Glow Scotland

Good news for the New Year - all teachers are now contributing members of the National Literacy and English Group. The National Groups are there for all Glow users and are places to find news, resources, links, and most importantly, people to work with and talk to. The Group will only be a success, though, if people get in there and use it, so it’s time to dive right in and get started!

Literacy is everyone’s business, and literacy development is part of every curricular area. The National Group is there to help all teachers and learners and it will change and grow to meet the needs of the education commumity, so get involved in its future by taking part in the discussions and sharing what you’re doing.

The group currently provides news related to literacy events and projects across the country, meeting and chat rooms for collaboration, discussion boards to share ideas and ask questions, and links to National Literacy Documents and insightful research from across the globe - and that’s just to start with.

Do you have a literacy project going on Glow? Why not put a link to it in the Literacy Glow Groups tab and let people see what you’re doing? The resources tab is another useful port of call, with links to lots of excellent sites for pupils and teachers.

Coming soon to the site are national events, including the chance to virtually attend the National Literacy Conference in March, as well as competitions and activities for pupils.

The National Literacy and English group is there for every teacher and learner, and we will make it everything you need it to be, so let us know what you want from it.

P.S. – Calling all English teachers… The English Teachers Glow Group is now open inside the staffroom. This fantastic and extensive group has a wealth of ideas about how to use Glow with your English classes, and provides a place to share resources with your colleagues across Scotland for all stages of secondary English. We highly recommend a visit!

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!