Create online and in-person events for your CPD programme
Whether it is mandatory training around Safeguarding and Health & Safety or practitioner lead workshops and events, you can create an entire calendar of events for staff to view and book onto. You can also place individuals onto events by utilising BlueSky's Flood Fill feature should you wish.
Creating your event
- Head to Admin and select Training from the left-hand navigation menu.
- If any upcoming events have already been created you will be able to view, edit and duplicate from this index or from the archive index. We'll cover editing and duplication later on.
- Select Add new event in the top right-hand corner
- As stated, any fields marked with an asterisk are required to create an event. Let's start with the Title, Description and Code. Keywords are optional but will provide additional search parameters in the individuals Training area.
- Next up is Event Objective(s). Here you can outline the objectives of the training, simply type and press Add another event objective until all relevant objectives are covered.
Details
- Next, we need to fill out the details of the event. Set the Date, Time and Duration of the event. Time can be just the start time i.e. 09:00 am or you can put the time period i.e. 09:00-10:30. The Duration field must be numerical and be input in decimals of an hour so 45 minutes would be 0.75.
- Now for the event location information. If the event is online simply check Will this training event be completed online? this will hide all of the Venue relevant fields and provide an Event URL field.
- If the training is taking place in your school or an external location you can complete the information here. The only fields that are required are Venue Address Line 1 and the Postcode so if the training is taking place in an IT suite or the main hall you can just type this and put the classroom number in the postcode. You can always write N/A here too.
- Next, select the individual that users should get in contact with about this event from your staff list. This will provide a direct message option should they need to get in touch.
- If someone is coming in to train your staff or if the session is online you can record their details in External Contact, Email and if relevant telephone number.
- Training facilitator is mandatory, this could be a colleague or it might be the External Contact's name again.
- If there is limited capacity or space, you can enter the count in Total number of places available.
- For most internal training cost won't be a factor but if you're promoting training from external 3rd parties then you can detail any pricing and cost information here.
- Lastly, in the details section, you can choose to automatically create bookings which means CPD Team Approval is not required, but can still be provided and if relevant to external events, provide detailed booking instructions.
CPD Evaluation Emails
When individuals create their own CPD's they can dictate when their immediate and long term evaluation reminders are sent or turn them off entirely. If you want to remind staff to evaluate the event you can set the timings of both the immediate and long term impact.
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If no timeframe is selected, evaluation emails will not be sent and evaluation emails are only sent for CPDs with a Booking.
- Select the number of days after the event date for the immediate and long term reminders to be sent.
- Wrapping up the event creation you can select Categories to tag the event with and choose any relevant Organisation Objectives it might link to.
Notifications
When an event is created and published a notification is sent to all staff to let them know. If the event is only relevant to a particular group of staff you can choose to restrict the notifications by using your groups.
Visibility
When staff first set up their profile they should have selected a Professional Level, this is based on the Professional Standards. Should you wish to restrict the visibility of the event to all Teachers or all Support Staff, you can do so here. By default, it will be visible to everyone.
Fully Booked
This option is often used once the event has already been published however if you want to record your training offer and all the places are already filled you can mark it as fully booked when you create it.
Publish
Ready to go? If you're happy with all the content of the event and you're ready to let staff know so they can book on make sure you leave this box checked.
If you're not ready to publish it yet or you want to utilise the notification system, uncheck the box and then you can publish it later on and notify staff closer to the time.
Press Save and that's your event!
Managing your event
Once created, you can attach resources to the event such as handouts or training materials. These will then be automatically attached to individuals CPD records so they can access them at any time.
From here, if needs be, you can cancel or delete the event (if no one is booked on) and then create a CPD Flood Fill. Remember you'll need permission to flood filling separately to perform this.
Archive, Edit and Duplicate
As soon as a training date has passed your event will automatically drop into your event archive. This keeps your upcoming event index clean and relevant.
Should you wish to repeat an event simply head into Archive or select Duplicate under Actions on the right-hand side of the event.
Now you have a fresh copy of all of the event details and you can amend details like the date. Once you have a bank of events you'll only ever have to create new ones every so often.
For any newly created events, you need to amend, select Edit on the right-hand side and amend any details.
If there is a timetabling conflict or circumstances change you can Edit the date of an event and all associated CPDs will update as well, however, any other information won't so you'll need to decide if it's better to cancel or just update the date.