Glow Scotland

Metaphrog are comics creators Sandra Marrs and John Chalmers, best known for making the Louis series of comics.

For the first time, they are bringing their popular comics workshop to Glow!

Any classes from P5 – S4 are invited to join Metaphrog over Glow Meet at 1pm on Wednesday the 3rd of March. You’ll learn lots about creating characters and comics, and have the chance to create your own characters. They will also set you a comic-creating challenge, and you can come back for the follow-up Glow Meet later in the year and show us how you got on.

To join the Glow Meet, you’ll need a room with a computer with internet access, a projector and screen or interactive whiteboard, and speakers. Pupils will also need access to paper and drawing materials.

The Glow Meet and the sign-up sheet can be found in the Graphic Novels National Glow Group.

The SLF Extra Glow Group is now live, with things to see before the Scottish Learning Festival, and a preview of what to expect over the two days. One event you can get involved in before the festival is a Glow Meet Session with Fiona Hyslop, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning. In advance of her Keynote Speech at SLF, Ms Hyslop will be hosting a Glow Meet for Scottish Schools from Gavinburn Primary School in West Dunbartonshire. The Glow Meet will take place on the 15th of September between 1pm and 2pm.

The cabinet secretary will be talking about what it means to her to be Scottish, and inviting questions from the children at Gavinburn and the Glow audience.

To sign up your class to watch or to take part in the question and answer session, please visit the SLF Extra Glow Group by clicking on this link

Guest Post from Laura Tansley at Learning and Teaching Scotland

Schools across Scotland tuned in on Monday to hear Michelle Paver talk of her experiences and adventures as she researched her series of Stone Age adventure novels, ‘The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness’. She spoke of happening across bears in California and singing ‘Danny Boy’ to distract them, getting close enough to Wolves in Finland to lick muzzles, skinning rabbits and eating Reindeer, all in a quest to discover what life was like for a hunter-gatherer. Michelle read from ‘Ghost Hunter’, the latest instalment of the ‘Ancient Darkness’ series which was tantalising for those who have yet to discover her writing. Through the Glow Meet, pupils were then encouraged to ask Michelle questions – we had so many unfortunately we couldn’t ask them all but we hope to get them all answered by Michelle at a later date. For the schools that missed it, the recording of the talk will be available soon at the Glow Group for the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Once again this year, young people from around Scotland have been invited to vote for their favourite shortlisted title in the Royal Mail Scottish Children’s Book Awards. Glow has teamed up with the Scottish Book Trust to bring you a national Glow Group where you can discuss your thoughts on the books with other young judges in schools across Scotland.

Teachers and librarians can click this link to request access to the Glow Group. Once you’re in, you can contact the Glow team via the group, and they will add your class/reading group as members too.

This is an exciting opportunity for readers to have their opinions heard. The shortlisted books come in three age categories – 0-7, 8-11 and 12-16 – so there’s something for readers of all ages to get their teeth into. Schools will need to register with the Scottish Book Trust in the first instance – click here for more details - and voting closes on the 13th of November, so there’s still plenty of time to get involved.

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

Click here for press-release

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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

Thirty English Teachers from across Scotland brought their skills and knowledge of Glow to Stirling Management Centre to help build a Glow community over the course of two days.

The purpose of the event was to build various subject specific Glow Groups that can be used by English practitioners throughout Scotland providing them with an opportunity to work with others, make lasting connections and share knowledge and ideas which are transferable across schools and authorities throw Glow.

The practitioners, all at different stages with Glow, were just as enthusiastic as each other when they worked in teams to create Glow Groups. The groups included; Scots language, war poetry, personal study, Macbeth, The boy in the striped pyjamas and higher critical essays. Practitioners were given a blank canvas to work from in Glow with ready-made basic Glow Groups to be developed.

True to form, each group communicated well, taking a strategic approach to the planning process with much discussion of what each page should look like and contain. Groups were constantly thinking of the end user when building the groups, taking careful consideration of how the pupils would view the site and how easy they follow the activities in the Group.

The groups created are available for all to see in the Building Glow Communities tab of the Literacy and English Glow Group. If you find any of these groups useful and would like to contribute, you can simply request access through the e-mail address provided in each Group and we would encourage you to do so.

Judith Weston from Earlston High in the Scottish Borders said: “It’s been a fantastic opportunity to take two days out to build these groups.

“I’ll be going back to the classroom with a Glow Group packed with resources for English teachers and creative work for children.”

Michael Stephenson from Inveralmond Community High, West Lothian said: “we have built our group through the eyes of the children so they can follow the instructions, navigate easily and upload work tasks for teachers to edit.”

If you are interested in taking part in future events. Simply CLICK HERE to find out more.  

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!

This summer I have been working on the National Parks Glow group in the National Site.
This group is the product of discussions with the Cairngorm Natonal Parks Authority and Aberdeenshire ICT Project Officers. The potential for collaboration and partnership with Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS) is growing, as this national group takes shape. Further talks will take place in August with the Cairngorms National Park Authority (CGNPA) and the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park (LL and TNPA).
The NPAs will eventually assist with the administration of this national group along with teachers who work in schools adjacent to the parks. The NPAs have started to provide resources for teachers who will be able to collaborate through the group and publish pupils work on the group’s pages.
Some pupils and teachers, in Aberdeenshire, are about to take part in an LTS funded project to promote learning in the CGNP.
This means that Glow will be used to promote learning in the outdoors. The National Park Glow group will, hopefully, model good partnerships in Glow and support the ideals of a Curriculum for Excellence by encouraging more outdoor learning, more intersubject collaboration and a better understanding of our rich natural and historical heritage.