Webinar

I joined an online training on Thursday. I have been joining a biweekly webinar group to keep my online training skills up while I work on curriculum development. One thing that I realized during the training was it is a good thing to have a few experienced folks in the training. Particularly during online trainings. This training was on Google+ and Twitter, both platforms that I have familiarity with, though I did learn new things!

Experienced?

This was a hands-on training. Some of the training was on the fly. As the trainer showed participants how to set up a new google+ account or twitter account, it helped that some of us have already done this and could quickly link back to the account so that the others could see an existing account. Those of us who had used the two platforms were also able to answer questions either in chat or via phone during the training will the trainer opened the social media or uploaded documents.

Sharing the wealth

I enjoyed the opportunity to join others concerned with disseminating information and learning new software. I enjoy learning how to use new software and figuring out how to make the most of it for my own uses.

Is it stealing?

One of the things that I love about Web 2.0 is how free many folks are with their information and expertise. I've been researching how to assist people when researching on the internet. For me that has lead me down many other paths--I was the type of student who could spend hours looking up one word in the dictionary, because I found so many other interesting words on my way to the one I wanted/needed.  But I digress. 


Researching on the Internet
I've been tooling around today over on the NICHCY website. I've always turned to NICHCY for information on early intervention and special education. They've also got some great information on sharing or disseminating information and how to research.
Steal This!
The section I love the most, is their page called steal these dissemination strategies. They have model language for social media policies, Facebook posts and tweets and they encourage sharing, re-purposing and linking like this.
So I don't think it's stealing if it is encouraged, but I love that it is encouraged! What do you steal--or shall I say repurpose?  And do you make sure to mention where you originally found your material?

Family-Directed Assessments

The new Part C regulations have been revised to place additional importance on the voluntary family-directed assessment. For some this is new information, for others it is simply a confirmation of the how to perform initial and ongoing assessments. To create an IFSP that truly serves a child and their family, it is important that families decide if they want to participate in a family-directed assessment, who is involved (parents, grandparents, siblings, caregivers, even a neighbor), and how much to share (everything, something, nothing--though this won't really lead to an effective IFSP). The regulations require that qualified personnel use an assessment tool and an interview when performing a voluntary family-assessment.

Preparation

But how can families prepare? Families report that the initial assessment can be a whilrwind of new information and terms. One way is to provide families with a form that they can fill out before meeting with the assessment team.That form can help families to organize their thoughts, and begin the process of thinking about their concerns, priorities and resources. 

Training

Providing training to families on outcomes, what they are, and how families enrolled in early intervention can develop both child-focused and family-focused outcomes can be beneficial. Families and professionals also need to learn the difference between Part C outcomes and Part B goals. It can also be helpful to inform families and professionals about how goals in Part B can be developed that are student-focused or teacher-focused.

Telling Your Story

If we are to effect policy change, those of us who are impacted by policies must be ready, willing and able to tell our story.

Assisting families to think about their story, to identify which part of their story is relevant, and how to tell it in a way that gets their point across, is an important part of helping families to become leaders. If you watch any political debate you can easily see that politicians know the importance of staying on message. No matter what question is thrown at them they give the answer they prepared in debate prep. Family advocates need to learn this same skill. They need to identify their message, hone it and often be prepared to deliver it with minimal prep time.

How does one do this?
The first thing to do is to identify your most important point. For example, I was recently asked to talk about the Affordable Care Act. I support the Affordable Care Act, though I'm still waiting for the benefits to kick in for my family and for insurance to become "affordable". When I was contacted I was told the general scope of the article and had to take some time to prepare my thoughts.

But what to say? Our insurance isn't affordable yet, our son is under 18 so we can't take advantage of the fact that he can stay on our insurance until 26, we haven't hit our lifetime caps and we're the very people who need others to be mandated to buy insurance so that coverage becomes affordable for us. I had to think about how to say all of that in a way that still supported the ACA. I framed my comments by first talking about how rare our child's condition is, how expensive it has been, and how we've used credit cards to cover needed surgeries. Then I talked about how the ACA would relieve our financial and emotional stress because our son's future is brighter now with its passage. You can read the actual article here and decide if I told my family's story in a way that was relevant and got my point across.

Sharing

We've talked about sharing information by reusing and repurposing content that you have found some where else.  Another way to share information is to revise a blog post and submit it for publication somewhere else.


For example, I wrote about my concerns about the effects on a child's brain due anesthesia exposure before age 3 on my personal blog, on this blog and then submitted it for publication on the Special Education Advisor blog, which has a much larger audience than my own. .  

Mobile workspace

Enjoying a latte while planning a presentation on using technology to support & inform.

Expanding your Reach

In my last post I wrote about developing a communications plan as part of a membership drive. I took the time to look at my Facebook friends (612) and then I made a list of the Facebook friends of each of the board members who are administrators for the fanpage for the board I sit on. I subtracted our mutual friends, and then added up all of the potential followers we could pick up.

Potential Facebook Followers
Our potential number of followers was 2500!  2500! Wow! Even if we added only 10% of that number to our membership rolls, we could significantly up the number of members. But knowing that we had a potential universe of 2500 new members that isn't enough.

Maximizing Our Reach
We needed specific strategies. After some thought, I came up with a template for all future blog posts. As part of the development of a blogpost, I would also develop a few sample Facebook status updates and a few sample tweets. Each Board member could then be emailed a link to the latest blog post, a copy of the sample status updates and tweets and asked to post to their own pages, other pages they administer and to the timelines of their friends.

Will it Work?
Well, only time will tell. As of this writing I have one-third of the board following the plan, and we've already seen visits to our blog jump exponentially. We clearly need to stick to our plan, and remember that the outcome isn't visits to the blog, it is membership in our organization.