My morning meeting disaster?...... no chance!

Today fate contrived to ruin me, i had a presenation to give in front of all the managers of Vision Support but the taxi man failed to show up and caused me to be about 10 minutes late thus missing my slot... anyways that was forgiven by those in the meeting and i was allowed in later on so all is well... i thik not... my computer then decided to fail to project on to the wall causing me yet mroe obstacles to overcome... I however remain calm (irriated but calm none the less) and due to having a set of A3 sheets with the majority of slides already on i was able to give the presntation using them instead... albeit without all the information to display... So yes i can confirm that again i was good and conveyed my message and was pleased to have done so after all the hassle i had!

In other news... i registered for the NVQ management level 4 thing today and then spent some time perusing the whole websiteto see what it all entailed!

off to london pretty much now so shall be back on here monday
bye for now

Going to Ireland

Yes as the title suggests i am going to Ireland now, thanks to Rich finding a course for me to go on i have now booked on to a conference run by Erikson on making learning mobile. Sounds good and best of all its free!!! so no personal development budget wasted there!!!

Tomorrow is the BIG presentation to the SMT not that im too worried as its only a brief explanation of how we want the planing stage of the web service development to go ahead. I have my powerpoint all done ready and i hope that it clears up any queeries that the strategiv managers have.

To make up for the lack of posting yesterday and the ay before... what i did:
1. Wrote my presentation
2. Discussed with a service user one of his ideas
3. arranged dates in the diary for the next couple of months
4. Booked off my holiday to Munich!! woo hoo

ok thats it for now
bye till toorrow

The speakers and the projector

a joyous day today as my speakers and video projector were brought up to meet their new owner (me) by Les. They i do think will be getting some good use and shall help me in many a presentation in the future. For now they shall just need a bit of testing...

Now what else of a more practical day to day note can i talk about... er... oh yes of course which was very productibve and again as we managed to discuss a lot of things and catch up with where we both were in terms of the project. The meeting showed me that i was getting on well with my project and that i was focused well on some of the aspects that i consider to be important... i guess i just need to keep on track with them and things should go well.

I also tried to install Kurzweil (a scan and read programme on to my computer at work but with limited success so shall have to wait till Dave (the IT co-ordinator) is back in the office so that he can maybe look at it and help out.

anyways i look forward to seeing how well this projector works over the weekend maybe and therefore prepare a decent slide show for the meeting the following week.

Induction to VST

Today i spent an hour or so being shown around VST and meeting some of the staff members in there. It was in my opinion very interesting to see what they did and helped me apreciate the size of the comercial arm (which i hadn't previously really understood). I got a chance to speak to the former KTP associate in their organisation and got to see hwo he worked and what he felt was important in getting a successful project (something which i guess is pretty usefull as he recieved a highup award for his project).

The afternoon was spent in a enterprise team meeting and was good for us to feed back as a team our opinions and concerns. From that meeting i think i can start to look forward to what will be required in terms of presentations). I have to say i think Steve is very funny in those meetings he really does make me laugh!!

Anyways hopefully should be seeing Les tomorrow and if i do he could well be bringing me up the projector i ordered out of the equipment budget!! So looking forward to that!

see you tomorrow
Tim

Personally developing myself (or at least deciding how to)

Hello hello

How be? i hear you ask...

At the end of the week i am good, today i have been writting my personal development plan and attempting to answer what i consider to be a difficult queston currently of "where do i see myself in 5 to 7 years time?"

I decided on the two preconfrence workshops i will attend in OCtober as well today, the first being a half day on web 2.0 and screen readers the second being on the transition of web 1.0 to web 2.0 so hopefully they provide me with some usefull information and advice on how we can try to get the website and web portal working in a fully accessible but fully advanced way. Rich today also sent me what seems like an interesting book on website accessiblity so again hopefully that will help me with my future work.

I also decided to try and organise myself properly today as i was starting to get a bit messy and slack with my papers and sloppy with when i had things on... lets see how long that lasts!

Monday i am going to work from home and look at short cuts and how they are used to navigate the computer wihout the use of a mouse, following the IT lesson the other day i feel its a very impressive skill as there are so many to remember!

Think thats enough for now
Tim

It pays to chek back over minutes of meetings

I today found out the importance of checking back over meeting minutes as i went over the LMC1 minutes with Sue today and have to say was somewhat surprised to find out some parts of the minutes that had been actioned. It turns out that my presentatioin on the 8th of November should be between twenty and thirty minutes long :O oh yes indeed that is an attempt at a shocked amily.

The morning was spent looking in to and booking an exhibition/conference helod in london on accesiblity and comuters called Techshare 2007. It actually looks very helpfull and seems to fit in very well with the project so fingers crossed that goes well.

Tomorrow i aim to try and get some more work on the lesson plans done so that i can spend the early part of next week testing them.

Bye for now
Tim

Christmas gets earlier each year!

Today i opened up discussions about what to do for a staff christmas party/event... Now as a working person i need to make sure i am ready fro christmas a long time before hand... so some suggestions have been made for what we could do and run by the few peoplein the office.

In terms of work done today, Andrew and I trialed our questionaire out ona couple of willing volunteers to see what we might need to add to it for when we actually start it up in terms of getting volunteers to phone the service users.

I also too a look at the access software that come as part of Skype to see how that could help a person with a visual impairment use the programme... in my opinion there appears to be little extra support provided and the supposed simplified graphics option makes it harder to view the bits it changes as apposed to easier.

Emails today were numerous and of course as usual it was good to hear from the people i met on the management course as to what they werw doing. I also booked two dates in the diary for a workshop and a meeting so hopefully they will be interesting (unfortunatly i did have to remove a date that was already in the diary due to a cancelation of the event)

Well that is quite comprhensive as to my days actiities so i shall leave it there
Tim

Its all about IT training

Today my day has been very geared towards IT and the traiing of it, apart from a brief irritating restbite in between observing wendy give an IT lesson and writting up my lesson plans.

I have now gaged an idea of how i should try to structure the lessons and what i would need to do to make them fully accesible. It was interesting to see how mch you can operate a computer without a mouse (admittedly i shold be much better at this but due to lazyness i havnet really put the effort in).

Registering for an NVQ is a total farse in my opinion... i feel like without Jess's (KTP modules 2 and 3 participant) help i would have never found out how to do it or where to go... ridiculous AND thanks to Andrew for helping me fill otu a totally inaccessible form anyways that should now start in about six weeks time according to Jess (ever so efficent down at Momenta)!

Well tonight i think i will continue trying to work on these lesson plans as i said last week working late has its benifits and whilst its fresh in my head i think i will get a fair aount sorted with it.

farewell for now
Tim

working late has its benifits

Last night i was sat at my kitchen table drawing up some plans and maps for the website and portal. Today i presneted them to some of the strategic managers and staff to show how things would work and i feel like it has clared up some questions that they had and it has deffinatly cleared up in my mind how it will work too... therefore i beleive taht although i havent ever really worked late/at howe before i can now see its benifit.

Brillinatly today as well i ordered my speakers which look amazing so i look forward to their arival... the sound that they give out will not only help in my presentations but selfishly make the music play sound good too!!!

anyway thats a short post today but the office is closing down now so i need to get out of here

back next week

Monthly meeting 1

Today was the day of my first monthly meeting with my supervisors fromthe charity and the uni (Sue and Les resctively). I think that the meeting went well with agenda items i had collated being discussed nicely. I look forward to most of the meetings following a similar vein. I shall have to type up the meetings minutes tomorrow morning so that any of the "emotion" from the meeting is left out of them, or so im told is best practise anyway.

Additionally in the morning i spent time again on my lesson plans for the IT training, im hoping to have them sorted by next week so tahti can start testing them out to see if they are accessible and informative.

I think im going to have to put my head down for the next few weeks though as i think it will be hard work up till the end of August so that i can get these lessons written.

I have a qustion for you to finsish with... What would you like to see/hear from this blog? I ask this as i have difficulty deciding what to write. your thoughts please

T.

Dedicated to wendy

Thank you to wendy who has shown support to this blog through out the dry period.

Anyway back to what i've been doing, today i wrote a report regarding how feasable it would be to survey all the service users on our database so fingers crossed that proposal goes ahead and we ccan get some positive results from taht.

Additionally i have rewritten my gant chart for the rest of this month and arranged the FIRST website meeting for early September. Spent some more time getting and giving feedback on the course i was on last week although i still have to show the video of my presentation (the spectacle that it is).

Communications with other course participants is still very high and i see that as a good thing as it keeps netwrokign oppotunities up too.

Looking forward to the introduction of wireless both in the offie and more iminatly home too as it will make it easier to write this blog for one but also allow me to work fromhome occasionally.


All for now
Tim

A long time coming

So i shant be appologising for the lack of posts as i have been well to be perfectly hoenst distracted by numerous other things however i am back on the blogger case.

Last week was again an interesting week with tme spent learning management techniques and indeed teaching them too... or at least giving a master class in the presentational style of improvisation! Got myself some positive feedback on it too so happy with that.

Whats next then for me and my blog i can imagine you are thinking... well the answer to that is making a real start and dent on the actual project proposal. The next few weeks i would apreciate peoples help with ideas for what we can maybe do with the IT lessons as we are hoping to maybe create some others to add to our repetoiur... I shall try and hold a meetig with Steve to get these moving so any ideas and feedback is welcome nay encoursged!!!!

Further to that i have a meeting with Sue and Les where hopefully we can bottom out some strucutre to the next couppe of months or so and in doing so increase my efficency exponentially.

On an non work related front internet and more importantly a bed should be iminant in the flat so i feel like a real Chester resident now rather than someone sleeping ona friends floor.

New post tomorrow but for now i am glad to be back on blogger
Tim