Glow Scotland

Over recent months Glow Learn, Glow’s virtual learning environment has been explored by many more people from across Scotland. A lot of this exploration has taken place at Stirling Management Centre during a series of two days Glow Learn training events.

Glow Learn provides tools to plan, prepare and deliver learning materials, assign work to pupils and track and monitor pupil progress online. It also allows users to search for and share learning materials across schools, local authorities and nationally.

Attendees have included Glow Mentors, staff from local authorities and many others who have an interest in Glow that they wanted to explore further.

Training has allowed participants to get to grips with using the Glow Learn tools, consider how it can be used to support learning and teaching and have an opportunity to make links with others using Glow’s virtual learning environment. A blend of presentations and hands on has allowed attendees to discover more. We’ve had 6 courses with around 245 people spending time using Glow Learn so far.

As participants have returned to their schools, local authorities and other establishments, they’ve started to use Glow Learn in different ways. Some examples have included schools making links to support their World War Two topics, the online provision of Access 3 Maths and English for interrupted learners, the creation of learning spaces for climate change projects and the development of learning resources to support Graphic Communication.

The possibilities are endless and attendees have been sharing their ideas in a National Glow Group both during and after training.

Find out more about what others have been doing with Glow Learn, their shared questions and answers and some useful materials in the National Glow Learn Training Glow Group.

One of the most satisfying aspects of my job supporting Glow roll out in a local authority involves sharing the eureka moment experienced by users new to Glow. That moment when the potential of a Glow Group or particular Glow tool sparks a flurry of activity, discussion or questions. Last week I spent five days in the Western Isles supporting Kenny Mathieson and his team in what turned out to be an intensive and rewarding experience with some eureka moments worth sharing.

Curiously, the first eureka moment of the week was experienced by me when a group of staff training at Back School launched into creating class Glow Groups within ten minutes of me finishing the introductory demo of Glow. They did this without instruction or help sheets and had little trouble putting together groups that could instantly be used by their classes.

Later in the week, I spent two days with school administration staff from across Lewis and Harris, taking them through Site Collection Administration (SCA) training. This group of staff quickly got to grips with populating their school sites with content. It was obvious that they were delighted at how straightforward the process was.

Following a day of training at Sgoil Nan Loch, Katie Ann MacLeod (Depute Head), Margaret Joan MacLeod (Principal Teacher), Hamish Budge (Glow Coordinator) and I brainstormed potential Glow developments for the school. Earlier in the week Katie Ann had represented the school at a conference attended by all of the Head Teachers on the Isles. Presenting at the conference were four pupils from Bernera school who demonstrated what they had been doing on Glow. As the four confident learners regaled the stunned audience with descriptions of how they embedded code into XML web parts, Katie Ann had her own eureka moment determining that she needed to get her school realising the benefits of Glow sooner rather than later.

My week ended working with staff from the Nicolson Institute, the largest school in the Western Isles. Glow Learn was on the agenda and it did not take the staff long to acknowledge the need for suitable tagging of resources or that we had in Glow Learn a tool that could finally break down barriers across schools and local authorities when it came to sharing resources.

I started this post commenting on job satisfaction. Working with staff in local authorities as they come to grips with the challenges faced by rolling out Glow is energising and inspiring. It is good to know that the commitment of Kenny, his team and the staff in schools will ensure that the impressive pupils from Bernera and across the Western Isles will continue to have opportunities to develop through Glow.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Kenny and his team for their usual warm welcome and hospitality throughout the week.

24th & 25th November saw the first national Glow Learn training sessions, held at Stirling Management Centre. Representatives of Aberdeen, Clackmannanshire, Dundee, South Lanarkshire and Western Isles attended this well-structured, intensive two-day residential course – the first of several to come over the next few months.
The course was introduced by Ian Hoffman, who gave an overview of Glow’s virtual learning environment, Glow Learn, and its potential as a tool for teaching and learning. The possibilities to create, organise and share digital resources; to search for, copy and amend other teachers’ resources and courses; to plan courses comprising these digital resources; to set digital tasks for enrolled pupils; to monitor pupil progress in these assignments - and how to incorporate all this in a Glow Group Learning Space was all covered over the two days!
Those attending were full of ideas for how they might take Glow Learn forward back in their schools or local authorities – and documented these in a specially set up national Glow Group devoted to Glow Learn Training.
We all also amended our profiles (look on the page you first see when you log into Glow for the link to this) to include “Glow Learn” as an area of interest. This will let other folk find us when they search the Glow membership using “area of interest” as the key field. If you have a Glow login, try it! (It’s a good idea to add your areas of interest such as sector or subject to your profile if you like the idea of collaborating with others in a similar situation. Once we all document our interests, we’ll be able to make such useful contacts!)
Several hands on sessions were held to take us all through the various steps involved in using Glow Learn, interspersed with presentations covering important issues such as observing IPR (intellectual property rights).
There were some light-hearted moments: Ian claimed to be the “supervisor” of the training team and his role was even celebrated in an ode by one of the participants, but his “lassies” – Karen-Anne, Dawn, Gerri and Lesley, the very able workshop leaders - were not so sure!
Ian rounded off the two days with a challenge to those of us who had attended – to go back to school or L.A. and use Glow Learn soon in earnest, to keep in touch and to help our colleagues to move forward with Glow to the benefit of all our learners.
If you are interested in using Glow Learn, have a look at the tutorials.

At the end of last week I was in Dundee as part of their ‘Making Connections’ Event - the theme of which was using ICT to enhance Curriculum for Excellence and Learning Together.
As many teachers in Dundee City are already using the Glow portal and Glow groups really successfully my role was to talk about Glow Learn (the ‘teachers’ part of Glow as one practitioner put it). Glow Learn is a fantastic tool and lets teachers do all sorts of really useful things like set assessments and differentiate work but I have always felt that if it is used alone you lose all of the wonderful collaborative opportunities that come with using Glow groups.
The solution of course would be to use both Glow Learn and Glow groups together and luckily this can be done very easily through the use of a special Glow group called a Learning Space.
The teachers in Dundee were genuinely excited by all of the new opportunities that this development could bring . One teacher who has been using Glow groups for a while said that Glow Learn was ‘just what she had been waiting for’.
The first round of Glow Learn training is just about to begin for many Local Authorities, and if you want to try it for yourself there are great modules under the ‘Learning about Glow’ tab either in Glow or on the Glowscotland website.