Safeguarding re-training

This morning, after breakast and vacuuming the carpets, I made an effort to get out of the house and walk, to make the most of a sunny morning. Leaving daily exercise till the afternoon often means in autumn and winter I end up walking in the dark for part of the time. I'm not concerned about safety after dark, but not benefiting from the optimum amount of daylight.

Clare had started chopping vegetable by the time I got back, and I took over cooking a sauce to go with pasta so she could get on with other things. Then after lunch, I did the new Church In Wales on-line basic safeguarding training. It's a slight improvement on what I did four years ago, using the Moodle on-line learning tool. It's one annoyance is the use of backing music over speech with subtitles that has a catchy pop beat. You can't switch that off if you find it distracting. A pity.

I needed a couple of tries to get 100% of the Q&A right as there were a couple of small points where I felt the correct answer was debatable. There's no discussion or feedback. This is a training in compliance, not thinking for yourself. Hopefully this comes later, in the stage two modules. Tomorrow afternoon I do the first part of stage two in a zoom session. I hope it works properly. I hate having to do these things on-line. Will we ever go back to making face to face meetings the default?

Then I produced an edit of yesterday's liturgy with just the pieces sun by the choir. With the prospect of a similar service for Advent Sunday, I researched on-line for suitable music to discuss before proposing a selection to Andrea at RWCMD. We received plan for an afternoon programme of live music by RWCMD students on 20th November, a special thank you for their use of St German's this term. Clare is delighted as it includes an 'AmserJazzTime' hour at the end.

After supper and the Archers in the evening we watched a new episode of NCIS together and then started the slow journey to get to bed a bit earlier, and benefit a bit appropriately from darkness

Picasa demise

Back in College to start the working week with bi-lingual Morning Prayer as usual, then a learning hour after breakfast on using Moodle, a meeting with the Principal, and a student before lunch and another student after lunch, then another hour's work on getting Moodle to accept user data alongside the Residential Training administrator. In between times I found that the March edition of the diocesan newspaper 'Croeso' had published an article about my Taormina ecumenical experiences and one of my photos. I scanned it and emailed to to the FMM sisters and St George's Church secretary. It's a pity the article wasn't attributed to anyone - an unfortunate little editorial omission.

By mid afternoon I was tired, desperate to stop, despite a good night's undisturbed sleep, but that's how I am after a spell of distance driving these days. I don't recover as well as I used to. Last night, I drove home from Bristol with an acute spasm in my rear ribcage, due to sitting awkwardly. It diminished to an ache by bedtime and didn't stop me from sleeping, but it was there all day, goading me to slack off a bit. 

I'd intended to go into the CBS office in the afternoon, but thought better of it. I went home, missed the Family Eucharist for once, and rested. Owain came around for a belated Mothering visit and supper. It was good to be indoors with that chill wind at freezing point making life miserable outdoors all day, as it has done for the past couple of weeks. Yet, daffodils, snowdrops and crocuses all seem to thrive on it, giving a splash of colour to parks, gardens and hillsides, to compensate for frequently grey skies.

Pottering around in the evening, with time to explore, I opened for myself a Flickr account for uploading photos too. It's highly spoken of by many, but I find that I don't like the user interface as much as that of Picasa, soon to disappear into the less than friendly over-complex Google+ Facebook challenger. I've started to find others complaining in web forums about the demise of the Picasa way of doing things, so it's not just me and my sister June who are resentful about this.

Before logging out for the day, I found an email from Suore Tarcisia thanking me for the article and returning my ecumenical greetings and promises of prayer for the election of a new pope, which starts tomorrow.
  

Moodle progress

Students are back after reading week, so it's back to an early morning start for me. It's getting lighter and now the blackbird is up and singing before I leave the house. Yesterday was fairly undemanding, but today I had a tutors' team meeting to chair in the morning, and another staff group meeting to attend after lunch. This was to plan the first stages of developing the use of Moodle for managing courses and students' work output. 

It's potentially a large complex entity that will need to be prepared and grown piece by piece. The first step will be to use it to arrange a joint Summer School on Key Pastoral Skills for all students, full time and part time. After the meeting I spent an hour and a half exploring properly this time, doing things like adding a photo of myself and expanding profile details, starting a blog record of what I learn as I explore its functions, to record my trial and error approach to learning how to use something new. I also set up a dummy course containing details about the sermon series I've organised at College Evensongs this term. I didn't know how to when I started, but soon got the hang of entering the information. Quite satisfying really.

With one student in bed poorly and another out on an assignment in her placement Parish, there were just three of us to celebrate with Cath her fortieth birthday, with another trip to Coffee #1 in Pontcanna. We had another lively chat in a rather noisy environment - nice and relaxing but not condusive to serious reflection, but we did end with a birthday prayer. Then I dashed home and went off to my regular Chi Gung session before supper.

  

Trip to Trinity Bristol

As I left for College, just after eight this morning, two traffic wardens were out in nearby Llanfair Road booking cars parked on four of the 'drop kerbs' at the end of our three side streets. Six new 'drop kerbs' were constructed only a couple of weeks ago. It's the first time I've seen the traffic wardens out locally at this hour. At first I wondered why they were bothering to annoy residents who'd had enough trouble finding a place in our car congested back streets to leave their vehicles overnight, and would soon be on their ways to work in any case. Then it occurred to me how fed up people walking with children in buggies to reach a day nursery, or wheelchair users out and about early to get to the surgery or shops would be, day after day, having their access to a safe and easy road crossing blocked by cars.

When CBS shared office space with Cardiff Council's Civil Parking Enforcement team, last years, I remember the phone calls received by desk officers from people complaining about cars parked in the wrong place, or from people complaining that they'd been penalised for parking in the wrong place. Both kinds were often harsh and unpleasant in tone, and I didn't envy those dealing with irate citizens. Very wearing, day after day. Having a car, keeping it and using it on the roads is not a right but privilege all to easily taken for granted. The finer points of the highway code are easily forgotten or ignored. Sometimes paying the penalty is the only way to bring home a reminder of the need to consider others. As I know from my own experience of being 'caught on camera' last year.

Today I went with six other College staff members to visit Trinity Theological College in Stoke Bishop, Bristol to see its implementation of the Moodle content management system. I was glad not to drive, for a change, just navigate to a place familiar to me from undergraduate days. From 1963-1965 I lived in Churchill Hall, one of the Bristol University student residences next door up the hill to a grand property which subsequently became the Trinity campus. The College is located in a noble mansion set in wooded hillside grounds which dates back to 1669. It's been much extended since it was taken over for College use back in 1971, but still presents an elegant face to those arriving.

We were shown around after our meeting and lunched with the ninety students and dozen staff in the refectory. There's a very lively buzz about the place, with spouses and children around. All their University courses are taught on campus, and that's a huge advantage for College life. St Mike's residential students have to travel in to the Cathay campus of Cardiff University, and effectively this loses them an hour and a half of time from each study day, and distorts the timetabling of many in-house activities. Would that it were different.

It was a very interesting session, encouraging us to think that adopting it would be a positive development for St Michael's. Nice to know too that experienced help and support is there as we figure out all the questions we should ask about our information needs, prior to setting up our own system.

After a quick cup of tea on our return, I went into the CBS office and had another go with the BT duty software support team at rectifying the remote access problem for our network drive, but with no success. Time to get in touch with Iomega, I think. No Chi Gung class tonight, so I had time at home to catch up on a few tasks waiting for my attention. The list never seems to get any shorter, however.

 

Reading Week diversion

No need to get up early this morning as College routine is suspended in Reading Week. I walked there across Llandaff Fields mid-morning, and was rewarded with the distant sight of scores of gulls and crows, some pidgeons and magpies searching busily for food on the grass, suddenly all rising into the air, as if disturbed by some invisible force. Then I heard a handful of gulls above and behind me, high in the air over Penhill, crying out as they wheeled round and round. Then I noticed in the midst of them the larger form of a buzzard in a hunting mood, or so the gulls thought. It's the first time I've noticed one in such a built up area. I should keep a lookout for them in future.

This afternoon I joined the College administrative staff for a hands on learning session about the Moodle content management system, beloved of many in the educational world. It was developed as a free Open Source learning support tool by teachers for teachers, and it's an excellent resource for managing the complexities of courses that involve hundreds of students and scores of teacher throughout the year. It was a brief introduction prior to a visit tomorrow to Trinity College Bristol to see how their Moodle system operates.

At teatime, I took the bus into town and the CBS office to install the network drive and get it running to serve the three computers in use there. It's a sophisticated piece of equipment which permits remote access to its contents from computers away from the office. The installation routine was easy, but the rest was a problem, due to the BT modem we use. Later in the evening when I was at home, and Ashley was in the office, as neither of us knew how to enable port forwarding on the router, Ashley spent more than half an hour with the BT tech support team trying to do this without success, so it'll have to be tried again tomorrow. So annoying that it didn't 'just work'.