 to this year's Seymour ceremony and together with my colleague Debbie Baff I'm looking forward to getting the show on the right. I can see quite many people watching and we've got a few nervous presenters here backstage so do try and put your hands together and post in the chat where you're joining us from and wave hello. The first person to introduce it's my pleasure to say hello to the person who heads up the scheme and will lead the ceremony today Debbie. Hi Debbie, welcome. Hello Maren, thank you ever so much, hello everybody. Very excited to be here this evening, done my hair and everything and I even remember to take my curlers out which is really really impressive so yeah really delighted to see people joining us and that even more delighted that we've got some people some special guests today to share their stories about Seymour with us so yeah please do tell us where you're from in the in the chat it'd be great to see some people to see where you've come from. I can see many people already saying hello so we've got Matt joining us, Anshul joining us, Dan, there's also Roger, Fiona, Eleanor, fantastic. Hello everybody and welcome. Brilliant that's really great thanks Maren so perhaps if we could put our speakers all on at the same time I think that would be really really nice and so they can see us down the side and we can just say a quick hello before I get going with the actual slides. I will warn you folks as well I've been trying to, hello everyone, I've been trying to do some clever stuff in the background and put some clapping and things like that on in the background so I hope they're going to work but we'll give it a go so I'm sure you can all clap along in the in the chat if that doesn't work. Okay so this is the rough format of how we're going to do it today in terms of this particular award ceremony and I'm sure that everybody watching will recognize the Seymour accreditation framework which is up there and these lovely photos and images that Brian Mathers does for us. So we'll do a quick introduction from myself and Maren just to say hello and then we'll take you through each of our speakers today so we have Sammy give us a wave Sammy. Thanks Sammy. We have Richard give us a wave Richard. Yay I feel like I'm on a game show and then we have Rob. Thanks Rob. Yay give us a wave. Awesome and hello to everybody I'm glad seeing in these comments coming through. So obviously you can find out more about the Seymour accreditation framework and we have these three different pathways and I'm very pleased to say that we've got the speaker from each of these pathways today. Okay so you've spoken to me so I'm just going to let Maren say a very quick hello. Hello everybody I'm a senior Seymour holder currently renewing my portfolio so I'm particularly thrilled to see some fellow senior Seymour holders both on stage and in the chat. It's fantastic to have you here. It's only been two years since we started the scheme but day to day I think I've had involvement with Seymour since 2008 and it's been fantastic to see the development of the scheme in the past year which is in no small part thanks to Debbie. Thank you Maren. That's lovely thank you very much for that introduction that's brilliant. So as I mentioned I'm going to tell you a little bit about Sammy first of all and then I'm going to just give you a brief quote from Sammy's portfolio that I found that thought would be really good to share with you and then I'm going to pass you over to Sammy. So Sammy is an FE maths lecturer and she consults with them colleges all over the country and developing their use of education technology and advising on their strategies for teaching and learning and it does say on here as well that Sammy was the first female Google for Education Certified Coach in Europe which sounds really impressive and she's also a Google innovator and trainer and when I was looking at Sammy's portfolio I thought that this really kind of struck me and I thought that the way that she put this into her portfolio was brilliant really because it talks about her work as a teacher but also as a mentor to other people and I think Sammy's portfolio is particularly reflective so I'm really really pleased that she's here today to talk to us and I've got one of my little widgets now and I don't know if this is going to work because I haven't got my headphones in but just imagine that it's a drum roll if it doesn't work. There you go Sammy over to you. Oh thanks Debbie I didn't know there was going to be that happening that was a little bit awkward but anyway yeah I am very proud to get my Associate Seamult this year and it was a long piece of work and I really did enjoy the reflective part of it. Core Area 2 was where I reflected most and what I wrote about in Core Area 2 is I wrote about what happened in my classroom and that sort of led me on a journey and then it was this is what I did in my classroom and this is the technology that I used and then I went and showed this colleague and this is how they used it and this is where we ended up and so it was almost like a story in Core Area 2 of what I did what I shared with my colleagues and then how we all moved forward with it as well. What I'm particularly proud of as well is Core Area 3 because I do teaching mainly I chose to focus on SEN and the Code of Practice and some of the work that I did with one of our provisions and it's a really simple thing but I'm incredibly proud of this just like Debbie's just used the sound effects in her presentation we built slide decks with sound effects of speech to text but then we used touchscreen technology for the students to then create almost their own assistive voice technology that could be customized to them and so I really enjoyed reflecting on that in Core Area 3 and that's really all I wanted to share about my portfolio it is going into the database so others can look at it but yeah I'm really proud of it I really enjoyed doing it. That's all that's brilliant thanks so much Sammy and I'm so glad that my drum roll worked I've never been really embarrassing as I said you know you are one of our associate CMART holders and your portfolio was just an absolute pleasure to to read so thank you so much and I really appreciate you coming today. Okay so I'm going to move on now to Richard Biles Richard is a CMOLT holder and he has he joined the Northampton University Learning Technology Team in 2016 and Richard does all sorts of things I had like this massive thing that Richard had given me in terms of his biographies so I'm trying to just pick out a few things and it's amazing the kind of experience that's on there but his CMOLT application documents really talk about things about active learning and the use of discussion boards and journals and padlet and things like that and I'm a real fan of padlet and so I think it would be really useful for Richard to tell us a little bit about the stuff that he does and hopefully I'm going to be on for a hat trick I hope today if I've done this so this is my quote that I found on Richard's portfolio and as you can see from that he basically sort of talks about how the experience of doing it has been really really useful to him and that how he's going to learn from all the stuff that he's done in the future and obviously you know as an experienced technologist with a with a wide range of skills really I think that being able to have his portfolio upon view as it were to the world really brings it all to life so I'm going to try another drum roll can we go for it that's brilliant I'm passing over to Richard thanks David so yeah I'm hoping you can see my screen so I'm going to jump right in and quickly show the online training course I produced as my specialist option in my portfolio so I've got three training courses that I made for partner staff who are based all over the world so I've got a basics course which really talks about the central platform that Blackboard learn and you know really basic things like releasing size making content things like that I've then got the let's jump to the assessments one first I've got an assessment one which goes through setting up Blackboard and turn it in assignments and all those sort of things so these are all the kind of things we're getting asked all the time by partners but we don't actually get a chance to meet them because they're in different time zones so the course was really useful for that and my my favorite of the three courses was this enhancements course which I'll just quickly click into and it's breaking down into a number of units so it covers things like discussion boards, blogs, edge of blogs, padlet, virtual classrooms, couchour and I guess this was all sort of pre-COVID so a lot of this material would have perhaps been PDF guides at that point or FAQs but it wasn't all pulled together into one course and what we've really done we've well I've written some content so we've linked to existing guides there, blackboards, guidance all those sort of things and then we linked to things like Jilly Salmon and we have some challenge sheets and in case that is so really just pulled together a lot of stuff that was perhaps existed elsewhere or where I created so it was the idea of this being all pulled together in some different courses so I thought this made a pretty good example for my for my CMAP because I think it represented a lot of different skills that were pulled in there so I was really lucky to have the opportunity to lead this project so joined the LearnTech team at a time when both our institution was moving to a new digital campus and we were changing our pedagogic approach to teaching and learning so these courses are really designed to promote how the digital tools can help our staff engage through online activities and I'm particularly pleased with that enhancements course because I then I interviewed our head of Institute of Learning Teaching Allie Armolini who talked about active blended learning here and also sort of that was reflected through the case that is that we did there so I think it really worked for us to build this online course. I think in terms of how this related to my CMOL I was it gave me a really good opportunity to speak to people about what I was doing at the university and I was really surprised to get these fantastic testimonials back and that I guess that really hit home not only our people appreciate the technical help we provide but also when we're sitting with them our ability to listen to develop confidence and to give people the same supportive space they need to learn. I think in terms of challenges the hardest part of my CMAP was being critically reflective I found that quite tricky so my approach was to keep writing show drafts to colleagues and then keep writing it again and just really working and working until it took shape but I think just to say that really the CMOL for me has been a massive sort of achievement I think it's been a really good opportunity and it's it's really sort of followed my career as I've started as a learning technology and understand the breadth of the role I think trying to do in this I was perhaps focused in one or two areas but I've really used that CMOL to expand myself into different areas so that I you know I feel that I'm a more complete learning technology as a result. So I just want to say a massive thank you to everybody at CMOL especially my assessors for their fantastic feedback and also obviously my colleagues here at Northampton have been really really supportive and given me the time and support today. So yeah big thank you to CMOL been a massive massive opportunity fantastic opportunity. That was lovely thank you Richard that's so good and we were just saying weren't we kind of backstage in the green room as it were that you know one of the the good things about the CMOL and all of the different pathways is that it is personal to you and it really does highlight and make your skills and you know all of the different things that you do really really visible which is why I just think it's such a good scheme really. Okay thank you ever so much really really enjoyed that thank you. Okay last but definitely not least is the lovely Rob Langney and Rob is one of our newly qualified senior CMOL holders and he works at the teaching enhancement unit at Dublin City University and he works with academic staff to enhance their teaching and learning and assessment practices on different modules with digital technologies. So I think when you see Rob's portfolio it's a really nice clean looking portfolio as well I found it really really easy to kind of look at it and it was really navigable if that's a word. So this is the quote that I came out with this which I thought was really lovely and Rob has said that you know the process of completing this portfolio has been a really rewarding one and he talks about you know when you really take stock and reflect on what you've done you can actually see the totality of your own work and I think that's so true because often in this kind of in the world that we live in we do things we maybe fix things and then we move on and it's always you know it's really nice to be able to reflect on that stuff and you know as we all know it's having the time isn't it to do these things but writing it down and being able to put it into a portfolio type approach is great really so I'm going to go for the hat trick am I going to get my drum roll in I could have had different drum rolls couldn't I but hey there we go right let's try it awesome over to you Rob. Thank you very much Debbie and thanks to everyone else I think that was a great quote you chose from from my portfolio because it really sums up what the whole process was about for me and it was probably the first time in my career that I truly stopped to think properly about everything that I've done in my journey and where I've gone and where I've ended up and so on and that kind of summarized the whole process for me when I started my Seamoth journey I didn't have the full map in mind I knew I had some things to showcase and to evidence and important things I wanted to share but the process of completing the portfolio was so important because the road unfolded for me as I started walking down so I could see what I had done before I could see the impact that I had and that's also put me in a good position to look to the future as well of where I want to go and how I want to continue having the impact on staff and students in higher education so I'm just going to show you three very quick things from my portfolio so one thing is the deployment of learning technologies this is very much a COVID era entry in my portfolio and I think probably in a lot of portfolios you can't escape the theme of COVID because it's been so impactful on society as a whole obviously but also on learning technology and on on education and so these two examples are about how I worked with my team to deploy Zoom in DCU to continue remote teaching during the campus closures last year and this is really interesting because I suppose I was unpicking what I while we as a team had done and how we had worked together to support staff but also what I contributed and what I contributed to the team and how I helped individual staff as well and the different kind of support sessions we ran and troubleshooting and how we helped and how responsive we were to help our lecturers and our students keep teaching and keep learning and my second example is around deploying the V-Box tool I mean the V-Box is a sponsor of the conference and is a fantastic tool and this is something that I lead primarily by myself and you know try to get our staff using so they can engage students a bit more give students a voice to participate in in learning and in class sessions which of course is hugely important during the remote teaching context when everyone is feeling so isolated tools like this and technology can really bring people together so that was a particularly important section of my portfolio and you can see here I did keep my portfolio nice and clean that's my that's my that's the kind of mind I have I like consistency I like cleanliness I like ease of navigation so I'm glad you found it quite navigable Debbie and one other thing to show you quickly then is my role and I know it's not true of all learning technologists but my role involves a lot of cpd and supporting staff and both internally in dcu and and externally so this is one of my um specialist areas and really gave me a chance to think back on my approach and my philosophy to cpd and how I work with people and how I try and help people and it's all about I think trying to understand the shoes that other people walk in understand their positions their their fears their values and then seeing how can I help with that how can I help them improve their practice and there's a number of different cpd activities I'm involved in again both myself that I would lead but also working with with my team I'm so privileged to have a wonderful team in dcu that I work with and and nationally I'm involved in a in a project with with several other universities and I think the portfolio itself is quite personal and it's it's my story but it's also the story of all the people I've met along the way and all the people I've worked with and keep working with and all the people who have helped me along the way become the learning technologist um I am today so it's it's um the portfolio has been a fantastic journey and is a lot and means a lot to me and I think as I said positions me in in in in planning my own development further down the line and the last section to show you and then I'll wrap up is is an advanced area which is around assessment I I believe strongly that's good assessment is is enjoyable for students and for staff I think it can really engage students support their learning showcase their attainment and of course I'm particularly interested in using technology to support assessments such as my work with the edtl project here in Ireland supporting assessment and feedback and one area in particular is student partnership as well student partnership and assessment is something I really believe very passionately in and in working with students to get them more involved give them agency let them take ownership of their of their learning so that is my portfolio it will be put up on the um on the on the database soon enough and I just want to say again thanks so much for the opportunity and a big thanks Debbie to you you've been such a wonderful support and I'm sure for all of the candidates throughout our journey you and all the rest of the team and also I do owe you a big thanks as well oh thank you oh that's so lovely thanks Rob and thank you so much for for showing us your portfolio as I said you know it was lovely and I think um having the spread and the breadth of the portfolios that we've seen today gives a really good insight into the extent of the whole scheme so um and there's loads have a look down the chat because there's loads of love for all three of you in the chat brilliant seemingly you've had lots of um influencing um on other people down there so it's so thank you so much well and now as we say thank you to our um seamal holders who've joined us here on the stage we are going to get ready for hopefully will be the biggest drum roll of them all um as we get ready to reveal everybody who has managed to gain seamal this year so get ready um for the actual ceremony now I hope you saw what I saw yay it's taken the ages to do that what a brilliant it's few learning technologists to help me with it so thank you ever so much and this is a massive congratulations to our associate our seamal and our senior seamal certified holders including those people who have completed their three yearly review so thank you very much and congratulations so what I'm going to do now is like the big reveal um I'm just going to put on the names um I'm not going to read them all out because there's quite a lot of them I've tried to put them in alphabetical order and I put your lovely new post nominals after as well what I would say is if you're in the audience if you spot your name give us a wave in the chat and then hopefully Maron can get your name going across the bottom that was the only way that we could think to do it that made sense so without further ado and we've just found what was this one was this a drum roll am I going to fail at the last hurdle still I pretend that was a drum roll here we go yay here are lovely seamal certified holders as you can see on this slide there's a lot of them this is only slide one there was another one to come after this so as I said these are to all the different pathways so we have people from associate seamal and we have seamal and we also have senior seamal as well I hope that if you do spot your name it's a big list well don't David is I can see your comment there um it is a really big list and we're going to go on to the next page in a second but I just thought I'd leave that up there so that you can kind of drink that in and really see how um you know people have achieved everything this year it is really really impressive you know given the last 18 months that we've all had to be in this position where people have managed to still keep up with their professional development and still pull over their portfolios together you know fair play there's a lot of work that's gone on behind the scenes oh we've got some people waving here we go Marin can you spot we do we have quite a few so we've got Fiona here who's on our list there's also Dan Clark who's on our list so you've got quite a few people in the audience and also wonderful rounds of applause from plenty of people um all around the room so fantastic thank you very much for joining in Debbie I think we're ready for the second um second list ready for the second list okay Alison is in there so congratulations Alison we can see everyone now quickly scanning their name and there's a shout out to Agatha and Sophie congratulations brilliant look at that it's lovely it's so so good awesome and yes all of your names now are kind of indelibly etched into my brain as well because I've seen them so many times um so I do hope you kind of I I tied with the idea of which was the best way to display this and this was Marin's suggestion to come up with this particular layout so I hope that works and I hope you can read it all so I'm going to move on to the next one there we go this is our second page um and as you can see on there again we have um uh lovely associate Seymour holders Seymour holders and senior Seymour holders I believe yes we do and um as I said earlier on these are people who have newly become certified or they have updated their portfolio as part of the three-year review so that's just a reminder for those of you in the audience that they not have quite done your three-year review yet I don't know who you mean Debbie I don't know what you mean one of us might be due next month so oh thank you Marieke nice to see you so good oh that's lovely that's so nice to see everybody and I'm loving all these emojis there's so many emojis in the comments it's brilliant well a really warm congratulations I think as we've all said it takes real commitment to achieve external recognition for all the hard work and knowledge and ncpd particularly in pandemic times so I think we can all um we can all empathize with how hard that's been um to make that happen and from everyone at ALB from our board of trustees from our staff and all the fellow certified members associate certified members and senior certified members congratulations to everyone um our new CMAL told us it's been absolutely fantastic thank you Marin that's absolutely great um okay so um there's just a couple more bits and pieces that I wanted to do before we come to the end of our time so I'm just going to move on my slide because of course we must not forget our amazing CMAL assessors so to be fair you know all of these people do this and the day job in the horrendous pandemic that we've all been through you know and they are still contributing and doing their scholarly contribution and they all volunteer and you know it's it's very rewarding work but it is additional work um and I'm happy to say that I will be um introducing some uh open digital badges specifically for our CMAL assessors so that will um be able to demonstrate the kind of work that they do so hopefully um that will be something that will um will kind of stand with you and you'll be able to use it in your appraisals and all that kind of thing so um I did this there's far too many to list on there they wouldn't fit on my slide um but I know that there are people in the audience there um and you know we really do appreciate all I know I say it all the time but I really mean that we could not do this scheme without you guys contributing your time and energy and enthusiasm so another round of applause please to all our amazing CMALs that's right thank you so much um peer review peer assessment is at the corner square and one more sound effect I love it Debbie any final words from you Debbie yes how do I stop the sound now well I think that's the perfect time for us to close the curtain and say thank you very much to everyone who participated thank you to Richard Robb and Sammy thank you to everybody who joined us and a very big thank you to our lovely host Debbie Buff who heads up our CMAL accreditation scheme so thank you very much everybody and enjoy the rest of our conference