Glow Scotland

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)

Tynewater Primary School in Midlothian had just finished its Glow training and was raring to go – too good an opportunity to miss I thought! So last week I enjoyed an exciting week working with a class of Primary 4 children to create work to showcase to their school.
The class had undertaken a Waste Management project supported by the authority and were keen to show the rest of the school what they had learnt. In consultation with the class teacher, I suggested that in small groups the children created a short animation to reflect the main themes that they had learnt about – Resusing, Reducing and Recycling. After an initial introductory lesson to let the children understand about the process of animation they quickly developed their own single background scene and four characters to animate using paper and moveable parts.
The authority had installed Digital Blue software on all the school machines so it seemed logical to use this and the stop motion facility that it has. Each group of 4 had 1 hour to create their animation and they very quickly learnt just how many frames go into making just a second of animation so there couldn’t be lots of action!
The end results were fantastic and were showcased to parents and pupils at the school assembly last Friday and will be appearing soon in Glow.

Lots of people are entering an exciting new phase with Glow and I’ve been busy visiting schools across the local authorities that I work with. Part of this activity has involved Midlothian schools and supporting them with their rollout. They have a comprehensive plan for how Glow will be introduced to nursery, primary and secondary schools throughout their local authority. This plan involves a 12 phased approach with introductory sessions, staff training sessions, optional INSET and following up with in-class support for schools. This seems to be a great approach and provides an invaluable opportunity to explore how Glow might be useful to a large number of staff and considering what it may mean to different people.

My travels so far have taken me to Dalkeith High school to give staff an introduction to Glow. Tommy Lawson and Alan Thomson from the authority also attended and supported this ideal opportunity to raise awareness in the first of many Midlothian schools. My next visit was to Woodburn Primary to talk about developments with Glow and allow staff to have some hands on experience. Some of this audience included Mentors and local authority staff who had already used Glow. It was a great opportunity to get their ideas about how they thought Glow might be used in Midlothian and to explore some of the challenges we might face and solutions to overcome them. Speaking to those people who had only just seen Glow that day provided a useful and interesting perspective too. This is something that we shouldn’t lose sight of and capturing those ideas can help plan for future events and what the focus should be.

My colleague Ian Hoffman has also been busy visiting Midlothian schools to get them thinking about Glow and what it might mean for them and joined Rosewell and Woodburn Primary for an introductory session last week. This support will continue this year and throughout 2009 and will hopefully raise awareness and encourage use of Glow. I thoroughly enjoy this part of my job as Glow Development Officer and can’t wait to get out and about to other schools and authorities to get to the heart of the activity and support this in any way I can.