Glow Scotland

Our first online debate takes place this Thursday, the 11th of June. The Debate will come live over Glow Meet from the National Debating Group. Join the Glow Meet at 4PM to watch Bearsden Academy and Aberdeen Grammar debate the motion ‘This House Believes Now More Than Ever We Need A United Kingdom’ - this should be very interesting, and there will be a chance for virtual spectators to ask questions after the speeches.

Click Here to request access to the group and PLEASE check that you can access Glow Meet from your location before the event to avoid disappointment!

April 29th saw the first national Glow Meet for chemistry classes. It was hosted in Aberdeen Grammar School thanks to P.T. Chemistry, Susan Davis, and Aberdeen City’s Principal Officer (Education ICT), Richard Elliott, but classes from around Scotland benefitted: St John’s HS, Dundee; Stirling HS; Marr College, South Ayrshire; Lenzie Academy, East Dunbartonshire; and several from Aberdeenshire - Fraserburgh Academy, Aboyne Academy and the Gordon Schools.

Craig Burnett, a recent entrant to the profession, described his path from Banchory Academy to his current postion with Talisman Energy, and also took the audience through the Higher Chemistry content statements about the Chemical Industry.
Gavin Smith shared his vast experience in various areas of the chemical industry with the pupils, and showed the huge responsibility that can weigh on engineers’ shoulders in terms of making sure that plants (including oil rigs) are safe - from design through to everyday procedures.
Some of the teachers who accessed the Glow Meet with their classes have left feedback in the National Sciences Glow Group:

“I used Glow Meet for the first time this morning and I really enjoyed it! I thought the presentation worked very well and I thought Gavin and Craig were very interesting and covered the topic well. I found Glow Meet very easy to use and I was happy to find that you could still join in the discussion just by typing. Thanks for giving me opportunity to join in this morning. I will be keeping an look-out for more Glow Meet events.”

“First experience of Glow Meet a very positive one. Gavin and Craig excellent at giving the pupils a wider perspective on the applications of Chemistry after school/university.
We found Glow Meet easy to use, no problems with set-up.
We didn’t have a microphone and so had to type all questions in - found this a bit restrictive and slowed things down a bit, making the Glow meet not quite as interactive as we had anticipated.
Would definitely participate again.”

“I am trying to push the use of Glow in SHS and it is events like this that are going to make it happen. The feedback from both Chemistry staff and pupils has been great. Thanks to Gavin and Craig and more please!”

If you have ideas for future Glow Meets for chemistry or any of the other sciences, leave a note in the National Sciences Glow Group, or by leaving a comment on this blog.

Unit 3, Topic a, of Higher Chemistry looks at the Chemical Industry. A Glow Meet involving two chemical engineers, covering the Higher Chemistry Content Statements in this topic area, and giving an idea of the career opportunities available in the field, will take place on Wednesday 29th April at 9.25 – 10.30 in the National Sciences Glow Group

The engineers are Gavin Smith, Process Engineering Manager, Altra Energy and Craig Burnett, Operations Reservoir Engineer, from Talisman Energy Ltd. Gavin has 17 years’ experience in many industrial chemistry fields and Craig is recently qualified, with fresh memories of the decisions pupils are about to make regarding their future careers. They kindly responded to a plea for volunteers to assist Higher Chemistry classes in this way, issued through the Institute of Chemical Engineers.

Aberdeen Grammar School chemistry department is hosting the event, so pupils there will be able to ask Craig and Gavin questions directly, but classes from around the country will also be able to see and hear the engineers and ask questions of them via Glow Meet’s tools.

Richard Elliot of Aberdeen’s ICT Support Team is coordinating the Aberdeen end.

The Glow Meet room will be open from 9.00am on Wed 29/4/09, with the session getting underway in earnest at 9.25 until around 10.30.

Click here to find out more about using Glow Meet.

If you are planning on joining the Glow Meet, you can let the Glow Team and other participants know by leaving a note of your school and local authority on the discussions area in the National Sciences Glow Group as a reply to the post there.
Bring your chemistry classes in to this novel event where experienced industrial chemists can give pupils an insight into how chemistry and the topics they have to study, fit into the real world.

There are so many ways to view and use a Glow Group. The prime role may be for teaching and learning with a class, for collaboration among staff, for distribution of information. This week I met Lynne Bowie, Curriculum for Excellence Officer in Aberdeen City. Lynne is developing a Glow Group as a CPD resource. The Sharing of Good Practice Glow Group is designed to ensure all staff have access to resources, research and examples of effective practice, that will prepare them to teach within the Curriculum Framework.

When Lynne attended a Glow awareness-raising session run by the Aberdeen ICT Team, she realised what an opportunity Glow offers to deliver the materials she is developing to all Aberdeen teachers. In the present financial and environmental climate, Glow has many benefits. Using Glow reduces the need for lots of paper based resources. Using Glow to host the materials means everyone can access them, unlike conferences where only those lucky to attend are fully provided for (…and who can get out to go to conferences when there is so little class cover available?). Using Glow means that the project, which brings together good practice advice and examples, will be sustainable since the Glow Group can continue to develop as practices improve and more guidance comes out about delivering Scotland’s curriculum.

The Glow Group itself is really a mini-collection of sites. The parent group has the Curriculum Framework at its heart, in particular the Learning & Teaching portion. There are subgroups covering AifL, Active Learning, Co-operative Learning and Critical Skills – all tools that have been highlighted for Curriculum for Excellence. Each of these also has subgroups to ensure all the elements involved are given good coverage and allow staff interaction in discussion pages. Lynne is standardising the layout of each area so staff will become familiar with the template and know where to look for the research, key features and local exemplification that is on each noticeboard page.
The Glow Group is still in development but there is no doubt that Aberdeen practitioners will be well served by it when it launches at summer.

The University of Aberdeen, School of Education is the first Teacher Training Instituion to develop Glow for teacher training. While they have a great deal of expertise in teaching for virtual learning Glow is new to them.

Katie Barrowman and I were presenting to a large number of lecturers, BEd and PGDE students from the School of Education, in the Macrobert Building on  Wed 4^th of Feb.  Our glow messages and tour of Glow were filmed for the benefit of those students who could not be there, due to heavy snow. We were also in the Macrobert Building on Friday 13th to give Mentor training to fourteen people: ten staff and four students. Thanks to Terry Allan, Linda Stevens and UoA ICT support for making these events run smoothly. The UoA establishment home page looks a little different from other establishments and it is still being developed to suit their needs. It is a home page for both trainee teachers and lecturers and  not as we find in most establishments with seperate home pages for Pupils and Staff. In the UoA all users have author rights in Glow, they can create Glow groups. This is an improvement over their existing intranet and VLE: Web CT. During the four one hour presentations we gave on Wed 4th, we took a number of questions about how can Glow fix traditional problems in education generally, such as linking up rural establishments and supporting transitions between establishments: pupils moving from primary to secondary school,  students taking up placements and students moving to take up offers of work in schools .

  Katie and I returned to the UoA  thinking that the attendees would be highly motivated and  quick to learn, most with an excellent knowledge of virtual learning and ICT. This turned out be correct.  While Katie and I were facilitating hands on with Glow in the classroom, Rob Grant ICT coordintator, facilitated training for George Drew, an absent colleague, by Glow meet.  George had laryngitis and could not speak but he managed to take part in training using a small logitech camera trained on the presenter, while he communicated with Rob via the messaging tool in Glow meet.  George also took part in the main Glow meet hands on sesion after lunch with the whole class and two teachers from school establishments outside Aberdeen. They had been invited by Katie using Twitter. Rob and I also experimented with Application sharing to allow George to access Rob’s screen in the whiteboard. In this way Rob was able to show George around Glow groups that were created during the day by attendees. George is our first virtually trained mentor.

The Glow groups that attendees created are impressive  and I look forward to seeing  more of these in the UoA establishment next Friday when I return to the UoA for the second day of training.

Today a small group of folk drawn from Aberdeen City, Angus, Midlothian, RM and Learning & Teaching Scotland got together for a workshop with a consultant to look into the area of Benefits Realisation. Part of the day was spent thinking about the original high level strategic benefits that the rollout of Glow would bring for users and administrators across the country, but the majority of the day was spent investigating how these high level benefits could be articulated in a much more meaningful, practical way for schools and local authorities to make use of.

Early on in the proceedings, it became clear why so often in many projects the area of Benefits Realisation gets placed in the ‘too hard’ tray, and only returned to at the end of the project. Tragically, this would be all too late in the process for many projects to provide any meaningful benchmarking or comparative data. With a project the scale and scope of Glow, production of benefits realisation documentation will be of great value to those tasked with measuring the progress of the project, and investigating how Glow has directly impacted on teaching and learning.

The challenge we face is in producing documentation out of the high level strategic benefits originally scoped at the outset of the project, that provides meaningful guidance for schools, local authorities and national agencies to work with. Not an easy task, but with the benefit (if you’ll pardon the pun!) of Glow, a task that we can make collaborative so that many can contribute?

Early in 2009, we’ll set up a Glow group inside Glowing Potential at the national level of Glow that will look at benefits realisation. In this group, we’ll put the documentation up for all to see as we’re working on it. That way, those with access to Glow can discuss it’s development in the Glow group and help shape it into a framework document for realising benefits that’s of value to us all.

Imagecredit: Trays Modern by JeffK (altered AB)

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.

I had a very busy but enjoyable day in Aberdeen today: making presentations at three venues to a total of 500 teachers.

My first presentation was a  live tour of Glow at Hazelhead Academy, for teachers who know about Glow and have log ins. This school is set to be a leading light for Glow in ACC. My second presentation was with powerpoint, to over two hundred teachers from local Nursery, Primary and Secondary schools, in Summerhill Education Centre. These are teachers who will very soon have log ins and who are keen to get started in Glow. My third presentation was a live tour of Glow, after lunch, at Kingswell Primary school. Again to a mixture of Nursery, Primary and Secondary Teachers who have  not as yet been using Glow.

These were warm audiences made up of experienced and perceptive teachers who asked relevant questions about what Glow can do for them. I hope their questions were answered and that they will also appear in the National Glow Groups Discussions pages soon.

On 28/29 October, Martin Brown and I were working with a new wave of Glow Mentors in Aberdeen this week. Martin did the bulk of the sessions, mentoring me in my new role as Glow D.O., as well as mentoring the mentors! The new mentors are a great bunch and will make a real impact on Aberdeen’s uptake and use of Glow. They raised several points worth mentioning here for a wider audience to ponder…

Glow refinements –
Could a way be devised to search for Glow Groups by topic?
When we complete our profiles cn we also note down our interests. This should make it easier to connect users interested in the same subjects by searching Glow using the “area of interest” field. There are also areas of Glow where teachers can have a look to see who wants to get involved in collaboration. Mentors suggested the ability to search for existing Glow Groups by topic would be an additional refinement to the search facilities in Glow: that it would be very valuable. One for the developers!
Also could web-based companies be persuaded to have links which lead to embedding in Glow such as some do for MySpace and Facebook?

It’s not surprising this was suggested, since Glow’s existence is Scotland’s way of bringing learning into the digital world in which our learners live and feel at home. They are used to these links being generated by their favourite websites for their social network spaces – so why not for Glow too?

Working together –
What is the best way to share local authority projects nationally? If some good L.A. projects get off the ground, should url links be placed in the national Staffroom glow group with short descriptors? The idea would be that teachers who want to “see into” the glow group, would then click on the url and complete the request entry box with their details (email address very important as well as name, school etc) and what their interest is in the glow group.

The local ICT Support team have managed to get funding for cover for up to a week out of school to allow some mentors to develop Glow projects! When Glow is getting off the ground, this is such a great situation – being able to step back, reflect, develop, create and go back to school with a Glow Group to use with pupils both in the individual mentors’ own schools and across the city.

Some of the Glow Groups created over the two day training session would be very worthwhile to take further. From environmental sustainability to the opportunities in Curriculum for Excellence of studying the world of the black pudding , there was no lack of imagination or creativity in Aberdeen..
Click on each thumbnail to see more detail.

Glow how to -
One piece of information that may be useful regarding the mechanics of Glow came up a couple of times when the Mentors were helping us clear down the training school site which we had used for the two days (How I remember the sad looks on the mentors faces as they deleted their Glow Groups!):
If a sub-group is created, it needs to be deleted before the parent group can go. Both groups, however, can be deleted from the parent group in the following way: (Deleting a Sub Glow Group)

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!