel for the parent and public use of data panel was very unique and because, of that fact, very informative. The panel consisted of 3 members. One was reporter Dustin Dwyer from NPR, who wrote a piece on a low performing school Grand Rapids, Mi. The second panelist was Dan Varner, a member of the Michigan board of education and on board as an assessment tool for some schools in Detroit, MI. The last panel member was a parent advocate from Kentucky. I'm only going to focus on panelists Dave and Dustin for the blog. The reporter from NPR discussed his intense look into a third grade classroom at Congress Elementary in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He summarized his 50 minute piece by discussing that we put too much faith in how well a 8 year old child does on a single test. He went on to talk about his experience of sitting in a classroom for 6 weeks. Test results did not even scratch the surface on what was going on in the school. There is a great summarizing quote from Mrs. Howard (the third grade teacher he observed) about how to really find out how good a school is. "I tell them first of all, come visit us. See what we do every day, moderately talk to us about the curriculum. Talk to us about the Common Core state standards that we’re implementing. And just have them talk to other parents who have had their children here for a period of time, who can tell them what we do and the proficiency levels of those kids."Panelist Dave Varner from the Michigan board of education focused on the system that they have implemented to rate schools in Detroit. Detroit is a rarity because all the schools (charter or not) are school of choice as long as you live within the city. To get an accurate reading of each school's performance, they created a scorecard. The scorecards are easily accessible and readable by the public. They earn a letter grade on academic performance, academic progress and school climate. These grades are based on a number of different details and walk throughs made by community members.Here is video by Dan Varner that better explains the score card and the benefits of using one. ConclusionAs I stated in the introduction, this was truly an inspiring conference that I was luckily able to attend. The conference not only give great information on how we can improve our assessments on different levels, but it left an imprint on myself on how we can do better assessments so that we can benefit our instruction. I have come away feeling more alert and aware on what should drive the assessments I use and create. I am motivated to try and find what my assessments are asking and are truly assessing what I am teaching in my classes. It is so easy to blindly give out these tests to students and then give them a grade. As educators, we should not be using assessments/grades in this way. Using assessments in this way makes the grades we give and the data we use to make "crucial decisions" useless.Assessments should be used to show journeys of knowledge, not just accountability. As a special education teacher, I believe our field is more accustomed to showing growth and progress rather than just a standard grade. But I do not think our system is foolproof in any stretch of the imagination. We as educators need to come together, in small and large scales, to really take a deeper look at our assessments and how we can best use them to drive/improve our instruction.Website of the Day:Here is a website for teaching materials that I use on a weekly basis. They have a bundle of free worksheets, games, rewards and other tools that you can download once you register for free on the site.Quote of the Day:"If you don’t know where you are headed, you’ll probably end up someplace else." -Douglas J. Eder, Ph.D 

So last week I tweeted an example of immersive learning scenario built entirely in Powerpoint and published using Articulate Presenter. Given that I saw the tweet travel a fair bit, I thought it might be a good idea to share some of the related ideas on this blog.Does Rapid eLearning mean Crapid eLearning?No, it doesn't have to. Really, the quality of your elearning depends on your creativity and the amount of thought you put into its design. In a recent conference, Cammy Bean and Stephen Walsh put together a great talk on 10 ways you can yawn proof your elearning. If you look at any of the ideas they put into their guide, you'll notice, none of them says, "Employ an expensive flash programmer." or "Get a budget of $100k." Recent advancements in rapid elearning development have put a lot of power into the hands of the average SME who has a passion for learning.The key to creating interactive elearning then isn't about rollovers and animations. In fact most people are really past the ooh's and aah's you might expect to get as a result of those fancy effects. So the way I define interactivity in elearning is:"It's not about how someone interacts with the interface, but how the interface interacts with the person's mind."Immersive scenarios are an inexpensive way to create meaningful interactivityA few months back, my favorite blogger Cathy Moore put up a very interesting article about why you want to include scenarios in your elearning. Coupled with Cathy's excellent presentation on the topic (see below), it was great advocacy for the use of immersive scenarios in your elearning. The key as Cathy says, is to 'solve real problems in the real world.' so we need to think of ourselves as 'experience designers' and not 'information developers'.How to save the world with elearning scenariosView more presentations from Cathy Moore.How I built my scenarioSo, first things first - the credits. None of the content of this example was mine. This was a scenario Katherine and William Horton presented at a conference 3-4 years back. All I did was pretty it up a bit and place it in Articulate Presenter. My aim was to illustrate how easy it is to create something fairly engaging with just a few minutes of work in Powerpoint, provided you have your design well thought through.My approach towards scenariosWhen designing any kind of elearning, I like to use Cathy Moore's action mapping approach to first define the scenario-based activities. I then use Ruth Clark's framework to flesh out the details of the scenario. Ruth recommends that as designers we think through the following aspects of the situation on screen.Task Deliverable: What will the learner do to demonstrate competence?In our case we wanted the manager to make the right decision about somebody's sabbatical leave request.Trigger Event: How the task or problem normally initiates in the job setting.In our case, the scenario gets triggered when you recieve the approved request from the applicant's supervisor.Case Data: What background information is needed to solve the case?The employee's file and leave request form the case data for this scenario.Guidance: How will learners get assistance when solving the case?You can get guidance by talking to the employee's supervisor, an HR person or a legal eagle.Feedback: How will the learners receive intrinsic feedback as the scenario plays out? How will they receive traditional, instructional feedback a.k.a Teaching Moments?The scenario has some very traditional feedback for the choices they make, but some intrinsic feedback could be useful. Our scenario misses this at the moment, but one way to build this in would be to illustrate the consequence of their choices.Reflection: What opportunities will the learner have to review their actions/ decisions and consider alternatives?We're missing this part in the demo, but its really important to give the manager and opportunity to review their actions and reflect on how they actually went about the decision.Visually representing the scenarioI built out all of the elements in my scenario entirely in Powerpoint -- at no point did I go into any external program. A few things that might help you achieve the same effect:Tom's tutorial on how to build out a scenario visually.Tom's folder template from which you can individually extract the stack of paper, the folder, the paper clip, etc. You can very easily create these assets yourself if you like. Just take a look at this tutorial.As far as the remaining graphics are concerned, yes they may look custom, but they're not. They're just standard clipart from Microsoft Office. All you need to do is search by the styles I've mentioned below.The rest is plain and simple hyperlinking. The current version of this demo has a few minor bugs, but I'll let you have the source files so you can dissect this and have a bit of a play around.All you need is a bit of inspirationFor many years of my life I kept waking up saying, "I'm not a creative person." I know now that nothing can be far from the truth for both you and me. Sometimes all you need is a bit of inspiration. There are several examples of creativity that you can learn from. In fact, I'm starting to catalogue all such examples at this link. A few examples that I really liked in recent days were:A demonstration of how you can recreate an expensive Flash course in Powerpoint (@tomkuhlmann)E-mersion's course for the Red CrossTelstra's 3Rs of Social Media EngagementExperian's online orientation programmeYou can find many more such examples on the web and in particular on the Articulate Community. Its defnitely worth being a part of this community even if you're silent lurker. All of the wonderful discussions that take place are well worth listening into, every once in a while. Remember, the tools don't matter -- exploit your creativity. Also, if you find something really creative that you care to let me know of, just drop me an email. And as always, please post your thoughts in the comments section. I'm really keen to hear from you.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Applications of emerging technologies for learning are evolving very rapidly at the moment. Reseach reports and cases on technology-enhanced learning are popping up everywhere in the web. The British BECTA organisation published an interesting report on the "Emerging Technologies for Learning". In the report six experts describe different emerging technologies and their impact on learning. The trends covered are: The netgeneration: a new generation of learners with the computer as the nucleus of their workspace. They go online when they need information, are multitasking and primarily use Instant Messaging, e-mail and cell phones for communication. Conclusion: our assumptions about students and what is best for their education may not be matched by today’s reality. Mobile, wireless & connected learning: mobile devices and wireless networks are changing the way we live, work and learn. We are connected to people and information real-time, anywhere and anytime. For learning the concept of the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) applies to this trend. It enables close integration of learning into the day-to-day practice of our private and work lives. Location-based, context-aware learning: ‘ubiquitous computing’ principles are about the integration of computing power (microprocessors) in our environment. The computer itself dissapears, but they have their tentacles in the environment to sense. manage, interpret and act on information around us. This already becomes clear in wireless networking, GPS and mobile devices. However applications are few the potential of this technology for the learning environment is great. Serious games and virtual worlds: serious games and virtual worlds are about using gaming and virtual reality techniques to explore non-leisure concepts. They enable us to provide support for learning communities, broadening networks of learners and providing creative, self-directed learning and experience design. This matches the shifting need from knowledge transfer to experience and activity design in education.  Search technologies: new Internet search technologies emerge with conceptual, contextual and semantic search. This enables us to find the information we are looking for more easily when we turn to the web. Tag clouds and social tagging are examples of new ways of tagging available information to improve searching processes. It supports learning, but is not a substitute for Education 1.0 that for this author hasn’t lost its relevancy. Interactive displays: new ways of displaying computer screens open up new ways of using computers in the classroom and beyond. With touch-screen mobile devices and electronic whiteboards new opportunities for learning emerge. Computers and content become more human centered and enable collaboration. This supports new ways of activity-based and workplace learning with computers. This BECTA report is an interesting read that is rooted in the field of education, but also has relevancy for corporate learning. New models of learning are within reach for learners and learning professionals based on the empowering force of new technology. Let’s reap the benefits!

As Instructional Designers, its always a challenge to balance meaningful instruction with information. Cathy Moore's action mapping framework is a great way to create lively elearning that allows you to include just the right amount of information in your elearning course. That said, our SMEs and clients will often say to us things like, "But we need to include _______ in the course as well." or "All that's fine, but they need to KNOW ______ as well." Its a consulting challenge to make the trade-off between meaningful instruction and information overload in such cases. That being said, there are a few simple strategies that you can use to ensure that your course has the right impact and you can include your client's request for additional information too! Here they are.Provide information through scenariosAs you may have noticed in my last post, I have a strong preference towards scenario based elearning. Scenarios allow us as designers to present our audience with a real life challenge. Of course, real life challenges are tough to solve without background knowledge and sound instructional thinking can allow us to weave in this important information, without being too top heavy about it. When your audience accesses knowledge from a state of pain, they're more likely to appreciate its value and remember it at their day job. What this makes us do, is think hard about the information that is really of consequence for the performances we target.Try organising optional information in tabsRegardless of how hard we try however, there's some information that just is so sacrosanct that it HAS TO BE part of the course. But then, what if this 'valuable' information just doesn't add value to the performance we seek and expect our audience to demonstrate during the course? I've found a middle path, especially when using Articulate Studio '09. You see, Articulate Studio allows you to customise your player to include some of this information in tabs. When we tuck away some of this really 'nice to have' yet apparently 'important' information in tabs, we have one more way to satisfy our clients and at the same time ensure that the course stays lively, engaging and useful. Take a look at this really elementary demo that I put together for this very technique.Provide your audience with Job AidsI've always believed that people learn over time and that learning is a process not an event. So its impractical to include roll all of the support an individual needs, into a single course. In recent months I've been surprised to see so many wonderful courses that don't link to any follow up information such as a job aid or performance support. And to think that after all that effort in putting together a great course, it should be really easy for you to put together a one-page summary of how people can perform specific tasks! So my suggestion is to include a few things for people to use as a follow up for your course:a definite action that you'd like them to perform once they're done with the program;a set of people that can help them answer questions if they're stuck;a set of resources and job aids that can help your audience long after they've forgotten your hard-work on the courseEnable supervisors with Job InstructionOne of our problems as elearning instructional designers is that we often forget about other, lightweight methods of creating learning. I believe that people learn a lot from mentoring and apprenticeship. And who better to provide this support than the supervisors themselves? Fortunately we don't have to go down the heavyweight colocated training approach to achieve maximum benefits. In recent days I've become a big fan of the training within industry (TWI) approach of the Lean world. While the TWI set of practices dates back to second world war, the approaches make more sense today than ever. One of the practices from TWI is job instruction. The idea was to help supervisors get inexperienced workers 'up to speed' faster. So they taught supervisors to break down jobs into closely defined steps, show the procedures while explaining the key points and the reasons for the key points, then watch the student attempt under close coaching, and finally to gradually wean the student from the coaching. The course emphasized the credo, "If the student hasn't learned, the teacher hasn't taught". Job Instruction sheets considerably simplify this activity for the supervisor and its great investment to provide them with such material to support their teams. You'll find some excellent examples of job instruction sheets at this location. Take a look, download the ones you like and start putting together these single sheet plans for supervisors to support your course. I believe the impact could be tremendous.  One of the things that I'm always curious about is how we can do more with less. What simple, yet high impact methods are you discovering to support learning for your clients or company? Yes, my intention is to steal your ideas and use them at work, but more importantly I'm keen to learn about what's happening across the world in terms of inexpensive innovation in the field of learning. So as always, place your thoughts in the comments section of this blogpost and also let me know what you thought of this article. I'm always keen to hear your thoughts.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

  This last school year, a few co-workers and I decided to create a PBIS program for our students. It was pretty successful overall and I wanted to go through some of the different steps on how we developed it. Our program is far from perfect and I will be making updates to this blog as we continue to develop our PBIS program. SurveyThe first thing we did was we created a survey for our students to take. The questions that were included in the survey were if they saw problematic behaviors in class, if they were distracting, how we may be able to fix it and what types of rewards they would like as an incentive for positive behavior. From our results we saw that many students thought that a reward system would be beneficial to our program and they gave us many great ideas for rewards. From the results from our surveys, we were than able to give something concrete to our administrators so they could see that this was a problem in our program and that we needed to address it. We asked for a budget and our administrator asked us to contact our parent's club. We wrote a nice letter to them and than we had our budget. Posters/ExpectationsAfter we had the okay to proceed from our administrator and a budget, we than created posters that defined our expectations in different settings. We decided to create a 3 bees poster, where it defined our expectations in a simple 3 step expectations poster. The 3 expectations he students were expected to follow were to be respectful, be safe and to be responsible. We than defined what that meant in the hallways, in the classroom and in the lunch room. We also created our very own titan tickets that were to be given out to the students for good behavior and they could redeem for rewards.After our posters and tickets were created we had a large congregation to explain the brand new program to our students. We told them about our new expectations and how they could earn rewards. We also gave out raffle prizes during our meeting to get the kids excited, which they were. Here are two examples of the posters we would use to show that we have specific expectations in different settings:                  RewardsOverall a lot of the reward we used were food. We would go around on Fridays and the students would be called out to buy different items from the cart. We had small candy, larger candy, and little dollar store trinkets. Than every other week we would have a big prize. These prizes would be something like going outside for an hour, playing board games, going to the gym or watching a movie. These rewards would be expensive for the students but quite cost efficient for us. In the future we are planning on adding more "games" to our PBIS program. We have thought of games like the "Price Is Right" or "Family Feud" where students would need a certain amount of tickets to play in the game where they could possibly earn more rewards.As a last reward, we wanted it to be extremely rewarding, so I being the dedicated teacher I am I let the students shave my head. The students loved it and it was a group experience at the end of the year.   Using the cart/rolesAnother aspect of using a PBIS cart is that you can make it academic and a job readiness skill. Our students were given specific jobs each week that they were supposed to do to maintain the cart. The jobs included: Make the signs for our cart Stocking the cart Greeters at the door to tell the teacher the cart was thereA ticket counterA cashier who gave out the rewardsThe PBIS program also engaged our students in the curriculum by having them keep as a checking book of their tickets. They would count them every week and write down the amount and the difference from the week before.  Quote of the week: I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities. -Dr. Seuss Website of the month:If you are like thousands of other teachers out there you may feel that your students are constantly coming to you with a never ending supply of personal issues. Some more serious than others. First take a breath and realize that you are only one person and won't be able to solve every problem that your students have. We do what we can for our students and we try to intervene when we can help but there is always more work to be done. This is why I wanted to share this really helpful site with all of you. It is called 7 cups of tea and it has trained listeners to listen to peoples problems. It will set you up on a message link to talk to someone who is trained to listen to peoples problems and give them advice. If a student needs a little extra guidance and is not in an emergency type of situation than this would be a perfect resource for them to use. Also as a side note, they also are trained to listen to people talk about work stress;)

A few months ago, I wrote an article about empowering learners in your induction program. The thoughts I shared at the time were around the various components of an induction program. My points in that post were also around the value of considering a pull based approach for upskilling your new hires. A few days back Michelle Dineen asked a question on the Learning and Skills Group about accelerating learning for new employees and making their transition into their new roles, smoother. So, while I did reply to that post using my own experiences, in today's post I want to share some ideas consolidating some of the interesting work people around the globe are doing to make life easier and more effective for new hires.The way I look at the process of InductionIf you look at the picture above, you'll see that I consider Induction to be a multistep process:Orientation - which covers the standard stuff for people to understand the ecosystem of the company; people, policies, benefits, systems, etc.Context Setting - which helps people understand the culture and identity of the company; history, values, USP, brand image, business model, etc.Competence Building - which helps people pick up the technical skills they need for their jobs.Project Onboarding - which helps people ease into their specific team, department, section or project.As you'll notice, I've experienced learning to be a continuous process, so I believe that people will need an opportunity to keep building their competence as a result of ongoing challenges that they face on their projects. So here's a secret about me -- I don't believe in elearning, social media and the like because they're cool or because I think they can be cheap or maybe reduce the cost of training. All those are fair benefits, but I believe in these modes of learning because they provide continuing opportunities for people to support their own learning. The ideas I showcase today, are therefore a way for you to empower your learners in their performance situations.Idea #1 - Try an Induction PortalIn July last year I was on a webinar by Lars Hyland of Brightwave showcasing the induction portal (or rather the pre-induction portal) for Sky - a major home entertainment provider in the UK. The portal allowed new hires in various roles to start their induction even before joining Sky and they could go through self-paced elearning courses on company values, organisational structure, core product knowledge, health and safety in an environment that was engaging and representative of Sky's brand. There are some obvious advantages of the approach:Your new hires have an opportunity to interact with your brand much earlier than the date of joining. With an intelligent application of design thinking, you could have inductees salivate at the prospect of their first day at work!You can ensure that new hires complete certain elements of training even before they join the company. As a consequence, you can reserve the time you earlier spent in induction, for more valuable activities which perhaps can happen only in a face to face environment.And most importantly, you reduce time to competence in many areas -- people can get up to speed with the requirements of their job much faster than in the case of classroom only education, given the unbridled access to these tools.For the full article, click here. For an example of such a portal take a look at Vestas World.Idea #2 - Provide your New Hires with continuously Reference-able MaterialAt DevLearn 2009, I met Bill Corwin. Let me first tell you that Bill is who you'd call an absolute demo-god! At the Demofest in the conference, Bill was showcasing his work on the company's Employee orientation programme. Armed with tools as humble as a simple video camera, Powerpoint and a bunch of advertisements and videos from marketing, Bill set out to create what seemed like a really interesting way of orienting employees to your organisation. Bill was in a situation where he found new starters drinking from a fire-hose in what used to be a 4-5 hour orientation programme. There was just too much to take in during that short time. So Bill decided to reuse the classroom training assets to create an online orientation programme that employees could take at their own pace, when they need it."And it’s easy for them to revisit things if they want. By design, the training doubles as a reference tool for all 4,500 of our North American employees. In fact, 61% of our trainees use the course after their initial training, to look up information as needed."Bill's work is an example of simplicity in action. You'll notice that none of the materials would have taken too much programming skill to create. On the other hand the skill required was that of resourcefulness and content aggregation. If you take a look at the video above, you'll see that the program is designed with a very personable feel to it. People have videos of real people introducing the topic, the content is simply presented and it's no surprise that the number of learners who are confident they can find the HR info they need has jumped from 59% to 90%. I look at it as an excellent way of making your new hire orientation extremely effective.Read the case study here.Idea #3 - Give them Learning Paths to chart their own Learning JourneyWhile it's legitimate to ask people to learn on their own, it's tough for new hires who don't know what they don't know, to seek how to know what they don't know! Confused? Let me try again. It's fair to ask people to take charge of their own learning. That said, new hires are really keen to do well in their new job and get through their probation with a sense of success. Without a sense of what people expect from them in their jobs and what skills they'll need to meet those expectations, self-learning can become similar to a wild-goose chase. To tackle this, we're using an approach driven by Learning Paths. Very simply, a learning path is nothing but a chronological representation of an individual's learning journey from Novice to Expert in a specific job role. The idea is that you can hand a new hire their learning path at the start of their job in the company. From that point on, the electronic version of the path can be their entry point to seek out learning resources on the LMS, the organisational wiki or social learning platform. So yes, learning remains self-driven but has some tangible outcomes that the new hire can work towards. In coming weeks, I may just publish a case study that will illustrate real life examples of Learning Paths in action.Idea #4 - Provide them a Career CoachWhen you're new to a company and you need guidance on what your career should look like, it's never enough to look at a microsite or a set of documents or even the very engaging elearning module. You need someone to talk to; someone who can guide you through your career moves in the company. In your initial days at the company, this could be the person that makes you feel comfortable in the organisation. As you go on, this person connects you to others in the company, guides you through your learning journey and help you deal with the feedback you're recieving. As time progresses, this person can be your guide and advocate for career movements in the company and can again guide you to find the right people and resources to help your learning in your new role. In general, we call this role the career coach or the personal development coach at ThoughtWorks. We've had this support for quite some time now at the company and most people tend to swear by the support they get from their coaches.Idea #5 - Strengthen your Project Onboarding ProcessesLastly, I come to the oft-neglected aspect of Project Onboarding. We need to remember that people can't know everything before they come onto a team or a project or even a department. There are many things that we learn only when we see them in a performance context. This is where project onboarding is crucial. According to my colleague Pat Kua, "The main goal of a new person is to learn about the larger context. They seek out things they should know about, start to understand the domain specific vocabulary, and begin to work with the team and the work culture. The more complex the project is, and the larger the number of people who join, the longer this phase can last."Pat is someone I consider to be an expert on the topic of onboarding people. As with many other things, his skills are experiential and he knows about this having practiced it on many different teams. Take some time to look through the various onboarding strategies on his blog and his related article on InfoQ. I find all of them to be extremely lightweight, yet practical methods of getting a new person to be comfortable with the context, practices and the working of a project. Yet again, the ideas on my post are limited by my own experiential wisdom (or the lack of it). What ideas are working for you in your own induction context? I'll be hugely obliged if you shared them with me on the comments section of this blogpost. At ThoughtWorks, we're currently working on a new and improved model for induction and your experiences will help us greatly in our own approach. When we do get done, I'll do my best to get a case study out as long as I can get legal approval.(A quick clarification -- the career coach role in ThoughtWorks has till date been known as the sponsor. We're in the process of changing the nomenclature, so that it reflects the true purpose of the role.)© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Ever since the work of Peter Senge (1990) the concept of the Learning Organization remains the Holy Grail of management in contemporary business. This is merely due to the ever increasing pressure to keep reinventing products & services, business models and operational processes. Critique of Senge’s work was that it was too abstract to implement in organizations with rather vague dimensions as: systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning. Recent research into characteristics of learning organizations made the concept a bit more transparant for management. After "Is Yours a Learning Organization?" by Garvin, Edmondson & Gino now Erwin Danneels published an interesting research paper on (sort of) this subject. In his "Organizational Antecedents of Second-Order Competences" Danneels looks at competences that enable organizations to develop new competences, something that can be viewed as the source for innovation. In fact two types of learning can be distinguished in this respect: 1) learning that is aimed at improving existing product, services and processes, 2) learning that is aimed at producing new knowledge resulting in new product, services and processes. As the driving force for this learning Danneels points to five factors: Organizational Slack: the room an organization offers its employees for reflection and renewal. Not all worktime employees spend should be absorbed by the day-to-day job. Or as John Cleese put it: "If your want people to be creative, give them time to play!". Companies as Google and 3M are good examples of embedding this in management practice. Constructive Conflict: openness in the organization to challenge the existing ideas, beliefs and assumptions. Internal discussion (with mutual respect) is stimulated to foster innovation. This is of key importance for the double loop learning Argyris & Schön published about in 1978. Willingness to Cannibalize: active support for innovation projects that potentially take away sales from existing products or services. Don’t neglect technological innovations because they can cannibalize your existing business, but embrace them and embed them into the organizations competences. Environmental Scanning: stimulation of active environmental scanning by employees is crucial. Make them establish networks beyond the borders of the organization via professional associations, networks, conferences, trade shows and researchers. This is crucial for picking up new knowledge and competence in the ’outside’ world.  Tolerance for failure: failure should be seen as a potential source of future success. Mistakes should be seen as opportunities to learn. With this mindset employees sense the room for entrepreneurship that will enable the development of new competences.  An interesting article that is enhancing the growing body of research into learning organizations from the perspective of strategic innovation and the so-called second-order competences.

Survey MonkeyWhile I'm enjoying my very humid summer break I'm also reflecting on this great year of teaching for myself. One great tool that I used throughout the year was survey monkey! I found a variety of different uses for it.Survey monkey let's you give anonymous surveys to others and than gather their feedback in a nice organized fashion. So if you are a data tracking nerd like myself, look no further!I used it on a regular basis as an exit slip for different lessons. Although you do not get to see who is struggling with what it still is a nice indicator of how your class is doing overall. The reason I chose this tool over other formative assessment tools such as exittix or Socratic is because it was easier to build and easier for the students to access the site as well.Disability Support GroupsAnother valuable way to use the survey monkey website is to show data to your colleagues and administrators. At my school this year we found that many of our students felt bad or mistreated because they had a disability. Now this is in a high school setting where many students, whether or not if they have a disability, have self-esteem issues. My social worker and speech therapist and I thought that we should look into creating a support group for the students. This would be a safe environment where the students can discuss how they feel and specifically about how they deal with living with a disability. To be able to get the time and budget to create a support group, we first needed to show data the supported our claim. I than had all of the students in the center-based program that I work in take a survey about how they feel about having a disability and if they would find a support group helpful, in an anonymous setting. After they took the surveys, my PLC group and I reviewed the data and did see that there was a need that was not being addressed. I than took it to my administrator and he approved of us creating a support group for the students. If I did not use something like survey monkey to support my claim, it could have been much harder for me to get the ball rolling on such a project.Our plans after this are to have the students help facilitate the support group and guide the conversations. Myself or the social worker will attend each meeting and like other support groups they will be a safe place where people are asked not to share others personal stories. We are hoping to get guest speakers to come and speak to our students as well.The support group will be starting up this fall hopefully, so I will definitely have another blog about it once it is up ad running!Quote of the day: Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theatre.-Gail Goodwin

A few pieces of news that I hadn't posted yet. Firstly, I'm speaking at the XP2010 conference in Norway this year. The conference is from June 1-4, 2010 and I'm presenting the following workshops:Facilitating Dialogue in Situations of Conflict - with Rixt WiersmaThe Distributed Agile Game -with Chirag DoshiSecond, I'm participating in RubyConf India. I don't know what my level of participation will be like, but you can be sure to find me there, doing something or the other.And the last bit of news for now, is that I've submitted two proposals for Agile 2010 in Nashville, Tennesee. The two proposals are:Facilitating Dialogue in Situations of Conflict - with Rixt WiersmaMaking feedback work in your teamsI need your feedback for those proposals, so I can do my best to find a speaker's slot at Nashville. So if everything works out fine, I'll see you at Agile 2010 as well - fingers crossed!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

As I am enjoying my warm summer days and lounging around while taking in the sights of the great city of Detroit, I came to the realization that Camp Abilities Michigan was fast approaching its one year anniversary. As a new non-profit we are very fortunate to not be tied down to any past obligations and we are extremely flexible because of it. Starting a non-profit is ton of work. Some of the things that must be thought about right away are insurance, budgets, by-laws, and if your going to become a tax-exempt organization under the IRS.I have found that the most important part of creating a non-profit is to give the people who work for the non-profit structure and specific roles/job duties. I have found that since job roles have been created and implemented in our non-profit, all of our events/fundraisers/meetings have run much more smoothly than they did before. For this blog I wanted to discuss what types of job duties that are essential for a new non-profit to thrive. I also have created a structured schedule of job duties for when we are running a fundraiser. Please leave me a comment on if this was helpful or not or maybe some other ideas that you may have on creating a new non-profit.Job Roles For a New Non-Profit:For the job roles, I created a simple Google spreadsheets that was accessible to all of our employees. In this form I outlined the job title, duties, time needed for this role, and the person taking responsibility of the role. These are roles that are specific to our sports camp for children with visual impairments, but many of these roles could also prove essential for starting any new non-profit organization. I have broken down the types of tasks needed and have laid out the format/job descriptions we use for our own camp. Administration:Administrator roles for a new non-profit are essential to get off the ground. The two roles that our non-profit have are an Executive Director and an Assistant Executive Director. The way our non-profit's administration works, is these are the people who are delegating roles and job assignments to others, supervising the on goings of the camp, and helping out to fill up whatever holes may appear along the way. Our administration also takes care of a lot of the writings for by-laws/tax exempt forms and other government/corporation forms needed for non-profits.Public Relations:Our on-site coordinator is the "face" of our organization. She is designated to run meetings for our board of directors and to speak to other organizations that would help benefit our non-profit. This is another extremely helpful role that specifically identifies someone for their charisma and ability to speak to others. Organization:These are the positions which I do not have much of a talent. Our roles that fulfill the organization of our paper work, activities, inventory and budgets is the Treasurer, Activity Coordinator, Equipment Manager, Volunteer/Participant Coordinator and our Project Coordinator. These are five of the most involved job roles that we have. The Treasurer keeps our budget up and makes monthly reports on our finances. The Project Coordinator keeps records of all our files and creates new templates for our schedules and other miscellaneous materials. The Activity Coordinator sets up our schedule and designates who will be handling what events during our camp. The Volunteer/Participant Coordinator contacts parents, creates participant/volunteer forms and makes sure that everything is in their forms that is needed. Our Equipment Manager creates an excel sheet that outlines our needs for materials and also outlines our inventory. Miscellaneous: For any non-profit you will have unique needs that will need to be addressed. For our group we have two specialist roles. We have a Braille specialist who is in charge of creating documents in Braille. We also have someone in charge of the arts and crafts department, this person chooses t-shirts, decorations and what arts and crafts activities we will be providing at camp.Job TitleDescriptionExpected amount of time neededPerson Taking Role Assistant DirectorHelps out with supervising and makes sure everything is going according to plan. Goes to Public Relations outings and works with other roles to make sure that they are accomplishing what they set out to accomplish. Medium to high On Site Coordinator The face of the non-profit. Goes to PR Meetings and speaks on behalf of the non-profit, contacts outside organizations. Contacts camps. Medium to high TreasurerTakes care of financial situations, helps with grants, lets us know what our budget is and gives details about fundraisers. Medium Activity Coordinator Creates the schedule for the activities that are going to be taking place. Also figures out who will be coaching/overseeing which activities. MediumFood PrepLooks at the amount of food that is needed and creates schedules/menus for food. Medium Volunteer/Participant Coordinator Contacts schools and organizations to get volunteers and participants to sign up. Sends out registration forms and such. MediumBraille Specialist Brailles objects and events that are taking place. MediumArts and CraftsCreates logo, banners, and other misc.Medium Website Creates, updates and maintains camp abilities websiteLow to MediumEquipment ManagerTakes care of all the equipment and makes sure that we have the resources that we need for activities and for camp. Low to Medium Project Administrator Takes notes at meetings, record keeper, creates dates for meetings. Medium to High Executive DirectorSupervises, helps out other roles to accomplish tasks, etc. Medium to HighFundraiser Roles:These roles are quite similar to the roles that we created for the non-profit as a whole. There are roles that fill the need for administration, organization and public relations. The only role that I believe is essential to have a strong fundraiser event is having a "floater". This is a role that is easily overlooked but should be given to someone. This is the person who goes and helps to fill whatever may occur throughout the course of fundraiser event. I believe strongly that creating these lists and giving out specific duties to the individuals associated to your non-profit will help direct others and increase efficiency in a small non-profit. NameRoleJobFacilitatorPublic speaking, problem solve issues that arise, go around and see if the rest of the group needs an extra hand at any time. Talk to business owners about anything that is needed as well. Creates flyer for event.Host/FacilitatorGreet people and help our Scott with going around and solving problems as they arise. Help with planning people’s specific roles for the events. Public speakingFoodIs in charge of bringing food and making sure that patrons are fed and happyRegistrationTakes care of keeping track of registrations. Email anyone who you think will attend to her. She will set up the way that people register andRaffles/BasketsManages how many gift baskets we are getting and how much they will cost. Manages 50/50 raffles as well. Designates people that will help her with this, Jen?Tresurer Takes care of money at the end and pays the management at the end and makes the deposit to our account.ArtBrings in posters for CAM, brings brochures for CAM brings flyers for CAM. Any extra arts and crafts needed for fundraiser as well.FloaterWill go around with whatever group needs them the most @ whatever time. Flexible roleQuote of the Day:"Don’t worry when you are not recognized, but strive to be worthy of recognition."- Abraham Lincoln

I have not been blogging much so I thought I would share a prezi I created for parents to gain a better understanding of what adapted physical education is and how they can communicate this need to an IEP team.http://www.slideshare.net/ScottMcNamara1/what-is-apeQuote of the WeekEducation is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.-George Washington Carver

Here is the video for Camp Abilities Michigan!!I'm currently working on a new podcast and am expecting to put it out soon. Stay tuned for additional details:)

With widespread fall in fertility rates and significant rises in life expectancy, the median age of Britain’s population is rising. Today, for the first time in history, Britain’s over-65s now outnumber people under the age of 16. This ageing population trend is being made worse by the inevitable retirement of the so-called ‘baby boom generation’ over the coming decades.* As people live longer one of the many challenges they face is how to remain both physically and mentally active. Many studies suggest that people who lead intellectually stimulating lives are more likely to be free of dementia conditions like Alzheimer’s disease. Retirement today can last for many years and through e-learning this significant group of people have more and more opportunity to challenge their minds by learning for pleasure, or even reskilling for a less demanding but enjoyable part time job. Reasons why e-learning is so important to the ageing population: Simplicity - Learning on line is accessible for all without needing complicated computer skills. Once the subject is chosen, it is simple to download an eBook to read or to purchase and take part in an interactive online course. Fun - Learning a new subject for pleasure or work gives a sense of achievement. Many of the online courses make use of colourful visuals and include interactive quizzes and games which make the learning process rewarding and enjoyable. Accessible - e-learning allows people to learn from home via any computer, tablet or mobile phone. For the older generation, especially those who find it more challenging to get around, to be able to learn from the comfort of your own surroundings is extremely beneficial. Range of subjects available - The scope of courses available is extensive and growing all the time. There are leisure subjects such as photography, curtain making and dog training; computer skills covering both basic and advanced skills together with numerous language based courses to name a few. No Time Restrictions - Once the subject is chosen and the learning purchased it’s up to the learner when they start their chosen e-learning, whether an e-book or online course. With online courses usually providing you with 6 months to a year’s access learners can take up the course as and when they feel ready, and dip in and out as it suits them. Affordable - with no requirement to travel to a designated venue, and no cost for a face to face trainer the purchase cost of digital learning is kept low and affordable. For many people struggling to survive on a pension watching spend is extremely important. Exercises the mind - recent evidence shows that challenging the mind has significant health benefits helping to prolong the quality of life and fight the onset of illnesses such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. Continuing the learning process after retirement is extremely beneficial. Accessibility - As people grow older and live longer, mobility can become increasingly difficult. In some rural areas access to convenient public transport can be limited, and at times can be restricted due to adverse weather. E-learning is unaffected by this and brings learning to a global audience. Sadly, an ageing population has led to an increase in loneliness. Through e-learning the participant can become part of an active, enquiring community through which to build and maintain new friendships. Author: Sonya Donohoe, Elearning Marketplace *Royal Geographic Society

Henry Mintzberg wrote an interesting Business Week column about Leadership versus Management and it’s relationship with the financial crisis. He argues that the separation of Leadership (do the right things) and Management (do the things right) might sound feasible, but has shown to cause trouble. Too many leaders have become detached from the crucial aspect of good management practices in their organizations. We are overled and undermanaged is Mintzberg’s conclusion. So it is back to good management in the first place. This is the fundament that has built most successful organizations anyway. In it’s new form Mintzberg calls this ‘Engaged Leadership’ (both leading + managing). Something he finds Barack Obama a striking example of. Instead of distinguishing leaders from managers, Mintzberg states that we should encourage all managers to be leaders. And, we should define "leadership" as management practiced well. This is an interesting new emphasis for business schools and leadership development programs. Besides charisma and communicating strategic vision, leadership is back to being just hard and decent management work again! It is time for what the Romans called gravitas.

For all those who are creating a blended or totally online model of training and assessment we think you’ll find this infographic really useful. Getting assessment and feedback right is critical to learner success whether in education, or in the workplace. Blended and Online Assessment Taxonomy Infographic Find more education infographics on e-Learning Infographics

My respected former colleague Wilfred Rubens pointed me to an interesting posting on the HBR innovation blog of Scott Anthony. It is about the danger of knowledge blocking innovation. The central issue: people who have deep knowledge about a topic sometimes assume other people have that same knowledge. That in itself can be problematic for innovation, because R&D of companies can have wrong assumptions about level of knowledge of potential customers for their innovations. They assume customers know more then they do, making them blind for opportunities & threats regarding their innovations. Anthony supports this notion with a Gillette example. Although I agree to the expert blindness effect of having a deep body of knowledge in a field, I don’t see it block innovation. Most organisations involve multiple (knowledge) perspectives in their innovation processes, ranging from experts, production, marketing to customers. At least they will have extensive market research and field testing to overcome the issues Anthony is pointing at. Greater impact of this phenomenon can be perceived  in the field of learning & education and especially in rapid e-learning. When subject matter experts develop (e-)learning programmes the effect Anthony illustrates has direct impact on learners. In my work I come across some quite comprehensive (rapid) e-learning courses that aim too high for novices, are too comprehensive or focus on the exceptions rather that mainstream knowledge. Also for rapid e-learning it is important to counter this effect with professional development approaches. This shown the need for a triangle of involvement of the subject matter expert, instructional design and learners in rapid e-learning development processes