Glow Scotland

Last week I found myself back in the beautiful (and very stormy!) Western Isles on a support visit for Glow. Over the course of the two days I spoke to many teachers and was able to see first-hand the difference that Glow is making in this remote community.
The best part of the visit for me was seeing that the tools making a real difference were not the ‘whizzy’ ones that we hear so much about, but the nuts-and-bolts ones which require minimal bandwith and little preparation to use.
One teacher in Benbecula used her time during my session at the school to upload all her resources into the shared documents store on the local authority site. Her remit requires her to support many teachers over a wide area and she was delighted that this simple tool made all of these resources available to everybody who needed them so quickly and easily.
Another teacher in South Uist told me about the pupil-teacher council Glow group which was running in her school. The most successful tool within it was the discussion board where the pupils had uploaded all of their requests and questions for the next meeting. At the same school they have decided to do a whole school cross-curricular topic based on ‘the Sea’ and in preparation for this their Glow mentor has set up a Glow group. She told me that although the topic doesn’t begin until term 3, already many of the staff are posting their plans into it to share with one another.
My visit really brought home to me the power Glow has to support education, and the best part about it was that none of the teachers using it had changed their plans to fit Glow in – for them, it was simply the best tool for the job.

Categories: Uncategorized, Western Isles