Glow Scotland

Last week I embarked on a week long visit to the most southern of the populated Western Isles. My whirlwind tour which covered Lewis, Harris, Benbecula and Barra was the next phase in a series of Glow training events for teachers and school staff in one of the most remote local authorities in Scotland.

My first stop was E. Scott School in Tarbert, where the original Western Isles mentors had been trained the year before. Here, I spent the day with teachers from across Lewis and Harris exploring ideas for learning and teaching and demonstrating how much easier Glow would make communication across the islands. This turned out to be slightly ironic when internet access across the whole island went down in the middle of the afternoon! (This was due to a mainland problem on the interconnect link).
Obviously used to such minor setbacks the group and myself simply set up wirelessly in a local Hotel using laptops until normal service was resumed. For myself and some of the teachers there, there was a real sense of deja vu as exactly the same thing had happened the year before!

On Tuesday I flew to Benbecula to catch a connecting flight to Barra – only to be told at Benbecula that the Barra flight had not left Glasgow! After the local Glow contact Hamish Budge scrabbled to hire a car there followed a mad dash to catch the local ferry to Barra. Finally arriving in beautiful Castlebay at 4 I was introduced to the teachers at Castlebay School who had all stayed on to attend a twilight session on Glow and left showing real enthusiasm about the difference that it could make in their classroom and school community.

On Wednesday I spent the day with Barra school management and administration staff discussing how Glow would make the dissemination of school information much easier and again Glow was received very enthusiastically. The group came up with many excellent ideas for the types of information that could be circulated including absence lists and school news. I then left Castlebay glowing… and headed back on the ferry to Benbecula.

On Thursday I spent the day at Sgoil Lionacleit with Uist based school management and administration staff. After hearing about some of the ideas from their Barra counterparts they also quickly realised the huge difference that having access to Glow would make to their schools.

On Thursday evening and Friday morning Hamish and I did a double-act to deliver sessions to a special Glow working group of teachers from Sgoil Lionacleit who are preparing to roll Glow out to the rest of their staff after Easter. They were incredibly excited about the learning and teaching opportunities that Glow could offer, and both Hamish and myself helped them plan a strategy to give the rest of the staff their best first experience of the portal.

Kenny Matheson and the entire Western Isles central team have worked incredibly hard to get Glow going in their authority and thanks to them after the Easter holidays every school in the Western Isles will have Glow available to them. It was this wonderful thought that made the ferry to Skye and then the long drive back to Glasgow worthwhile. My thanks in particular go out to Coleen, Jane and Hamish for their expertise, company, humour and enthusiasm during the course of an unforgettable week.

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.

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.

When Western Isles Glow Mentor Kirsteen Maclean told her pupils at Bernera Primary School she would be attending last month’s Glow conference in Stirling, she encouraged them to post their thoughts and ideas on the Glow discussion board. Checking the forum, Kirsteen was pleased to see that pupils had not only posted summaries of their Glow work to date, but that they had also commented on each other’s work.

‘One little boy had gone from post to post making comments like ‘I like what you’ve done here’ or ‘I like the way you’ve described this,’ laughed Kirsteen. ‘I have children who are really encouraging of one another and the older ones really nurture the younger ones. To actually see that in action is so encouraging.’

Kirsteen first introduced her pupils to Glow through a Judaism Glow Group where she uploaded all of her lessons, including worksheets, photos and videos. She then taught pupils the key skills they would need, such as how to resize photos, hold a discussion and upload their work.

‘So far, our experience with Glow has been very positive,’ Kirsteen said. ‘It all boils down to making Glow activities relevant and meaningful for both staff and pupils.’

Read more about a nurturing Glow at Bernera Primary and Glow in the Western Isles.

Following Glow Mentor training in Harris in January, two teachers have been working together to bring pupils from Paible(a 5-14 school on North Uist) together with pupils from Sgoil Lionacleit (a community secondary school on Benbecula) using Glow Meet.

Mary Ann MacDonald, a P6/7 teacher at Paible, and Liz MacMillan, a French teacher at Lionacleit, arranged for former pupils of Paible, now at Sgoil Lionacleit, to read eco poems written in French during the school’s climate change week.

‘Having successfully managed this link-up, we decided to take Glow a step further and arranged for Liz to teach our primary 6/7 class a French lesson on pets,’ says Mary Ann.

Liz talked to, and took oral responses from, Paible pupils, as well as interacting with them through the whiteboard.

‘There was great excitement when they would see a big tick appear against their response,’ adds Mary Ann. ‘This was an ideal opportunity to set up links between schools and make the transition from primary to secondary less daunting for our pupils.’

The other components of Glow have also been used by Mary Ann and Liz, for example to share documents, to start and contribute to discussions and to post news items.

As storms go, it wasn’t the worst the islanders on Harris had experienced, but it did bring down power lines the night before the Glow team flew into the Western Isles for a two-day training session with Glow mentors. The damage blacked out television and radio signals.

As one mentor pointed out, it highlighted the difficulties facing isolated areas. This time, though, wireless access to the internet stayed live. Training went ahead, averting any delay to the launch of Glow.

But the ill-timed storm also highlighted the advantages Glow will bring to the islands. Access to tools such as Glow Meet will enable schools to communicate with one another, despite the weather-induced difficulties. Since the training in January, the mentors have been collaborating with one another using Glow Groups and connecting pupils from various schools using the Glow Meet web conferencing tool.

Glow is now ready to be launched in the Western Isles. Initially it will be introduced in two or three schools to allow the authority to get feedback from P1 through to S2 before extending access. In the spring it is hoped Glow will be made available to the rest of the schools.

Read more about Glow in the Western Isles.