Google Search Tips

Hi Everyone -
The Yorkville U Librarian shared this link and I've bookmarked it as a favourite.

I asked Cassie to check it out earlier today and here were her preliminary recommendations: "Of particular interest are the Reference, Better Results, Fine Tuning, and Scholar sections which link out to longer articles so there is a wealth of information available."

More from India

Here's a link to the website for the conference I attended: http://www.jivacareer.org/conference.html

Unfortunately, I can't seem to attach a document here - if you're interested in Tony Watt's final reflections, just email me (I share his reflections).

Finally, here's a blog I wrote for the Career Development Chapter of the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association: http://ccpacdchapter.blogspot.com/

Juggling Multiple Projects

Within our team, as all of you know, we're ALWAYS juggling multiple projects. However, if you're in the office the week before I leave for an extended overseas trip, you'll be familiar with the mad rush to move a month's worth of projects forward concurrently...

So...lessons learned from this:
1. Take a step back and look at due dates within the next 6 weeks
2. Chunk time - block it off and make appointments with key stakeholders (we've had lots of teleconfs, GoToMeetings, and meetings in the office this week)
3. Give every project some attention
4. Communicate what's been done and what needs to be done next
5. Delegate where necessary
6. Strategically decide to set lower priority projects aside
7. Plan for longer days (i.e., realistically, schedules don't work perfectly, so allow some wiggle room)
8. Leave space for cool new opportunities or important requests (we've actually put 4 new certificate programs on our "books" this week - things we'd thought of but wouldn't have chosen right now to focus on except that opportunities came together and it made sense to pursue them)
9. Be kind to each other - in the midst of juggling multiple priorities, mistakes will be made or communication will be misinterpreted. Check in often...and assume positive intentions :-)
10. Laugh...a lot! Without humour, we'd never get through busy times!

Thanks everyone - see you after October 18th!

Prezi - A New Presentation Tool

Our latest "cool tool" is Prezi - introduced to us by two different presenters, we decided to play with it a bit this week and try it out. Here's one example of a prezi - it's worth looking at as it also talks about corporate "story" and we've discussed trying to document our story for Life Strategies - perhaps this is one way to capture it with words, quotes, pictures, and a timeline?

Here's another example - a wee bit long, but perhaps some of you would be willing to create a Prezi with 10 things about you...to share here and with our students?

Shared Learning

Just wanted to update those of you who we don't see quite as often about what's been going on "in head office" (AKA the garden patio :-)). Our revised website is almost ready to launch (thanks Deirdre!), Cheryl has worked miracles with Moodle (it finally has graphics!), and we're actively working with SUCCESS again designing Essential Skills training. We expect fall to be busy...and the focus of our work internal to Life Strategies is "consolidate." To do this, we're working on integrating our social media (blogs, websites, linked-in, Twitter, Facebook) to make them work better for us. We're also going to be more consistent with writing and design standards (Cheryl will work with us to develop and share the standards) and we'll develop and use more templates (for flyers, handouts, PowerPoint, etc.). We'll be working on smaller project teams, so wanted a means to share some information with our complete team (hence this blog!).

We miss the shared learning and tech tips from our team meetings, so hope that this blog will allow us to continue to learn together. Did you notice you can even upload video? So, if something's easier to just "show us" try that. :-)