Welcome to the first issue of the FOR-PD facilitator’s electronic newsletter. We’ll call it FFF* for short, but the title FOR-PD Facilitation with Felicity really conveys the tone and intent of this publication:

• FOR-PD, of course, is the Florida Online Reading Professional Development project
• facilitation \fa*cil`i*ta"tion\, n : act of assisting or making easier the progress or improvement of something
• felicity \fe*lic"i*ty\, n 1: pleasing and appropriate manner or style of expression [syn: felicitousness} 2: state of well-being characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy [syn: happiness]

No we’re not trying to build your vocabulary (although there are lots of hints for doing that with students in Lesson 7 of the FOR-PD course.) We’re trying to help make your work as a facilitator easier--just as you make participants’ work easier. We also want to try to show that we appreciate your efforts and celebrate some of the ideas you share with us.

We are going to use this as a vehicle for sharing news, updates and ideas with FOR-PD facilitators, and we invite you to submit ideas and questions. FFF* will be issued periodically to all who have been accepted to the FOR-PD facilitators course (unless you specifically ask us not to include you.)

To read is to empower
To empower is to write
To write is to influence
To Influence is to change
To change is to live.

~ Jane Evershed ~

The FOR-PD course launched the week of January 20. There are currently 63 sections underway with 2535 in 24 districts (staff development points) and three state universities (graduate credit).

Congratulations and special thanks to those of you who posted a personal introduction on the Lesson 1: MEET ME HERE discussion board as a model for participants. We’ve found it makes all the difference in getting things off to a good start. Some of you also send an email to each member of the class, welcoming them and tell them the best times and ways to reach you for help. GREAT!

Equally important is replying to each member’s introduction on the Lesson 1: MEET ME HERE discussion board. With each participant also replying to at least one other posting, you help to build that sense of community that has proven so important in online courses.

Continue that sense of community posting interesting tidbits in the "Faculty Lounge" and posting general feedback for each lesson on the "Main" discussion board.

The first week passed with our Helpdesk Coordinator, Carlos Ibanez, feeling like he had a lot in common with the Maytag repairman. He kept waiting for the phone to ring in the evenings and on the weekend. No one called. Why? Because we had inadvertently provided the wrong number for the help line on the login page and in Lesson 1. Oops! We’ve corrected it on the login page, but if your class was already in session, we could not correct it in Lesson 1. You should have received an email asking you to post that information on the Main Discussion board or in an email to the group or both. Here’s that information again:

In the evenings and on weekends, we have a special FOR-PD technical support hotline at (866) 863-READ (toll free, FL only) or (407) 882-READ.

M, T, W evenings	6-10 PM
Friday evening	6-8 PM
Saturday	10 AM-5 PM
Sunday	12 - 5 PM

(During the weekdays, these hotline numbers should be forwarded to the FOR-PD office. There is voicemail on all FOR-PD numbers, so if no one is available, be sure to describe the problem and leave numbers and times and email addresses so that you can be reached.)

Technical support is also available during weekday and helpdesk hours through AOL Instant Messenger, screen name forpdhelp.

P.S. Carlos reports business is booming. Most frequent call for help? Participants who can't log in because they use a different name than the district provided in the registration file. For example, "Skip" Johnson might have been listed by his legal name, Reginald Johnson, in the district registration file. Easy to solve! We like that!

Remember there is a special email address for FOR-PD Facilitators: forpdfac@mail.ucf.edu. It is the best way to direct your question to the attention to Teresa Dahl, FOR-PD Facilitator Coordinator.

When you have been assigned to facilitate a course and you log into FOR-PD, you will soon see a "course" called For Facilitators Only. In it is a discussion board that only facilitators can access. Use it to post constructive criticism and feedback on lessons and assignments, or use it to ask questions to which you think other facilitators might want answers (or might have answers.) You might also want to use it to get other's input on grading, or find some ideas that have worked for others. When you are in your FORD-PD section, you'll be able to get to this discussion area just for facilitators by clicking on MyWebCT at the top of the page.

This will take the place of the facilitator forum originally described in the FOR-PD Facilitator Training and Certification Course. That forum required an additional username and password, and we’re hoping this will make life easier for you! See, we're trying to facilitate our facilitators!

Not too far down the road will be adding a course evaluation for you to use at the end of the FOR-PD section you are facilitating. We want input from the facilitator's point of view about the course and the process. Please do not use the facilitator's course evaluation feature until you complete your section and are requested to do so.

The assignment in Lesson 4 of FOR-PD requires participants to use SUNLINK (http://www.sunlink.ucf.edu), a free online library media catalog, to build a bibliography. It's a tool that provides access to information about over 80% of the public school library media collections in Florida. The SUNLINK database (updated on January 27, 2003) has over 1.3 million titles and nearly 11,000 websites. Talk about print-rich environments!

We've seen a few bibliographies posted already that did NOT use SUNLINK. We can tell because a search for several of the items on the list results in no matches in the database. Unfortunately, NOT using SUNLINK not only negates learning about a free online Florida tool, but it makes the assignment more difficult than it needs to be!

Creating a bibliography, saving it, and attaching it as directed in the "show what you know" segment is really easy. If you aren't familiar with SUNLINK, you might want to spend a little time searching by grade level, interest level, topic, format, etc. Create your OWN bibliography so you can help participants. In fact, posting a model assignment might help participants be more confident in completing this assignment.

Figure 1: Sample 3-Item SUNLINK Bibliography

Set weekly deadlines for lesson assignments and make sure they are clear to participants. Remember to be firm, fair and fun! Encourage participants to keep up to date with assignments. Students who begin to fall behind frequently find it difficult to catch up, so they drop out. A quick email or phone call from a facilitator can make a real difference.

A little boy opened the big and old family Bible with fascination, looking at the old pages as he turned them. Then something fell out of the Bible and he picked up and looked at it closely. It was an old leaf from a tree. The leaf had been pressed in between pages.

"Momma, look what I found", the boy called out.

"What have you got there, dear?" his mother asked.

With astonishment in the young boy's voice he answered,"It's Adam's suit!!!!!"

Send us your success stories and good ideas you've tried. We'd also love to hear any stories about how teachers are using FOR-PD content and strategies in their classrooms. Do you have any "funny"stories from your FOR-PD classes? If we use your story or idea in a future FFF, we'll send you something nice! We won't even use your name unless you say it is OK! Send your contributions to fff@orion.itrc.ucf.edu.

FOR-PD FACILITATOR’S MANUAL (version 1.4) is currently online at /facilitators/manual.html

Dear Felicity,

I'm a new FOR-PD facilitator and love it! I find the rubrics very helpful in grading assignments. However, I find it difficult to remember the parts of the rubric. I'd also like to be able to comment on what most participants did well and where they fell short in the Main Discussion area after grading each assignment. Do you have any suggestions?
--I.M. Readingbetter, FOR-PD Facilitator

Dear I.M.,

Several facilitators told us they use a spreadsheet to track participants and assignments and then transfer the final score for each assignment to the FOR-PD electronic gradebook. We LOVE hearing great ideas like that, so Becky Fiedler of the FOR-PD staff has come up with a Microsoft Excel file for you to use if you'd like.

If you are already facilitating a course, you can download the file, add your participants' names, and score each assignment on a separate worksheet. A shortened rubric is provided at the top of each page. You award the points for each part and the program totals it for you automatically! Download the file for Macintosh or Windows (92k). (Note: You must have MS Excel on your computer to open this file. Enter names (or cut and paste them from the flat file we sent you at the beginning of the course) on the "flat file" page and they will be automatically entered on each worksheet after that.) One look at the page should help indicate general areas of strength and weakness.

From now on we'll include that file to facilitators for new sections of the course (and we'll include participant information). If you have questions about how to use the file, contact us at forpdfac@mail.ucf.edu or call the FOR-PD help line at 1-866-227-7261.

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Last updated February 18, 2003
Contact us at forpd@mail.ucf.edu

A project of the Instructional Technology Resource Center at the University of Central Florida.
Funded by the Florida Department of Education and Just Read Florida!