Glow Scotland

The Scottish Arts Council and Learning and Teaching Scotland have joined forces to bring arts education online through Glow. As a result of this partnership, a new post and project have been created to explore Glow’s potential to support innovative approaches to learning and teaching through the arts.

I have recently joined the Glow Team as Development Officer (Arts) and I’m hugely excited about this project’s potential to enable artists, performers and writers and Scotland’s schools to work and learn together in ways that have never been possible before. Glow is breaking down barriers and making learning experiences and opportunities more widely accessible – the recent Anthony Horowitz and Oscar Stringer Glow Meet events and the Willie Rodger print project are just a few examples of the exciting work that is already going on via Glow.

Over the next 22 months I will be working with selected Scottish Arts Council funded arts organisations on a number of ambitious demonstration projects, to be announced later this year, which will trial new ways of learning and will show how creativity and the arts are a fantastic way of supporting Curriculum for Excellence.

The project will provide CPD opportunities for both teachers and arts practitioners to work together to develop ideas, projects and resources. I am keen to make contact with teachers, cultural co-ordinators and local arts teams who would like to be involved so please do get in touch – I’ll be delighted to hear from you.

Look out for a new national Glow Group for the project which will highlight developments and opportunities providing a focal point for all related activity and a place to collaborate and share good practice. The project will also be showcased at the Scottish Learning Festival on 23 September.

Enquiries: glowenquiries@LTScotland.org.uk

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This post and project is funded through a partnership between Learning and Teaching Scotland and the Scottish Arts Council National Lottery Fund

Two very successful Glow events have recently taken place at Stirling Management Centre. These ‘Building Glow Communities’ events focused on getting English Teachers and Primary 4-7 teachers respectively to work together to create Glow groups to support learning and teaching.

These groups will be used by the teachers who created them to share ideas and resources and to allow collaborative activities between their pupils. The groups are also open to all teachers and pupils nationally so that they can follow what’s going on.

Teachers can apply to join the groups with their own classes and take part in the activities.

You can find the P4/7 groups created by the participants under National Groups/Building Glow Communities. Groups include ‘The Victorians’, World War 2, Scotland and European Tour Guide Mission. The English Teacher groups at are at National Groups/Literacy and English/Building Glow Communities and include Transition P7/S1, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and War Poetry.

If you have any problems viewing or applying to join the groups please contact Lesley Dickson at l.dickson@ltscotland.org.uk

We are still taking applications for the next events for early years, maths, the expressive arts, science and social studies. Visit Glow Scotland to apply for a place.

Please note that while the emphasis of the events is very much on sharing and collaboration it would be useful for applicants to have some previous experience of creating Glow groups.

If you would like an event held for your subject area or sector please register your interest with Glow Administration.

Do you teach P6 or P7? Are you planning to work on World War 2, the Victorians, Scotland, favourite authors, Global Citizenship and international education, Astronomy, or even planning to work on a European Tour Guide Mission?

People always ask me what they can ‘do’ in Glow, or where they can find ‘resources’ or ‘people’ to help them in their work. To help this, we put together a series of events that would bring people together to share ideas, plans and resources related to either stages or curricular areas. We called them ‘Building Glow Communities‘, as they’d put people in touch with others that had a common interest or area of expertise.

We had the first event a couple of weeks ago for P6-7 teachers, and you can find some of the groups created at the event linked above. Tomorrow and Wednesday will see the second event take place for teachers of English, with a number of other events planned to take place at the beginning of next session. Watch out for a blog post in the near future sharing what was created at the English teachers event!

If you haven’t had the chance, why not take a look at the revamped Curriculum for Excellence website? You’ll find a new addition was added at the end of last week, that allows you to browse the experiences and outcomes and add them to a saved list in your browser. You can add notes, and even group them together to aid your planning and development. To find out more, check out the information on the ‘using this tool‘ page.

If you’re a Glow user* however, this new addition takes on a whole new lease of life. By using your Glow login details, you can not only save outcomes during that visit, but you can return to them whenever you like, where you’ll find them kept just for you.

(* In order for this functionality to work, your local authority needs to have signed up to the ‘UK Access Federation‘, which at the time of writing 21 LAs have done – if your Glow login doesn’t seem to unlock the functionality discussed here, then get in touch with your Key Contact to find out more about where they are in the process.)

I joined June Jelly from the Glow team and Patrick Carson from the Curriculum for Excellence team, to meet with Alex Hill, Chief Advisor to Governments in  Scotland and Northern Ireland and Alan Motion, Business Development Manager, from the Met Office.  June demonstrated Glow and National Glow groups, such as the Social Studies National Glow Group  and Science National Glow Group. Alex showed us around the very large Met Office website and educational resources in it.

Patrick commented on the English curriculum focus and what could be an opportunity for the Met Office to match existing reources from their website with CfE frameworks, levels and subject specific outcomes, for geography, science, literacy, numeracy, and other knowledge areas. There was a great deal of discussion around the huge potential in this website for identifying authentic learning contexts and suggesting opportunities for teaching and learning across traditional subject boundaries. Alan showed us how to locate and use Met office resources for  teaching a range of topics such as Climate Change, Global Warming, Tourism, Retail, Transport and Health. Patrick and other members of the CfE team will be meeting with Alex again very soon to discuss how the Met Office website can support CfE more directly .

It would be great to see collaborative projects, using Met Office resources, start up in Glow groups. My own suggestion is for a number of schools/geograpy teachers to take photographs or video of local weather during a depression and share with Glow tools. A Glow group could be used to plot the movement of a depression from west to east across Scotland using, local digital images, synoptic maps from the Met office website, and perhaps Glow meet? Bob Hill in Dundee has recently created a weather Glow group: The Weather and Google maps. Bob is facilitating a collaborative project which will bring together a number of schools by uploading photographs of their local skyscapes into a shared Google map. Great idea.  I hope members of this Glow group will also extend their collaboration to sharing resources, such as synoptic charts from the Met office website and resources from other websites such as Google earth.

There is a great deal of content in the Met Office website and it will take a quite few social subjects and/or science teachers to describe all the different possibilities for teaching  at different levels and in different subjects or knowledge areas with it. However a good place to start  for both Sciences and Social Studies is in the UK Weather tab, where we can find synoptic charts, infrared satelite images, radar images, forecasts and station plot data from across the UK. It would be really useful if interested teachers could share their experiences of teaching with the Met Ofice website, by visiting the Social Studies National Glow Group and People and Environments page tab, to take part in discusssions in ‘Glow groups and Website links’.

This week the Glow team met with our colleagues in the Curriculum for Excellence curricular teams to talk about the National Glow Groups. As you’ll know, there is a national level Glow Group for each curricular area, and the Glow and CfE teams, with help from the content managers and communications officers here at LTS, had some great discussions about where we can go with these powerful tools.

Everyone’s keen to make the National Glow Groups inviting and useful for anyone joining them, and the ideas were free-flowing all afternoon, so you can expect to see some exciting developments in the near future. In particular, there are plans for innovative use of Glow Meet, ranging from inviting in outside experts, to having regular informal drop in sessions with people from the CfE and Glow teams. We also looked at the possibility of interdisciplinary projects, and at using the Groups as a place to share real examples of the work being done with the Curriculum for Excellence Draft Experiences and Outcomes in classrooms around Scotland.

Remember, though, the National Groups are for everybody, and it’s important that you have a say too. If there’s anything you’d like to see on a group, or if you’ve done something you’d like to share with the whole country via Glow, get in touch with us – each group will have a place for you to discuss and share ideas, and you can comment here on the Glow blog.

So we’ve got big ideas for the National Glow Groups, and we want to hear yours too!

The Cairngorms National Park Authority hosted an event to raise the profile of CfE and outdoor learning in the Cairngorms, at the Lecht ski  centre today.   It was very well received by an audience which consisted of school teachers from all the Local Authorities that surround the CNP and many of the partner bodies that work with the CNP, such as RSPB, Forestry Commission, Duke of Edinburgh Award, John Muir Award, Scottish Natural Heritage,  Highland Environmental Network, Scottish Countryside Alliance Educational Trust, University of the Highlands and Field studies Council.

Eddie Broadley and Peter Eavers, LTS Area Advisers introduced the Cairngorms and CfE respectively, in the context of an exceptional landscape, experiential learning and lifelong learning.  David Green, CNPA Executive, spoke convincingly about a values based curriculum and the value of learning  outdoors. His message was about new opportunities to “teach them young and teach them good” with CfE, better vocational links and cross curricular projects.

Murray Ferguson, CNPA Visitor Attractions, described the landscapes, landforms and landuses of the Cairngorms NP in the context of a family of protected areas found across Europe.  However, CNP is a special case of Local Authority partnership for innovation and sustainability. Young learners should be “getting out there”, getting involved in meaningful tasks and be made aware of ‘bigger landscape issues’, such as: landuse conflicts, planning and climate change.  

Bruce Robertson, Director of Education for Aberdeenshire Council, also spoke passionately about bigger ideas and the CNP. His special interest in promoting outdoor learning was obvious.  He described “learning, in, about and through Aberdeenshire’: with CfE and Glow. He described his arrangements for learning and entitlements for learners, in a landscape that stretches from the Cairngorm Mountains to the North Sea. He said much more but one comment in particular sticks with me: “outdoor learning does not stop outdoors”. This is, for me, a critical observation and central to Glow, both in terms of creating opportunities for using mobile technology and in providing the essential means to share, interpret and reflect on outdoor learning experiences.

Workshops followed, on: The National Park Glow Group, Writing Materials for Outdoor Learning, Climate Change, The John Muir Award, CfE, Local Culture and more. Attendees listened to mini presentations, collected ideas and asked questions in a ‘cafe style’. Later in the day Local Authority groups met to put forward ideas for planning and implementation, before Richard Stroud CNPA Executive, finished off with some observations. Thanks go to Claire Ross and Elspeth Grant from CNPA for organising this event. I enjoyed facilitating workshops with Anna Rossvoll, Glow Key contact for Aberdeenshire and look forward to working with Eddie and Peter again at the next NP event. This will be hosted by Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park. Finally, I will be in touch with all of the ‘partner’ bodies who requested access to, or more in formation about, Glow and the National Parks National Glow Group.