SLS 2011

www.goldzone.org

The SLS Fall Conference was on November 9th at the Double Tree Hotel in Syracuse, NY.  We were invited to present for the second year - thank you Patty!  Once again, we enjoyed sharing our passion for instruction and technology with the LMS crew from the area.

First, as promised, we want to make mention of...

• Justin and Laurie - thanks for the last minute equipment fixes. We appreciate your help. Even techies run into issues at times!
• Thanks for providing so many great segues Tina!  One might think you were a plant...
• Marcie - good luck with your ePort.  We are thrilled you walked away with ideas you can use (hope all of you did)!
• Thanks for opening the discussion about public reflection Sue.  It is a topic that inevitably comes up.  Many of our folks seem uncomfortable with the idea of sharing their reflections in a public forum.  We have added the image and quote above as a continuation of our  response to this conversation. 

Now onto our reflections...
First let us say we learned something too today!  We did not realize that the resolution setting on your computer could change the way a website displays when connected to a projector. Thank goodness Justin was there to give us the heads up - now we know.  Though we probably could have figured it out on our own when not in front of a group of professional techies, it was a great relief to have a quick and easy fix.

What about those goals we had for today?
We completed the presentation with no major glitches.  It seemed to go well.  The polls suggest that you were engaged, and you do understand the difference between a website and an ePortfolio.  Only time will tell if you apply what you learned!  We hope you will share a link with us if you do!  We look forward to feedback to this post and conference feedback. The conference has come to a close, but we hope you won't be strangers:  nextgennow@nextgennowpd.com

What ideas and/or feedback do you have for us?  Do tell!  Add a comment to this post or email us directly.  Hopefully we will see you all again next year- if not before!!

Developing Our Philosophy and Setting Goals!

We are so glad we finally had to sit down and write our philosophy and goals! We believe in practicing what we preach so we want to keep our ePortfolio alive. We often talk about our philosophy and vaguely of our goals but we have never written them down. It was a powerful experience finally getting our philosophy on paper. It took a lot of talking and reflecting to dig down to the truth of what we believe. Once we got them down on paper, then video taped (with the help of the fabulous Karen!) ourselves saying them, we knew we could own our philosophy. We truly believe each of our statements is true and we hold ourselves to them.
     Goal setting was much more difficult than we anticipated but we knew we needed to do it. We found an article discussing a Harvard Business School Study in which MBA students were asked if they set goals. Only 3% had written goals and 18% had goals but not in writing. The remaining 84% had no specific goals. When the students were interviewed again 10 years later the 18% who had goals was making twice as much as the 84% who didn't and the 3% who had written goals was earning 10 times as much as the rest of the class combined! We want to be in the 3%! If having clear, written goals will get us there we are all for it.
     We started writing our goals and got confused again. We knew we wanted to write SMART goals because that is what we have been using in our virtual classes but we had the hardest time with the "R" of SMART. "R" stands for realistic. Does realistic mean we have to be sure we can do it? We try a lot of things without being sure of the outcome but that's part of what keeps us engaged in our work too. Does realistic mean we can't aim over our heads? We're frequently over our heads and figure out how to get to the surface. We like the challenge. We decided realistic means we think we can do it. Believing in our ability and our participants ability to step up to the plate every time we approach an unknown is realistic. It has worked for us so far and we plan to move forward with the same momentum that has kept us going and growing.