education

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Tracking Professional Development

How do you keep track of your professional development? Where I work, we have a log (a Google sheet) which is shared with us at the start of each calendar year and which it is our responsibility to keep up to date. There are two elements (each with its own tab on the sheet),

1) Training log (mandatory) – “21 hours per calendar year, with a balance where possible between centre-wide development, programme-specific development and external development. These activities may include online or face-to-face training courses, talks, and workshops.”

2) Scholarship log (optional) – “…scholarship can be defined as broad and varied activities which are personal, but structured and reflective in their nature. This could be done by further qualifications or research. […] The definition of scholarship is knowledge acquired by study. In the context of learning and teaching, it might mean evaluating the impact of new approaches in your teaching or carrying out projects to answer specific pedagogical questions.”

I think it is good to have this framework for recording development, as otherwise I’ll attend stuff/watch stuff/do stuff, blog about some of it, but not have an overview. Recently 4C in ELT posted asking “How often do you actually seek out recordings to talks you missed and watch them?” – I was able to look at the log and identify at least 12 (there’s another session I watched via recording too that I haven’t yet added!) for this calendar year. I like accessing sessions via recording because then I can pause them whenever I want to (for a wee, to get a cup of tea, to have a thinking break…). Anyway, in total, in this calendar year, to date (it’s not over yet, for all it’s December already!), I’ve logged 129hrs in my training log (!)

The biggest chunk of that, weighing in at 50 hours, is the Instructional Design course I have completed this semester. 10 weeks, at 5hours per week. (The course reckons 5-6 hrs per week so I took the lower bound for logging purposes.) It includes synchronous tasks and a weekly one hour Google Meet session. There is also an optional assessment, creating materials using one of the tools which I did in a race against time, while I still had access to the free trial of the tool in question! It wasn’t a rush job but there were definitely extra hours squeezed into those weeks! I have been fitting the course in around everything else, piecemeal – Google Calendar and Google Keep have been my very good friends this semester, for keeping track of everything going on. (There are two more weeks of the course, but I’ve logged the course as one entry using the lower bound of the time, as otherwise there would be a million mini-entries of time spent! Suffice it to say it is unlikely to be *less* than what I’ve logged, much more likely to be more!)

The second biggest chunk, at 48hrs, was a FutureLearn Expert Track (which is a set of courses on a particular theme) – Autism: Developing Knowledge of Autistic Experiences:

I completed this Expert Track during the summer holidays this year – 4 courses, 4 weeks each, 3hrs per week. However, I did them in a more compressed time frame – more hours per week, fewer weeks. Hyperfocus is a wonderful thing!

So, those two, between them, account for nearly 100hrs out of the 129. It’s inevitable that a course is going to represent a larger number of hours than one-off things can. A distant third, in terms of chunks of hours, is the ELTC Away Day which accounted for 6hrs: A morning of talks and an afternoon of workshops, all F2F. For me the highlight of the day was the session in the afternoon about the EdDoc run by Sheffield University’s School of Education. In an ideal world I’d like to start doing one in the academic year 2026-2027. Since that session, which took place in late September, I’ve come up with an idea and started doing some reading around it – though the Instructional Design course temporarily moved further reading/preparation to the back burner (time is finite, however hard I hyperfocus!). Close behind the Away Day, in terms of hours, was a “slow conference” called Feminism X EAP, which I spent 4hrs on, not consecutively but over the course of a week or so. It seems a long time ago now, but it took place between the 9th and 15th May. It was really interesting, Story – by Bea Bond. It was Activity 2/3 on Thursday 9th May::

I recommend having a read! I hope there will be another slow conference next year, I’d never participated in one before but it is a format that really appeals to me.

The remaining hours have mostly been made up of watching recordings of various sessions and attending a small number of live online sessions too. Many of the recorded sessions I found via MyDevlopment which is our university professional development portal, combining internally made content and curated external content. Through it I discovered a treasure trove of webinars hosted by CareScribe – and in seeking out this link, I notice that there are a number of new ones which I am keen to watch when I can! Carescribe focus on neurodiversity and was founded by an NHS doctor, strategy consultant and software engineer in 2020, and the tag for their events page goes thus: “We run free online events to raise awareness and support neurodiversity in the workplace. See what talks are coming next and sign up below.” Highly recommended.

I wouldn’t have known about them without MyDevelopment, where some of the recordings are linked to as part of the curation side. I suppose one of the challenges of development is finding the sessions to attend (or watch via recording) in the great jungle of the internet. We are quite lucky in this regard. We have MyDevelopment, as already discussed, but it is a university-wide platform so it doesn’t curate ELT-specific content. However, our TD team put out a weekly bulletin via Google Workspace highlighting external opportunities amongst which webinars and recordings. There is also an internal one highlighting sessions the TD team is hosting and also sessions that University are running relating to education in general e.g. about AI, about Blackboard Ultra, about how to teach inclusively etc. Examples of sessions I’ve attended live online via MyDevelopment are Supporting Dyslexic Students and Students with SpLD and Supporting Students on the Autism Spectrum.

In terms of ELT-specific online sessions and recordings, there has been plenty of AI-focused content delivered and recorded by the ELTC TEL team, which I have accessed via a mixture of watching recordings on our ELTC TD portal (separate from My Development, just for our department) and attending live online when I can. I have also watched an older recording about pronunciation teaching in EAP by Gemma Archer (of Strathclyde University, at least at that time). In terms of external content, there was a recording of a Penny Ur session called “Getting them to talk in English” which lives on YouTube, recommended by Sandy Millin in one of her TYT Delta Newsletters (you don’t have to be doing the Delta to benefit from them!).

All in all, it has been a good (calendar) year for development, though I’ve not done much blogging. I think I’ve ended up instead with bits and bobs of notes – in the development log, in google docs linked to in the development log. Thank goodness for the development log, without it I would be like “ehhh I didn’t do THAT much development this year really, did I…how remiss of me” because it all becomes part of the blur of everything else we get up to at work (or in the summer holidays in the case of the Expert Track!) – but all evidence points to the contrary! Perhaps one of my New Year’s resolutions for next year will be to write more blog posts linked to the things I do for development/my reflections on it! (Perhaps I could put some of the links in the other tab of the scholarship log, which for this year is rather empty…)

Anyway, circling back to the question at the start of this post (and congratulations if you made this far!) – how *do* you keep track of your development? Do you have an effective system for it? And also do you have any links to cool stuff you’ve read or watched that you could share with me so that I can have a look too? 🙂 I look forward to hearing from you via the comments!

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Instructional Design Course

I am 8/10 weeks through the Instructional Design course (link) run by some of the good ELTC TEL team folk. Their site is called The Training Foundry and on it you can find information about the courses, but also webinar recordings and blog posts. It’s pretty cool. This is the subtitle for the Instructional Design course (IDC):

“Our Instructional Design for Language Teachers course can help experienced teachers design flipped and asynchronous materials.”

It is a 10 week course and I would quite happily recommend it to anyone who is interested in principles of online learning and learning to use a variety of tools to design asynchronous content. It has a weekly live online session (using Google Meet), and each week there are also a series of tasks to complete. There is interaction between students (sharing output, commenting on others’ output etc) via a forum.

Most of the tools that we’ve learnt the basics in were actually new to me (with the exception of Google Slides [Week 1] but even with that I learnt new things about it!):

  • Wordwall

Wordwall (link) is a very user-friendly tool. It is subscription-based but I haven’t taken out a subscription, just using the limited free version for the purposes of the course. You can make the usual array of ELT activities. One I particularly like is called Word wheel. You input words and it creates a wheel in which each word is a segment of the wheel (looks sort of like a pie chart with equally sized segment). You can “spin” it and it will stop at random on one of the words you have input. You could then get students to define it (as we had to do in one of our online lessons, using vocabulary from an article we had read), for example.

Another online-based tool for making asynchronous content. Also requires a subscription but it offers a free trial which served the purposes of the course. It is pretty versatile. You input information into a form and it spits out an activity. You can also e.g. create a voice recording tool that you could embed into a page on your platform, or whatever asynchronous content tool you were using, for students to use for an activity, make interactive video activities, activities using pictures and much more.

As you can see, my free trial is coming to an end. I’ve had a good play with it though and really like it. But it is EXPENSIVE! So it is something that a business/institution/self-employed person might invest in rather than an individual. Our TEL team has access via institutional subscription, for example. I find it really visually appealing and quite intuitive to use. Interactive elements are built in, if a little limited. But limitations are lifted because you can also embed interactive content from e.g. H5P, Quizlet or its sister tool Storyline (see below for more information about this one!).

  • Storyline

This one, you have to download a programme onto your computer to do it rather than using it in a web browser. It is part of RISE so you can find it there. No screenshot because it only runs natively in Windows and I decided therefore to use an old spare Windows laptop (creak creak creak!) rather than subject my even older Macbook to “Parallels” which is required in order to run it. (Said macbook makes enough take-off noises for using Google meet, so! But for as long as it limps along, I shall use it!!) However, it effectively looks like powerpoint when you open the programme. The area you are working with is slide-shaped/screen-shaped. But unlike powerpoint it has a lot more power in the interactivity department. It has a timeline, it has “layers”, it has “triggers” and all sorts. The newest version also has AI stuff inbuilt. All of this stuff enables you to create a lot of interactivity in various ways. It gives you a 2 week free trial before kicking you out in the absence of a giant pile of moolah. We spent two weeks of the course on it because there is a lot to learn. You would use this if you were creating materials for a course that you were planning to run multiple times because it is a big time investment that is required to create stuff. At the ELTC it is used a lot for flipped content for the summer school and at the bit where I am (USIC) it is used as the basis of most if not all of the interactive content that we embed onto Blackboard for learners, to support the learning done live online and F2F.

In terms of using the interface, I struggled because using it on a computer that hasn’t got strong processing powers and hasn’t got a big screen, it made it even more time-consuming than it should be. Everything is tiny (the parts where you control the “layers”, the timeline and all that jazz) and you have to generate previews to check what you did works properly on a regular basis, and the computer had to strain really hard each time!

The rest of the course

This week we’ve been working on using video in online learning. Which, again, is very time-consuming and requires decent (probably fairly expensive) equipment to produce high quality stuff. We have learnt a bit about video editing (which I have done a little bit of myself in a hobbytastic kind of way!). Still to come in the final two weeks is zooming out to consider more about designing a whole course rather than sub-parts of it and then a final wrapping up and moving forwards week.

It’s been really nice to learn how to use all these different tools and challenge myself in this way. The final assessment was creating a storyboard and run of lessons in Articulate RISE and I am happy with what I have made for that (I have completed it early because of the whole free trial running out thing!). I based it on an AES listening exam lecture. It was also of course interesting to study some of the theory around online learning, as well as focus on making content accessible (which is a legal requirement!). Overall I think the course works really well, building each week on previous content and progressing logically, and the live online sessions definitely complemented the tasks and forum part.

Have you used any of these tools? Which ones do you favour? Do you use any other tools which I haven’t mentioned? There is a lot to keep abreast of, isn’t there!