Glow Scotland

Chris Anderson has shown, in his briliant book The Long Tail (2006) that context and not content is king in the 21st century. If this is true (and I am sure it is) what does this mean for Glow and sharing content in our National Glow Groups?

June Jelly, my colleague, and I visited the Met Office in Edinburgh, during the recent bout of windy weather . We went there on behalf of the Science and the Social Studies National Glow groups to meet up with Alan Motion, one of their Business Managers. Alan showed us the Met website and some of the free resources that are available in this great website. We saw how to access the most recently updated weather maps and a variety of other easily accessible and very useable data, for flooding, traffic and health. He also showed us a range of free resources such as a DVD, developed by meteorological experts, for school pupils, called Weatherbytes.

This type of specialised free content is becoming more common and there are more excellent sites such as Ordnance Survey, BBC and Google earth.  As access to content becomes easier and choice becomes wider it is important that we make good choices. Sharing our ideas in the National Glow groups can help us make better decisions about the curriculum and content for teaching and learning. It is important  that we share content but it is more important that we  share context aswell.

Teacher reviews of websites and ideas about how content can be used for Curriculum for Excellence can be shared much more easily with Glow tools. Discussions can take place in National Glow Groups and teachers can  upload materials there. Alan  mentioned that he thought ‘The Weather’ would eventually only be taught by Scientists, not Geographers in schools. Meteorology, like hydrology is afterall a science, isn’t it? There are many Geographers who would disagree with the idea that the weather topic should be moved to the Science curriculum (same arguement for Tectonic Plates). I can see his point, you can put yours in the Social Studies National Glow Group discussions page.

The Met office web site offers great potential for teaching across subjects areas, with up to the minute information and relevent contexts, for example, flooding, health and insurance. Did you know that the Met office  is paid to provide information to the oil industry, the armed forces and health trusts in Scotland?  There are ample opportunities for imaginative teachers to use this site for problem solving activities based on local and national contexts, for example with global warming. Furthermore, teachers can enrich learning experiences by offering additional locational information from sites such as Google earth or Ordnance survey.

I recently had an idea for using Met Office weather maps in the classroom, which are, by the way, updated every two hours. Teachers and pupils could link up with other schools, in a Glow group, to photograph the weather or even plot the progression of a weather front across Scotland. Digital images of local weather and sky views, could be matched to Met Office national weather maps and Google earth screen shots, to illustrate how the weather changes, such as during the advance of a depression.

  Ollie Brae has recently asked teachers to consider sharing local landscapes and digital images internationally in Google maps, perhaps we can think global and act local using Glow groups? He was commenting on Elrik solheim’s work and a ‘film’ called One Year in 40 seconds, which is a brilliant example of showing something that we all take for granted, in a new way: the changing scenery of the seasons in a given location.

Read more about the Met Office website and share your websites, website reviews and teaching contexts, in the Social Studies National Glow Group, the Science National Glow Group or other National Glow Groups.

Categories: Curriculum for Excellence, National Groups