Glow Scotland

Are you a practitioner? Do you want to win an iPod? If the answer is YES then we want to know how you are using Glow. Perhaps you have shared materials, ideas or practice with your colleagues. You may have set tasks for pupils to complete through Glow or joined in a National Glow Meet providing a focus for your topic.

It doesn’t matter how often you’ve used Glow or what you use it for, we’re keen to hear how it’s helping you and the young people you work with.

For the chance to win an iPod, please complete our online questionnaire before March 31st 2010. If you have completed the survey since the Scottish Learning Festival in September 2009, you too are in with a chance of winning the prize.

The survey sits in Glow so you’ll need your user name and password to take part and is open to all teaching and non-teaching Practitioners only. Start the Online Questionnaire here.

We are pleased to remind you that we will be running three Building Glow Communities events at Stirling Management Centre in May.

This batch of events will be for Technologies, Additional Support Needs and Expressive Arts.

As before, practitioners will work in small groups to create Glow Groups in which they and their pupils can collaborate over the coming months. The groups created will be made visible to all teachers and pupils nationally to act as examples of good practice. This will be a unique opportunity to work alongside colleagues from across the country to share ideas, experiences and resources.

Applicants must have a Glow account and should have some experience of creating Glow Groups.

To apply for the event, please visit the Building Glow Communities Glow Group and click on the link ‘Building Glow Communities application form’ which sits directly under the table of dates.  You can also access the application form by clicking ‘new item’ under the link. The dates of each event are shown below:

Technologies 4-5 May
Additional Support Needs 17-18 May
Expressive Arts 25-26 May

11th March, 1.45pm – 2.45pm

Join author Annemarie Allan in Glow Meet to find out more about Breaker, an undersea adventure.

‘Tom and Beth are not happy when they move to North Berwick and find themselves facing a rainy, windswept beach, a house that’s falling apart and a school full or strangers. When they meet Professor Macblain, with his weird and wonderful inventions, little do they know that he has a secret: not only is he a thief, but he has stolen the one thing that can save the Firth of Forth from environmental catastrophe.’

Find out what inspires Annemarie to write, delve in to the wonderful world of sealife in North Berwick and ask her questions. Explore a range of themes such as family, making friends and moving to a new place. Find out more about living by the sea, green energy, science and the environment.

Law Primary will be joining Annemarie at the Scottish Seabird Centre to get some insight into being an author, writing skills and the wonderful book Breaker which is set in North Berwick where they go to school.

This Glow Meet is aimed at pupils from P4 – P7 and is being run in partnership with the Scottish Seabird Centre and Floris Books.

Find out more
To sign up for this Glow Meet click here to visit the Glow group.

Marie-Louise Brogan is Depute Head Teacher at Holy Family Primary school in Kirkintilloch, East Dunbartonshire. As part of her remit she is responsible monitoring and supporting learning and teaching within the middle and upper stages. Last year she also shared a class with a Probationer and was responsible for Social Studies and ICT in the P.4 class.

In this cookbook we will look at how Marie-Louise used Glow Learn to develop a short course for the learners in their topic, The Vikings. Marie-Louise found that through using the Glow Learn platform the learners were able to make full use of their allocated ICT time and the learning in this time was purposeful and ensured that ICT was supporting learning.

Various video clips will talk you through the project including how to create learning objectives in Glow Learn, how to add pupils to the course and how to track pupils’ work using monitor and Track.

Visit this Glowing Cookbook to get started.

In this cookbook, find out how Margo Kerr,  seconded from her nursery post at Kirknewton Primary School, is working as the Early Years ICT Development Officer within the West Lothian Council Early Years Team. Margo’s remit is to provide curricular ICT support to all Early Years practitioners (nursery – P3) within the Local Authority and to drive forward and support the implementation of Glow within the Nurseries.

There are five standalone Early Years Centres and eight Nursery Schools in West Lothian. Since these Early Years establishments are not attached to a school, they do not have access to a school Glow establishment site. West Lothian therefore asked to have a separate, single Glow establishment created for the standalone Early Years establishments. The staff in all of these nurseries had their Glow accounts provisioned within this establishment, which is called ‘West Lothian Early Years’ to enable them to all work together.

Visit this Glowing Cookbook and follow Margo’s story including video footage of how to set up a Glow Meet.

We love Glow because it’s a fantastic educational tool, breaking down geographical barriers and driving forward Curriculum for Excellence. We would like you and your pupils to tell us why you love Glow; do you use it in the classroom as part of a project, at home to help with homework? Perhaps you have a favourite feature? We’d love to hear all about it.

For the chance to win an exclusive bendy Glowing keyboard, simply send a short video clip to the Glow team at: Glowadmin@ltscotland.org.uk starting the video with ‘I love Glow because…’. Every month a new winner will be announced and their video will be uploaded to the GlowScotland website.

We’ve already uploaded some clips of primary and secondary pupils from across Scotland telling us why they love Glow. Visit the GlowScotland website to find out more.

We’d like to announce the launch of our new Glow Cookbooks.

What exactly is a Glow Cookbook I hear you ask? Put simply it is description of how Glow is being used by classroom practitioners and how it has enhanced learning and teaching with their pupils.

Like a traditional cookbook it contains the ingredients, which Glow components have been used, some advice on method, a quick ‘how to’ video, and the end product, a description of the impact from the teacher or pupils.

So if you’d like to know how to use Glow for innovative and successful transitions or use Glow Meet to support conversational French or how to create a Worry Forum or how to embed video as a stimulus for writing or how to use  Glow for Personal Learning Planning or enhancing staff communication or…OK  so you get the point. Go on take a peek and leave us some feedback.

We hope to add many more of these short cookbooks to help generate useful ideas and showcase how Glow is being used around the country.

Glow Cookbooks can be accessed via the Glow national site Help link or linking directly to http://cookbooks.glowscotland.org.uk/ or using a Google search for Glow Cookbooks.

Tell your story and win a Flip video camera

We’d love to hear and share your story. How are you using Glow and what has been the impact on you or your pupils? Please send us your Glow Cookbook for sharing on our cookbook site. From the first fifty we will select three winners to receive a natty Flip video camera. All content should be emailed to glowadmin@ltscotland.org.uk and titled Cookbook competition.

What are we looking for?

Take a look at some of the current cookbooks they follow a similar format. This is a useful template for creating your cookbook. There are some points that you need to bear in mind:

• Your cookbook should include a brief context
• It should include pictures and screen shots – but we don’t expect you to submit any video
• Any graphics etc should be copyright friendly and all photos must have the appropriate permissions granted for sharing over the internet
• The main element of the cookbook will be a description of the impact using Glow has had on facilitating learning
• You do not need to include any instructions on how to add, amend or use specific web parts
• An email address would be most useful to encourage further collaboration
• All submitted cookbooks (subject to a QA process) will be shared on the Glow Cookbook siteSo get writing! We know that there are lots of you using Glow for a whole variety of contexts and curricular areas and we’d love to share these stories!

Not only does South Ayrshire do really well in terms of using Glow to enhance Learning and Teaching but there appear to be advantageous romantic by-products of this great work! In January 2009 2 of the new South Ayrshire mentors met for the first time at their 2 day training for glow mentors.

As part of being mentors they began to test out some of the tools within Glow, Glow Messenger and Glow Meet from home. This extended into working collaboratively on a number of innovative projects using Glow with their respective classes when they were at Pinwherry and Dundonald primary schools: Homecoming presentations, writing lessons, reading groups, open classroom to name but a few!!

It is testament to the innovation that Avril and Richard practiced that they were asked to present at the Curriculum for Excellence festival in South Ayrshire and at the Scottish Learning Festival in September of last year. Avril and Richard moved in together during the summer holidays last year and both took up new teaching posts in Girvan Primary and Forehill respectively.

They continued to use Glow for work with and between their classes. They got engaged this month and their wedding is planned for July.

We wish them all the best but want to know, will Glow be involved on the day?

This Month’s Puzzle has now been added to the Glow Group, just in the nick of time!

You can access the Group with your username and password by using the link http://tinyurl.com/ycv5xmn

Be warned though, the last one’s a right wee stinker!

The Scottish Book Trust are celebrating World Book Day on the 4th March with two events; one for primary and one for secondary, with the hilarious children’s poet Michael Rosen.

Michael will be telling stories from his childhood as well as performing a selection of his catchy and funny poems and you can watch the events by signing up for the live stream through Glow Meet.

The event is being streamed live on the National Books Trust Online and is produced and edited by the BBC.

The details are as follows:

P3-P7 session (Curriculum for Excellence Levels First and Second): 10.30am
S1-S3 session (Curriculum for Excellence Levels Third and Fourth): 2.00pm

If you would like to take part,visit the World Book Day Glow Group for more details.