CLOUD APPLICATIONS

After trying some cloud applications, I have found that the clouds don't recognize the Powerpoint format OR they appear to load, do so for a few hours then say the file is too big.

Hmmmm...

PART 2 OF 2

Not Yet..... but getting closer?

Through my trouble shooting efforts, I have found that you can reduce the size of a file by turning it into a movie.  So, after playing the 90 minute video to include narrations, I started to upload it and found the file was still quite big.  So, I split it into two parts for posting.

Then I discovered that the movie did not maintain the audio as my research said it would.

Back to the drawing board.

Now, it's personal- lol!

MY FINAL PROJECT

I am sorry to have to delay the process of uploading my final project.

Because it is in PowerPoint format, rather than video format, I cannot upload to this blog.

As identified in my Next Steps part of the course reflection, I will be able to overcome this snag by having the presentation in a different format.

REFLECTIONS ON SRL DURING PROFESSIONAL INQUIRY

SRL Learning Outcomes From Professional Inquiry:

Giving and Receiving Feedback:

The rubric presented earlier in the course pointed out to me two learning blind-spot, of which I was previously unaware: Collaboration and Feedback.  Perhaps these SRL techniques have been neglected as I have developed other SRL strengths like self motivation and self control, as a result of learning experience in years of distance learning. 

I brought these areas for development into my SRL project so that I could explore the potential benefits as part of my inquiry.   In planning and implementing my SRL project, I came to realize that the deepest learning came from the critique from my colleagues at work, who agreed to assist me with my project by providing constructive feedback.  Through the collaboration with these learning partners, I was able to widen view beyond the limits of my own self-focus and the project became a better process and product because of their questions and ideas about the professional inquiry topic.

Most Challenging Aspects of the Professional Inquiry:

Looking back over my blog was helpful in taking me back to challenges I had experienced in my professional inquiry.  The images and words I chose revealled that juggling learning from the course, the process of developing the blog and managing the workload of the distal goal of creating a workshop for Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, was my greatest challenge. 

In the midst of this chaos, I experienced  a high service peak at work and a bout of strep throat for my daughters, then later for me.  Managing balance of life, work and study did threaten my usual self-efficacy for the task at times during this course.  I think the only thing that saved me from not achieving my professional inquiry goal was my SRL strategy of self motivation promoting and early start of sub-goals.   This, along with abandoning perfectionism was the key to my completion of my project within the required timeframe.

Learning Transfer Beyond the Course:

I didn’t expect that there would be so many common concepts between my professional inquiry and SRL and so the learning transfer cross-pollinated across both SRL and Solution-Focused Brief Therapy.   Some of the common ideas that I hav noticed, and therefor allow for deeper learning transfer beyond the course are:

·      Best results come from engaging the individual’s motivation at a deep and personal level

·      Goal setting and visualization of a preferred outcome can direct the client’s behaviour to support the learning goal

·      Building on strengths to create the self-efficacy to address areas of need

·      Questions, in the form of collaboration and feedback can support positive steps toward change

Next Steps:

In consultation with my Manager, it was thought that PowerPoint was the ideal form of the project, so that it could be shared with others easily.  While it is true that the ease of sharing of the project is in the current form, I am not satisfied that PowerPoint allowed for the workshop to be as easily shared as if it was in YouTube or Prezi format.  My colleagues and I will take this discussion further, as we have, together, developed a new distal goal of sharing this workshop with the our Ontario College Employment Sector network throughout the province.  In doing so, we will be able to share the research I completed with hundreds of counsellors, rather than our staff group of 15 people in a free, completely accessible workshop format.  I don’t know that I would have considered doing so without the encouragement and vision from my collaboration with my trusted colleagues.  It also made the process so much more fun and rewarding!

Well, I spent most of my weekend working on my powerpoint for my professional inquiry and it is finally completed.  I had no idea how difficult it is to add audio messages so that the workshop can be presented without requiring a presenter to be in the same room.

After takes and retakes of my verbal messages, I now have a product that is worthy of submitting for the project.  I will be meeting this week with two of my colleagues who will be providing me feedback and suggestions for changes that I hope will make it even better for my intended audience.

I was talking about this professional inquiry with the leader of my division, and I think it can be used to provide a free training option for other agencies like mine in our network.  More editing will be required to make it less academic in focus, and more user friendly, but I think that it is a very good start and I learned so much in completing of the project about the subject of SFBT.  

They say that if you want to learn something yourself you sound try and explain it (teach it) to someone else.   This is so true in the case of this project.

REFLECTIONS ON FINAL PROJECT

My final project is now well underway and I am ready to start building my PowerPoint presentation.  The research materials have been outstanding and I find myself wanting to read and research more and more, but I am beginning to feel a sense of urgency to get beyond the cognitive stage of thinking about my chosen subject (Solution-Focused Brief Therapy) and on the more behavioural tasks of mapping out timelines and getting the ideas into the proper format.

I mentioned in an earlier blog that I can tend to get stuck in perfectionistic design mode and I find myself struggling with this again.  Before, it was about building a blog that had the right look and structure and now again with PowerPoint.  Sometimes I wish someone would tell me, with grand authority, that I must use "this presentation theme only", so that I could better accept the choice and move on to working with what I have got.  Since that isn't going to happen, I think I am going to have to set a time limit for myself, and the best option during that time is the winner.  I am aware that self adjustment and correction are good SRL strategies, but so are setting timelines for the overarching goals.

I mentioned in a discussion in D2L earlier, that I am beginning to see SRL themes jumping out at me in everyday life.  In D2L, I used the example of my FitBit dashboard, which is helping me to learn about healthy lifestyles.   I know that deeper learning has occurred when what I notice and how I think about issues, problems and solutions are effected by what I am studying.  I am glad that SRL is such a practical and impactful study subject that I can use beyond the classroom and into my everyday life.  Life is learning.

Juggling Priorities

Module 4 is definitely proving to be the most challenging workload yet.  The kids have come down with the flu and work is at the highest peak of the year.  Yikes!

I definitely can not wing it.  I need a plan to be able to accomplish all of the goals for meeting in a small group, researching tracking and eval methods and doing the reflection on the project.

Once I have the group meeting, I can map out the rest of the work for the weekend.
I think the challenge would be to get the project laid out in terms of structure of the information first, then decide on citations and use of clips.  I have to remember to work within the time I have in order to ensure the project is not left incomplete.  Perhaps I will have to provide more of an overview and go into less depth.  I will see how the compiling of the research goes this weekend.

Scholarly Articles and YouTube Video Research NOW COMPLETE!

Over the past few days I have completed my research including:

Burtwell, R., & Chen, C. P. (2006). Applying the principles and techniques of solution-focused therapy to career counselling. (U. o. Toronto, Ed.) Counselling Psychology Quarterly , 19 (2), 189-203.

as well as all of the YouTube videos.

What I want to remember:

• This article mentioned "excavating" and digging into the client's past as unnecessary in the process of SFBT.  This gave me the idea for the presentation to be based on an analogy of building a structure... the building plans, the foundation, corner stones, building blocks etc.

REFLECTIONS FROM A SRL PERSPECTIVE

I am finding myself getting agitated with the many sources of information and the reading volume.  It is becoming more difficult to sort out the information into something that will be easy and useful to my coworkers.  I am losing motivation for the reading.

In order to better regulate, I think I will apply the SRL technique of adapting instead of plowing on with reading.  Perhaps a little reward for my efforts is in order.  YouTube may be just the thing to help me maintain motivation and the feeling of progress I need to keep things flowing.

4th Scholarly Article

Reading this article took me back to my stats courses.  Not an easy read!  But very interesting that there is research going into creation of a measure of SFBT for use with clients. 
 

Grant, A. C., Cavanagh, M. J., Kleitman, S., Spence, G., Lakota, M., & Yu, N. (2012). Development and validation of the soution focused inventory. The Journal of Positive Psychology , 7 (4), 334-348.

 Things I want to remember:

• good quote for problem-focused thinking, would contrast well against the SFBT positive thinking 
• also good for disccussing current assessments available being very limited and limited research
• the questions that make up the assessment could easily be adapted for less formal work with SFBT

Limitations:

• not much on how to change one's approach using SFBT as a communication tool 

Scholarly Article #3

I just read the third article, which I thought would bridge the world of SFBT and SRL, but the research did not allow for useful information for me to use in the creation of a resource.  I think it would only cloud and confuse my message.

Saadatzaade, R., & Khalili, S. (2012). Effects of Solution - Focused Group Counseling on Student’s Self - Regulation and academic achievement. International Journal for Cross-Disciplinary Subjects in Education , 3 (3).

Things I want to remember:

• Personalize goals- good potential quote page 4
• Helplessness-good quote on page 4

Scholarly Article #2

My second article was

Bezanson, B.J. (2004).  The application of solution-focused work in employment counselling.  Journal of Employment Counselling, 41, 183-191.  

What I want to remember about this resource:

• Acknowledges that the rapid changes in the world of work require a new approach
• Has a really good preface, I might want to use this as a quote for what SFBT actually is 
• Crisis of imagination thoughts were unique

What it doesn't address:

• A sense of "how to" or process- my resources needs to have a sense of flow, not just SFBT ideas 

ARTICLE #1

I just read the first scholarly article:

Miller, J. H. Building a solution focused strategy into career counselling. University of Canterbury. Christchurch: University of Canterbury.

Things I want to remember about the article for use in final project :

-GREAT sample questions

-constructivist principles and premises

-features of BSFT - future focus, stance of curiosity, positive expectation, client self-helpfulness

-3 Stages in process

-EARS approach

-Scaling Questions

-reflection break

-homework assignment

-4c's 

Limitations- where I need to work further

-auditory examples

-tool that is visual- a map or cheat sheet

Old School... meet New School!

APA Style Citation.... I need to get into the swing of it.

You can tell how many years since my undergrad when I explain that I just discovered that MS Word has a "new" section for Works Cited that I can just populate by entering in data.  This is cool new learning.... well new to me, anyway!

Old School no more!!!

Got APA Style?

Apparently I am not very stylish... at least not when it comes to APA citation style.  I have come to the conclusion that I need some help in the form of resources.

I went to Chapters today and their single book on APA had 160 page but only 10 pages of APA.  What?  Forget that!  I am going to use some online resources instead and save the $40!


I found this Purdue University poster in Google Images that I think will be quite handy for quick reference.

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/media/jpeg/APAPoster09.jpg

Getting To Know Me...

I am still testing ways to post my photos...
what better time to add my most recent family portrait!

To really know me, you have to know those I love:

Planning Blog- Proximal and Distal Goals

Notations imported from before blog was complete 

I am trying to think about  what I will need well into the future.  My major stumbling block now is the vision of using this for all the GDPI courses, and maybe onward to PME. 

I just discovered the feature of Labels and have set up a dummy GDPI801 Label to test ways of separating this course info from future course info....hmmm this could take a while.

Reflections:  I have come to the conclusion that I need to focus on more proximal goals.  The idea that it can all be changed at a later date prevails!

Sweating the Small Stuff?

Notations imported from before blog was ready for posts

This process is taking forever!!!!

I needed to stop and figure out why.  

Reflections:  I am way too concerned about the aesthetics of the site and all of the bells and whistles that I want it to have.  I tell myself that I must stop so that I don't over invest.  The course has more content this week and I need to move on from fronts, backgrounds and gadgets.

I fight this for a few more hours and two late nights have me exhausted and ready to given in.  

Blogs- Choices Become Overwhelming

Imported ideas from notes before blog was complete

Just like when I go out to dinner and the menu is too big...I am frustrated with platforms choices!

Wordpress, Weebly, Blogspot... I can't seem to find one I like.  

My past use of WordPress has me wanting to try something new rather than removing and retooling old content.

And, I am cheap, so I want the best for free..... maybe my expectations are too high!

My Previous Blog- Reflections on SRL Process

Funny SRL story...
I have already developed a blog, last time using WordPress.   I came to do this blog when I was involved in a local literacy partnership.  As part of the program, we were testing the use of competency portfolios as a motivational tool for clients.  In our community, we were testing employer and labour market applications of portfolios.

I had already taken Portfolio Development as a university course which earned me many transfer courses and, because my portfolio was successful, I was also asked to speak at a conference on Prior Learning Assessment.  So, I had already clearly identified that competencies, but was asked to continue to participate in order to evaluate the potential of the course.

As I became more involved in this college course, I became distracted and frustrated.  I already knew what was being taught and I felt that I needed to focus on learning I had not yet demonstrated.  Clearly the professor did not understand SRL and, even though I tried several times to dialogue about the NEW learning I wanted to focus on, she was having none of it.

In the end, we agreed to disagree.  She stuck to her script and, given that my motivation was to learn something new rather than to get a good grade or achieve credit, I continued to customize my learning experience.  She was not happy, but I remained engaged and used the opportunity to learn about blogging and how to leverage this concept, which was new at the time, to help me understand how to guide clients to do the same.

I failed the class.  And, yippee!  I also learned something new and important to me.

I love that I had the opportunity to live this SRL example.  What is great about it is how I can apply this deeper learning as I talk with my daughters (10 yrs and 12 yrs) about their goals and ambitions in academics.

Taking risks, adjusting my plan, having my motivations being fuelled by intrinsic motivation rather than teacher's validation.  These are all things that I have come to know as

SRL

I Did it!

I think I am ready for ACTUAL work for GDPI now- lol!

Placeholder Post For Future Courses

This post is to test labels for other courses beyond GDPI800, like GDPI801

Bring it on!