Blog feedGlow for Aberdeen City Probationers
October 3rd, 2008
Today I made my first visit to Aberdeen City as a Glow Development Officer. I was delighted to have the chance to speak to the city’s current probationer teachers concerning Glow as part of their training day about ICT based resources. It was heartening that, when asked what they knew already about Glow, a perfect response was given about a national web-based learning community of teachers and pupils.
After a short presentation about changing learning styles and the resulting need for pedagogical change, using digital tools such as are second nature to today’s pupils, we had a tour of the growing list of activities and Glow Groups to be found on the National Site. We looked at the Glowing Games and the Consolarium, Jaye Richards’ research into the impact of Glow, Fiona Hyslop’s recent Glow Chat and much in between.
After this national perspective, Brian Murray, a Glow ASG Mentor and maths teacher at Hazlehead Academy gave an insight into his school’s site. Staff at his school recently got their logins to Glow and now are paper free - accessing the daily bulletin and attendance information via Glow. The role-based sites and the school site had all been prepared by the central ICT team and looked very stylish and inviting. Hazlehead and other Aberdeen schools on Glow at present, are initially concentrating on the use of Glow for information flow. Its learning and teaching potential will soon be realised too when pupils are brought on to Glow in the near future. The planned gap between staff and pupils’ access, is working to advantage in terms of staff confidence building. Staff see the potential of Glow and now actively want pupils to get logins. The other schools across the LA will follow a similar pattern – staff first, then pupils a couple of months later.
The probationers are looking forward to getting their Glow logins - and I’m certainly looking forward to working with Aberdeen City and seeing all the planning and hard work pay off!
Would the school staff not have learned more and felt more of a sense of ownership if they had constructed their own site?
I hope that Aberdeen teachers get the freedom to develop their use of GLOW in ways which suit them and their pupils rather than having to conform to a comon theme. This is what has worked so well at Cathkin, as the research clearly shows.
Remember - be creatively subversive; it works.
Knowing the central ICT team in Aberdeen, I think your comment about a ‘dead hand’ is in this case misplaced. They are certainly amongst the innovators in Scottish education.
We felt it was asking a lot of schools to expect them to build a site with limited training, limited time and before they had much idea of what they would do with Glow.
At a time when teachers are under ever increasing pressure, particularly in our city with very severe budget cuts, we wanted to offer as much support to schools as possible and providing a basic site was an obvious first step. It has proved very popular as teachers can focus on what they want to do with Glow in the classroom and not have to worry about the technicalities of putting a site together.
The central team are all teachers, not technicians and our decisions are based on what we think will meet the needs of our schools.
Clearly there are many different ways to implement Glow but the route we have taken seems to suit our situation and has proved popular with schools so far.
If we want creativity in schools surely we have to start by encouraging a creative mindset in our teachers? To my mind a central team deciding what GLOW sites should look like in schools smacks of heavy-handed centralisation - something you’ve argued against beore Andrew…
Might not the central team in this case have been seen as more supportive if they had asked teachers to ‘opt in’ to GLOW and worked with those teachers to build their sites together. We are often accused of ’spoon-feeding’ our students. Is this not an example of just such an approach? Teachers need to know how to build and develop a site if they are to become confident in using it, and this also creates the sense of ownership I mentioned in my earlier post. It would be a shame if GLOW foundered in parts of the country because of a lack of just such a feeling…
And as Aberdeen are so cash-strapped, might a different model have been worth considering, one where the money would have been spent on training mentors in school to lead on the roll-out rather than on a central team? and again, would this also have created more of an ‘edupunk’ sense of ownership..
Just my own views of course… and maybe I’m too much of a maverick in believing in minimal management and distributed leadership?
Had a central team put up sites that would be forevermore cast in stone then that would be heavy handed centralisation - saying here’s something to start with, and you can now adapt it and make it your own is surely quite different?
I am in close contact with the central ICT team and from the outset it was made quite clear that it is the school’s site and we can do with it what we want if we want to change it totally then it is up to us. The basic frame work was made by the central ICT team and I have to say is quite flexible. The decision of how we use it is up to the school and one we will be making soon.
One huge benefit to having the general layout created by the central ICT team is that to some extent all schools will have the same feel which makes it so much easier to navigate round each others sites. This meaning the sharing of resources and good practice will be much better and happen more often, because at the moment, as is all too often in teaching, everyone is reinventing the wheel on their own.
I agree if all the staff had created the whole site ourselves there might be a greater sense of ownership. Ownership will happen quickly as each department will be administrator of their own area and can freely choose how that area will operate.
As ASG mentor I am very glad the basics were set up by the central ICT team as the time it would take is simply not available. Most teachers are on jam packed timetables and severely stretched, mainly because of the staffing cuts and budget problems Aberdeen City has had.
However as a very busy class teacher of 32 pupils, I am also very grateful that the team will put together the basic structure so that I have something to start with when I begin training the other staff members. Then I am sure that we will start to adapt things to suit our school.
As for staff not feeling they have ownership of the site;
1) All school mentors are encouraged to take ownership of their department or curricular area.
2) All staff are aware that they can take control of a glow group if they desire, as it states on he landing page for staff.
3)Pupils are being involved in ownership of their sites when they are given access. Pupils will be fully involved in the development process for pupil sites, via their pupil councils, and will have a major input to the look, feel and content of their sites.
As a class teacher on minimum time, I feel incredibly grateful for the school site template the ICT team have provided my school with. I certainly don’t feel that they have been overbearing or have tried to steer the development of the site in any particular direction. All staff in the school feel comfortable with the consistency of the glow group template provided, yet are still aware they have carte-blanche to develop the site in line with their individual needs.
Surely this is what Glow is all about, a consistent environment in which to share and collaborate, coupled with the freedom to develop organically?!
Could this mobilisation be described as a form of central control I wonder ?
…and I wonder how much ‘consistency’ results in a sacrifice of organic development.