Some time later, when we're all trying to create things...

Well. It's nearly a week after our training. The session went very well, I thought. People stayed awake all day, most of the technology worked most of the time, and I even heard some people say they had fun. So we're off and running.

Running? Well, maybe that's a tad optimistic. Some of us are walking, crawling--and maybe some of us haven't gotten started yet. Tomorrow our Learning 2006 team is meeting, and it'll be interesting to see what their impressions are. What are we going to do now?

I'd like to get Michael Sullivan to agree to a podcast of his talk next week. We could post it on CCPL's Teachers Toolkit web page as a way to promote our partnership. I wonder if we could do that.....?

Getting ready to train

Scott, Bob, Muffie, and I are spending this morning in the Eldersburg training lab. We're going over our plans for next week's training session, and trying to work out some of the kinks.

Some folks would say it's kind of ambitious to expect folks to get enough hands-0n training in wikis, blogs, podcasts, photo posting, and PC videoconferencing in one day to be able to use them effectively. That may be true.....and all I hope is that we can make all the technology we have work well enough so that people enjoy the taste. The rest is up to them!

Why I'm here...

What the heck is onboarding, anyway? It's the term now being used for the entire hiring and orientation process--that is, what are the activities needed to get a new employee on board in your organization?

At CCPL, we're thinking about reinventing our onboarding process. We want to take advantage of our technology resources, of course. And we want to be able to compete with other employers who are making it easy for people to apply for jobs AND get up to speed once they're hired!

There are some other potential benefits, too. We now spend a great deal of time in face-to-face orientation sessions with new staff.

• Face-to-face may be an optimistic way to describe some of these sessions, though--after a day of meeting people and seeing several PowerPoint presentations, pity the poor new staff member!! Wouldn't it be great if people could access the information they need, when they need it?
• What about the amount of staff time spent in conducting new staff orientations? Wouldn't it be great if a presenter could make their content available once--and then focus their time with new staff on answering questions or filling in gaps?
• The content we share with new staff might be interesting to other staff, too! From time to time our staff have asked for a 'who does what' directory. Having departmental content online could help to address this need.