 there we go brilliant well thank you very much for introducing me so I just want to say that this talk it doesn't replicate what happens in the wonderful Seamult talks that I'll put on for out the year this is basically how I did it and to say you know I've called it crossing the fidgety line because it was a very long journey for me it took about nine years from start to finish and you'll find out why as I go through it but was it worth it oh hell yes and I'm going to show you why and what it means to me to actually be able to put the letters Seamult after my name so a little bit about me so I've had many hacks over the last 12 years since graduating so I started out as a teacher and a trainee student teacher in FE at Salisbury College I then went through various roles in wedding participation and research and marketing officer but I finally landed in Roger Emery's e-learning team at Southampton Solent University and that's where I really found a subject that I loved and I knew I wanted a lifelong career in about eight years after joining that team I relocated to Oxfordshire you fall in love and you have to move sometimes and I got a job at Cranford University and that's where we specialised in postgraduate courses and CPD mainly to the defence sector and the MID and then during the summer this year I transitioned over to catalyst IT so you could call it my dream job as I am now a learning technologist two learning technologists and I can be happier so things that I love and things that motivate me so Moodle and Mahara wonderful platforms okay they they can you know be improved however what I love is how they can actually support teaching learning I open I also love open badges open practice as and when I can and also my PLN I love my personal learning network I I don't know if I could be where I am now without them so this is kind of like me giving back to my network as well so all of you that haven't yet got your C-mult or I've just started or thinking about started hopefully this will give you the motivation you need to just get on and do it but let's see so before I start I wanted to share this wonderful image done by Brian Mathers and I'm just gonna share a link to it everyone second so I'm gonna put it in the chat now this image to me sums up C-mult in a nutshell every time I look at it I think of new things I could have put in my C-mult portfolio so if you're if you've got 10 minutes and you can just sit there and look at this image I'm sure you're gonna come up with new ideas to stick in your portfolio you might be sport for choice I don't know but I think this is a wonderful graphic so thank you Brian for doing this because I think it's wonderful okay so that was my introduction and this is what I'm actually gonna be talking about and yeah it could take half an hour it could be shorter it could be longer I can waffle I've just got a you know rain it in could you get excited sometimes so I'm gonna talk about why I chose to do C-mult you'll have our reasons for doing it I have about five different ones throughout the years and I'm also gonna say about how I actually saw inspiration so where who I actually looked to to help me get through the process and I don't want to talk about content and structure because there's so many ways to do it and this is how I did it but sorry somebody just put waffles yummy and then I'm gonna talk about the feedback process because this is something as a new starter to see more you haven't you don't really know what goes on in the feedback area so I just wanted to share what happens because it really really helped me and then finally how it's impacting me right now and what my next steps are based on being a C-mult member so here we go so why did I choose to do C-mult so as I said in 2009 I joined the then technology unit with Roger Emery and he suggested that I do it because I'd come from a teaching background and I was a lover of technology back then using Moodle to teach with he said well this is a way of you being able to see where you are and then fill any gaps that you have and what he can do is in work with me to design projects to fill those gaps so that was great as a really really good starter but then you know something that's a shiny was dangled in front of me I was offered to do a PG certain blended learning so see what went on the back burner and if I went to do a qualification once I did that I also started thinking about my my career what I wanted to do and again after I finished the PG sir I went back to my portfolio and my gosh it was so outdated already I'd learned so so much so I had to start again completely started over however this time I got a promotion shortly afterwards so once again it was put on a back burner and then in 2014 I decided to rope together some colleagues so we thought we'd do this slimming world approach where we shame each other into doing sections you know a group encouragement help each other out but then I was offered the chance to do the fellowship in each so I thought well okay I need to do that and once again see what went on the back burner so as you can see it's been a lot of stop and start stop and start so I'm pretty sure a lot of you have been through that as well so as I said I moved to Oxfordshire and started a new job at Cranford University and I said right that's it no more stop and start and I am and I get this thing done I want this so I started my new line manager approved it said yes that would be wonderful nobody has it here yet let's go for it but then I fell pregnant and then took some time off work and then when I came back to work I had a half finished portfolio again which was again started from scratch and I thought okay right no more excuses I need to do this I really need to get it done this time so I worked my bottom got all my evidence together I started putting together my portfolio and then a few months before the submission date I had a wobble and I'll tell you about my wobble a little bit further along but the big motivation for me actually be able to get it done and submitted this year was I registered for CML I didn't think about it I didn't plan to do it I actually just thought do you know just get it done just register yourself then the clock starts ticking and then you've got no excuse so this is kind of four and a half attempts at it so inspiration so this is why I love my PLN so look to your group look to your circle of friends colleagues influences and see who has got CML so I want to do a shout out for David Hopkins and this is his wonderful blog here don't waste your time and he shared his experience of not only compiling his CML pages but also his own reflections on his reflections of doing it and that was a really really good help for me and section on Google so I just googled CML holders and a mirror Vogel popped up and this was a game changer because she actually included her feedback sheet which completely dispelled the myth as to what goes on when your portfolio is being peer assessed so this is why I'm going to share with you my food you know my feedback at the end as well to give you an idea of what to expect so again thank you Mira for being brave and showing us your feedback colleagues as well so my maternity cover Angelique Baudard she came to Cranfield already with CML and luckily we were able to hold on to her when I came back and she was my agony on she sat two meters across the desk with me and my gosh the poor girl listening to me win Jamone about am I reflecting enough have I gone too deep does this evidence show this yes it was really good to actually have somebody to bounce ideas off who's been through the process herself and then shared portfolios on the CML side so when I registered I had access to all these wonderful portfolio examples and you know another shout out to Theresa McKinnon and Sheila McNeil because they you know theirs were really really influential instrumental get of helping me get them done so that's kind of like my journey to actually compiling it and who inspired me and the next stage was actually the building of the portfolio so this is the structure so of course you allowed to structure it however you want but this is the process that helped me and this is what I did so planning was always paper based I used to print out the CMOS every time I attempted a new start to see my I would print my perspectives and then scribble on the back ideas of different projects that could go with each section and it didn't matter if the same project could go under three of them it just means that when I had everything down on paper I can then pick and choose and then fine-tune each response so that it made it appropriate but like how you change your CV depending on who you're applying for exactly the same you sort of change the context to fit each section and then I use Google Docs to actually write each section so this was great especially as I did a lot of traveling so I could access Google Docs on my I've had an offline mode so if I don't have internet connection I could just keep writing the joy of Google Docs as we found out yesterday is it could be accessed anywhere and they're really rather reliable but then when it actually came to compiling and presenting my portfolio I obviously used Mahara and I'm a big Mahara advocate I've been promoting it for the past 10 years in the various universities I've worked in but also this was my real opportunity to use it as a learner you know practice what I preach and my gosh it was a learning curve oh thank you Mark for sharing Mira's portfolio there was brilliant so this is kind of how I structured it so everybody is different everybody chooses a different tool and that is wonderful and that was what's so lovely about looking through all these e portfolios and everyone is different because it's our own personality and so I went for a one page per section so everything to do with operational issues I put in one page and I know people like to separate it out into lots of different windows but I wanted to keep everything together because I get lost sometimes and so I have the structure on the side panel my menu so you can see all the pages I have all the content in the center of the page and then at the bottom I have a link that goes on to the next page so this is the way I decided to do this and I set use the same format for every page so this helped me because I could actually see how much was being done so I could just copy and paste from my Google doc and chuck it in there and that was really good for me right I talked to you about my wobble so I had a pretty decent portfolio together around about April maybe slightly yellow March and then I saw this amazing tweets on Twitter so some poor brave soul tweeted that they had failed but they didn't pass Seymour and they actually shared their feedback as to why and it was because the assessors didn't feel his reflections went deep enough and that got me thinking have I reflected deep enough I thought I had and he was helping me thought I had but then again I thought was it actually deep enough for me because I'm not doing this just to get the letters Seymour after my name I'm actually doing this because I want to be as good as I can be and I want to present something that I feel 100% proud of so again I went to practice what I've reached and I looked for different reflection models and I landed on Gibbs and I like this because not only could I be reflective but I could actually put some emotions in there how I was emotionally affected how I could actually put myself into my reflections rather coming at it from an academically written perspective where it can suck you know not always but you can sometimes come across as quite dry I wanted to make sure that I was there in the text so I may have gone too deep in some of my reflections I don't know but I felt that I needed to do it and it actually felt like really good therapy for me doing it so I thought it was great so whoever that person was on Twitter I can't remember his name I have looked but thank you so much for sharing your feedback because it really really helped me and I really want to find out who that is so evidence so I try to be as varied as possible with my evidence so obviously I was using screen grabs of work that I did but I also tried to include videos where I could so for examples if I'm talking about a course I've created I obviously can't share a link to the course because it's immoodle and our students at the time were MAD students and there's all sorts of reasons as to why I can't share things publicly so what I did was I just used a very short screen capture video tool and just recorded a 30 second clip of my course so scrolling up and down showing a few of the activities just to give the assessors an idea of what it was I was talking about and then I just uploaded them to Google Drive again just linked them or embedded them in the page so screenshots are great but videos that show you doing the thing or showing off the thing that you've created is a really really good idea so you can see a quote up here from one of the assessors talking about how my video on Turnitin so this is me showing that I can use Camtasia to record a video and edit the video use YouTube as a tool to upload it and then I'm also demonstrating that I know the advanced features of Turnitin to an audience which would be the students on how to access their feedback so I'm showing a number of skills and this is really really good for operational section B and having a wide range of knowledge with LT skills so yeah so present obviously presentation slides but do assessors have time to actually sit there and look through slides hmm I didn't know but as again what I said this portfolio was for me and I felt the presentations had some merit so I added them and photos and if you can get feedback from colleagues or students chuckle that in there as well so once again you're bringing your portfolio to life it's not just a flat document it is a living breathing dynamic visual portfolio I mean that's why we use an e-portfolio route rather than just a word doc because we actually want to make it digital and we make it pop as my old jazz teacher used to say so next what if you don't know the answer just ask absolutely fine I struggled with section 3 I always study their struggle struggled with the wider context because I didn't know enough and I felt embarrassed about not nailing up and I just kept avoiding it and I thought you know what you have to do it you know there's a reason why they asked you to do it so I picked very difficult topics and I was very very honest in my portfolio and said I don't know enough but this is what I think the answer is and I'm gonna find out so actually contacted people who did know and okay I still don't have all the answers and like I said in my portfolio is very honest that I don't have all the answers but I started to ask the questions and when it comes to my follow-up portfolio in a few years I've you know I know where to carry on and to hopefully close that gap so don't be afraid to ask and if you are asking make sure they know that you are gathering evidence for a portfolio because it ensures that the you get very quick response a proper response at that too so feedback so I mean I'm not showing off it this is just one part of my feedback and this is something that I gained from Mira so you're assessed by two assessors a lead and a second assessor but then there's also a scale so they're strong and adequate which are both passes and then inadequate you haven't quite made it and this was good because in my head it's like no it has to pass it has to pass but no no there's two levels of pass there's just you know there's okay you don't have to go over the top you can just put in an okay portfolio and it's all fine but you know if I were strong I could you know work a bit harder on bits so this was a really good thing that I got from Mira's portfolio I could see what the feedback was and look at her portfolio and say do I agree and then maybe look at what I've written and whether or not it actually makes sense to me and whether I feel it was the right level so yeah I'm happy to share my feedback forms with you and I'll put that online I can't however share my portfolio it is a shame but like I said I am very honest in it and I'm working with a university with contracts with the MOD and I'm pretty sure they don't want my honest thoughts and appraisals in there and there's a rigorous process called permission to publish at Cranfield and I would never have got it through so I didn't even bother trying but I am very very happy to share a Mahara template if anybody wants to use Mahara if they have a Mahara portfolio system in their institution I'm very happy if you want it and I'm happy to create it and so the feedback and then this bit popped up this bit oh my gosh at the end there's a separate section for the core principles oh my gosh this was absolutely brilliant for me because I could see at the end you actually marked on the commitment to exploring understanding and the you're keeping up to date those four things that you know meant to show it be shown throughout your portfolio and I thought well I remember when I used to assess key stage one portfolios for apprenticeships and for MVQ two portfolios and it used to drive me nuts running having to go through people's portfolios trying to find stuff and cross-reference stuff but wouldn't it be good if I actually put a page in my portfolio at the end to summarize where in my portfolio I felt I met these criteria these principles so this was another game changer for me so again thank you Mira you're you're amazing so if you want to see what that looked like it's just a summary slide right at the end the four principles and how I feel I met them it's nothing big nothing fancy because I've done all the hard work throughout the rest of my portfolio but this is just me just concluding each bit and yeah so last bit so the impact steps so yes that is a photo of me doing archery so normally you put in a picture of a target don't you and I thought well I've got my own target and me and my arrows shooting at 90 90 meters away I'm quite proud of that so what I put down in my future plans and I'm a big believer of as soon as you write it down on paper it becomes a real thing it's not just some you know concept in the air it's actually there you have a target to work towards so Debbie I'm just reading your comments so yeah I put down my four things I wanted to achieve before my next Seamult review so there's the wonderful digital digital scholar course which I put down and I had time this summer to finish it so I've done that and actually submit a paper for a journal and that was published last month and that was my first ever paper so that was a really really good career goal for me to get I put down about completing my senior fellowship of the HGA and I was halfway through it but I've now left the higher education sector and I don't feel it's relevant in my role now I mean it'd be nice to have but it's not necessary and then you know start a master's in a suitable subject okay I've started a new job this is something that I could bring to my employer when I have my first PDR I'd say this was one of my goals can we do it so that's you know that's that's why it's important to put your future steps your future plans in your portfolio and really we think about it because as I say as soon as you put it on paper it becomes a real thing for you to work towards and then sort of benefits to my employer so for ground field it meant that I was reassuringly competent and capable so not only did I have a fellowship at the HGA which meant that lecturers knew that I've come from a similar background to them and I can sympathise you know entirely what they're going through but also we see more I can say look I have been assessed by my peers I've been deemed competent I know my stuff just let me get on my job so that was quite cool and then when I transferred to catalyst a few months ago you know my my boss said you know it was something about our clients being reassured that we understand their frame of reference so like I said I'm now a you know e-learning specialist but the people that I talked to are learning technologists and IT people in the universities and colleges that we support so it's it's good that they know that I have the CMOT standard so they know that I know my stuff as well and then finally benefits to me because this is why I did it I did it for me so validation from my peers you need to be recognised as a member of a wonderful bunch of people who you know absolutely love the old community and I'm looking forward to now being able to go to more old events and now that I'm at catalyst but it was a big boost to my confidence because when I came back from maternity leave I was not well and being able to get through this was just absolutely spot on and then finally I have an excuse now to keep doing more because I can say right I need stuff on my next CMOT portfolio I need examples I need projects and it means I can then keep going and just push myself and find those gaps in my knowledge and fill them so this is kind of like my journey through CMOT why I did it and how it has impacted me where I am now so to conclude so okay as I said I had glowing feedback I put a lot of effort into it and I probably did go well over and above what was meant to be in there but like I said I did it for me and to know that it was recognised as being good was just really really good for me so my seven tips because you know I didn't want to squeeze into five I didn't have enough to put into ten I thought well seven of these my honest ones so as soon as you know that you definitely want to do CMOT register because the clock starts ticking and it actually gives you a deadline to work to so register I also recommend you look at at least five CMOT portfolios lots of different ones from different people so ones from people that you know and then some that you know people you don't know it's really really good to get a broad overview of what's out there I mean what I found was is some of the reflections on some of them that I saw were very thin and they still passed I thought well okay that's thin for me but it's obviously enough for the writers writing them and enough for the assessors to get an understanding so you know it very very reassuring and also plan your examples on paper first just write down all the projects that you've been involved with and how they could fit into each section just scribble it down, scribble it down it's a really really good starting point I am very much a paper and pen girl even though I am a learning technologist and a lover of technology I still like paper and pen if you have any gaps in your knowledge so things that you don't know ask just ask and then evidence the fact that you know you are being brutally honest I don't know this I want to find out however look I know who to ask and I know how to ask and here's my answers fifth one is user reflection model now I did this as I said because I wanted to make sure I was doing the best for me and I found it really really helped structure my responses so I had my description I had my reflection and then I had my evidence and action plan at the end and that really really helped six put yourself in it you know it's a portfolio of your professional work you bring it to life with your personality if you can it doesn't have to be dry I mean if you have a dry personality you know fair enough but you know try and put you in there because it's humans that are going to be reading your work and assessing you so you know say hello to them and then seven and this is the thing that took me a long time to understand and accept you know be happy to draw a line under it it's never going to be finished you're always going to be finding new stuff to talk about and that's the joy of Seymour you can do it again in three years with your updates so just be happy what you've done because I'm sure if you are happy with it it's going to be enough so that is me and you know everybody loves a good Venn diagram you know having a competency there written in front of you with your reflections and evidence that is your kick-ass portfolio so good luck and I am happy to take any questions and if you wanted to contact me this is me thank you Sam thank you so much that was incredibly motivating and I'm looking forward confidently to finishing mine in in eight years time but we have got plenty of time for questions so if you do have things they'd like to ask feel free it looks like Debbie's got a question so Debbie do take the microphone oh hi hi Tom hi Sam can you hear me yes oh lovely that was brilliant really really loved that I was so honest so amazingly reflective I'm really impressed and I just wanted to ask how long would you say maybe I missed it because my my headphones were kind of dipping in and out but how long would you say that it actually took you when you've kind of decided right that's it I'm doing it I'm getting in how long do you think it actually took to get to get something that you were happy with to submit oh my gosh I'm just thinking because obviously you wouldn't be so long haven't you but I think it was I mean comparing it to the fellowship of the H.E.A. I did I wrote that in four days four days Seamult I reckon if I'd have just sat there and did it it would go it would have taken me about a week two weeks if I'd have done nothing else but Seamult two weeks and that's because I just kept editing it and adding more and changing bits yeah it's like like I'm in an editor isn't it the creeps up on you as you're writing it all the time yeah it's the same with like this presentation I have changed it so many times just because new things come flooding in and you know it's that Brian Mathers picture every time you look at it new stuff pops into your head so you know like I say just be happy and draw a line under it and I'm glad I did it I did it to you know the level that I've done it and you pick this really good to sit to hear from your point of view and that you've been that was a really key moment for me when you said you'd bring your personality into it because I really think that's where I think wrong because I like you I've got so many false stars all over the place and I really felt I was boring myself I thought nobody's ever going to want to read this so I thought that's it that's what I need to do so yeah that's really important thank you ever so much no worries thank you thanks see if any more questions come in Sam I was wondering whether your earlier attempts to you know your sort of abortive stop-starts were helpful in you know a kind of progressive articulation of what you were trying to say or were they generally just more frustrating um I think they helped because it was like every time I did it I had in another layer on top I mean the operational issues section A that has gone through there's four different projects I've done for that before I actually finally landed on the last one that I actually did about the employability skills for the students but it started off talking about turn it in workshops then it changed to oh what else did we do it just it each time I just used it as a platform to either rewrite what I'd already written or just start again from scratch and you know looking back I'm fine with that process but at the time it was frustrating but I think it was just very excitable and really really wanted to do the best that I could well I think I can definitely detect a perfectionist freak only in some areas of my life it looks like Sarah's got a question so Sarah do you go ahead thanks very much Tom and thank you Sam that was really great to hear all about story um which has obviously been a long project for you well done on staying focused on the end goal I think that it's so easy to lose sight of what it is that you want but you just stuck with it three pregnancy as well which is really great and so I did post a question in the chat but I think it's everyone's saying thank you so much that it's gone off to me I just wanted to know um aside from your mentor relationship you had for the lady whose name I've forgotten I'm afraid Angelique yes um did you then run your end portfolio by a critical friend before you submitted someone who hadn't seen it during the process you've been through no I didn't and the reason why is uh because I wanted to just submit it if I had sent it to somebody and they gave me feedback I would have had another wobble and I would have questioned myself and you know because this was at a time you know I mean it's not that long ago but it's at a time where I had very little confidence in myself at the time for being unwell so I just wanted to submit it I just wanted to get it in okay well fair enough well done for being so brave on on that I suppose I'd be interested to know if anyone else who's um been through this process then or is going through it now is thinking about that um I just think you know if you've written for papers which do you have now and I don't know if you saw but I read your paper just yesterday funnily enough so that's really great that you got that published um you sometimes get feedback that you just weren't expecting by someone who's looking at it for the first time so I just wondered if it's a practice that people engage with in this particular context so I'd be interested to know if anyone else has thought about that or done that but that that was my question thanks very much I think um Sarah um you know going on um feedback which I receive from people who've done seamalters part of um an institutional group um so you might have five 10 or 15 people kind of going through the process together that is really really helpful uh but equally as as Sam says you know um it doesn't actually have to be a finished product or it's never going to be perfect so just getting it in there and and getting the feedback from the assessors um you know that may be maybe equivalent in some ways oh okay I've got there's a question there from Vicki about um how long I was at Cranfield so I was at Cranfield for three and a half years and um yes all my evidence was based at Cranfield apart from the specialist area which was about my involvement in Mahara so obviously I had 10 years worth of experience to pull into that so that was just rampactful of examples of where I've engaged in the Mahara community so yes pretty much the whole thing was based on my time at Cranfield but um obviously my past experiences at Solent informed my approach to how I did things at Cranfield so yeah I hope that answers that question good I'm glad it helps well um that's been I think we can I can say from the chat you know that's been an incredibly helpful session Sam so um I think you've more than um more than acquitted yourself if you're if you're um personal duty to to your um the whole community and your network and I think um everyone's really grateful and to you for sharing so honestly and comprehensively there we go thank you thank you very much now this is this is yeah um as you know I've been I've emailed Alt to say that I would love to share my experience to help others and I was advised to you know put in a proposal to do it here for Alt C Winter Conference and I'm glad I did so this is my first ever Alt presentation so another milestone career milestone to take off the list so I'm very very happy so thank you thank you Sam and we will look forward to hearing about it in the C multiple portfolio update um so yeah um just to say to everyone um thank you very much for coming and the session recording will be made available um through the conference session page and I've been putting the link to that in the chat and if you haven't yet exhausted this topic um you feel free to pop along to the virtual cafe and continue the conversation the next winter conference session will be starting at 11 o'clock um so I hope to see many of you continuing to participate thank you again to Sam Taylor our presenter and I think you've had plenty of applause but I'm going to add some more very much thank you