Glow Scotland

January 23rd, 2012

Debating in Primary 7

ggallacher

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Jennifer Neill is a teacher at Alexander Peden Primary School in North Lanarkshire. This year Jennifer’s remit has been to share a Primary Two class with a probationer teacher and support the other teachers in the school with the roll out of Glow. To do this she regularly meets with class teachers to discuss what interdisciplinary work they are completing in class and they look at ways in which Glow can compliment and support this. At present all pupils in the school have Glow log ons and are actively using Glow.

In Primary 7 the pupils were studying a topic on Vivisection for Literacy. Within this topic the pupils had a debate as to whether they agreed or disagreed with animal testing. The pupils first of all, after some research, had to consider all the reasons for and all the reasons against in relation to animal testing. The pupils then created short videos, using a video camera, giving an argument for or against animal testing, whichever they agreed with. In this cookbook we will look at how Jennifer and Scott Clark (North Lanarkshire Glow Development Officer) used Glow to support this Literacy activity.

Find out more in the Cookbook here.

January 20th, 2012

Using a wiki as an evidence store for pupil e-portfolios

ggallacher

Comments: Comments Off Tags:  : Categories Glow, Glow Blogs, Glow Groups, North Lanarkshire, Technologies

Maureen Atkins is a Maths teacher at St Aidan’s High School in North Lanarkshire. She has been making good use of Glow in her teaching. She was involved in the school making the decision to move ahead with using e-portfolios with the S1 year group. Maureen was keen that evidence of pupil achievement that she had captured in the classroom would be available to be used by the pupils when creating posts in their e-portfolios. This Cookbook will focus on the Maths Store Glow Group and on the wiki. You will see a tour of the Glow Group and wiki and also interviews with Maureen where she will explain what she was setting out to do.

Find out more in the Cookbook here

January 13th, 2012

Standard Grade Music – Using a wiki for project work

ggallacher

Comments: Comments Off Tags:  : Categories Expressive Arts, Glow, Glow Groups, North Lanarkshire, Technologies

Irene Stewart is a Principal Teacher of Music at Bellshill Academy in North Lanarkshire. She began using Glow quite recently, encouraged by her own son’s use of Glow in primary school. She saw the potential for her secondary pupils to be accessing materials from home and also to be able to ask questions on Discussion Boards for help with their homework. Her son’s obvious enjoyment of using Glow made her think that her pupils would be motivated by using it.

This is the second of 2 Cookbooks which will look at how Irene has started to use Glow with her Standard Grade classes but mainly with S3. This second Cookbook on Irene’s use of Glow will focus on the pupils using a wiki to upload project work for Standard Grade Music.

Find out more in the Cookbook here:

November 13th, 2011

Glowing Thursdays - National School Sports Week

Jennifer McDougall

Comments: Comments Off Tags: Tags: Lee McConnell, National Schools Sport Week, olympic
 : Categories Curriculum for Excellence, Events, Expressive Arts, Glow, Glow Meet, Health and Wellbeing, North Lanarkshire, Pupils

This week Scottish athlete Lee McConnell, 400 metres runner will be on Glowing Thursday to tell us about what it takes to be an Olympian and to encourage schools to get involved in National School Sports Week 2012.

Nearly half a million primary and secondary pupils from over 1,400 schools in Scotland participated in National School Sport Week last June, making it the biggest school sporting event in the country. So, the numbers for 2012 are set to rise!

The week will be from 11th – 15th June 2012 and the theme for this year is Stage your Games! The possibilities for capturing the Olympic and Paralympic spirit in your National School Sports Week events and for supporting interdisciplinary learning in Curriculum for Excellence are endless.

Join us live from Muirhouse Primary School in North Lanarkshire on Thursday 17th November at 11am and find out more about how you and your school can get involved! Sign up in Glow TV.

October 20th, 2011

Sharing Instrumental Performance Videos at St Aidan’s High School

ggallacher

Comments: Comments Off Tags:  : Categories Expressive Arts, Glow, Glow Groups, North Lanarkshire

Alan Jenkins is a music teacher at St Aidan’s High School in North Lanarkshire. After receiving a small amount of training in school Alan could see that he wanted to make use of it. He wanted to use Glow to share instrumental performance videos with his pupils. Alan felt that pupils will have pieces of music demonstrated to them in school but then this moment is gone and it is difficult for the pupils to remember what to do. He feels this is an issue that Glow provides a solution for.

Read more in the Cookbook here

October 12th, 2011

Daily Quote - Northern Lights: an international project

ggallacher

Comments: Comments Off Tags:  : Categories Expressive Arts, Glow, Glow Groups, North Lanarkshire, Perth and Kinross, Stirling

“Young people have had the opportunity to speak to other young people in different countries, across different authorities. They have been able to share their interests, hobbies etc”

Ron Cowie - Stirling Council

To find out more, read the Cookbook here

October 12th, 2011

Creating a Picture Book

ggallacher

Comments: Comments Off Tags:  : Categories Glow, Glow Groups, North Lanarkshire, Technologies

Jennifer Neill is a teacher at Alexander Peden Primary School in North Lanarkshire. Jennifer’s remit had been to share a Primary Two class with a probationer teacher and support the other teachers in the school with the roll out of Glow. To do this she regularly met with class teachers to discuss what interdisciplinary work they are completing in class and they looked at ways in which Glow could complement and support this. At present all pupils in the school have Glow logons and are actively using Glow.

In Primary 4 the pupils were looking at story books, so Jennifer decided to use Glow to support this area of Literacy. Scott Clark (North Lanarkshire Glow Development Officer) suggested a website called Artisancam, Picture Book Maker to Jennifer. This resource provides a template which allows pupils to create their own picture book online, and they choose their own text and pictures. The pupils then save their picture book and are given a link so they can access it online. Jennifer provided a page in the P4 Glow Group called Creating a Book. Using this resource Jennifer gave the pupils a task of designing a picture book for Primary 1 and 2 pupils. Within the P4 Glow Group, Jennifer and Scott set up the page with was a Page Viewer of the Artisancam website. She also provided an area where the pupils could share their picture books and added a Discussion Board for peer assessment.

To find out more read the cookbook here

September 23rd, 2011

SLF Extra - Literacy across learning: using wider texts at second and third levels

Karen-Ann McSwiggan

Comments: Comments Off Tags:  : Categories Curriculum for Excellence, Glow, Glow Meet, Health and Wellbeing, Literacy, Media Literacy, Moving Image Education, North Lanarkshire, Pupils, Technologies, West Dunbartonshire

Today the audience was packed into the seminar room at SLF 2011 with no sign of people losing interest on the last afternoon. They were there to see speakers Patrick Mooney, PT English at Caldervale High School in North Lanarkshire and Gilian Penny Headteacher at Gavinburn Primary School in West Dunbartonshire in the Literacy across learning: using wider texts at second and third levels seminar.

Let’s have a listen to why some of the audience were at the seminar today:

Click on the radio to hear why an education student has come to the seminar.
Click on the radio to hear why some international visitors have come to the seminar.

Patrick Mooney

Patrick Mooney is PT English at Caldervale High School and previously taught English at Cardinal Newman High School. He is passionate about using moving image education as a way to enhance literacy across learning.

Let’s have a listen to Patrick describing what he will be presenting on:

Click on the radio to hear Patrick describing what he will be speaking about in the seminar.

He spoke about the challenge of teaching literacy in a modern context and widening the definition of a text. As part of becoming a chartered teacher he researched moving image education and worked with Scotland on Screen. He explained that there are often perceived constraints in the secondary sector with teacher attitude, lack of kit and the need for leadership in moving forward with moving image education in the school. Although he told us that all the kit required is a web cam and a laptop. He stressed that moving image education is an fantastic tool to ensure that active learning is happening, that the pupils are highly motivated and that it builds on their resilience.

He went on to explain that the gains that can be made in terms of inclusion, true collaboration, creativity and enterprise and opportunities for teacher reflection on their own practice are substanial. Pupils with poorer literacy skills can be released from previous ‘failures’ they may have experienced with other forms of communication. Encouragingly, Patrick talked about the possibilities that moving image education opens up in the curriculum by acting as a gel for literacy across the curriculum and inter-disciplinary learning projects. He gave ideas for outcomes/products such as science news reports; documentaries on sports personalities/famous mathematicians/historical figures; movies to analyse performance in PE and projects such as documentaries to celebrate whole school life.

Pupils can really get to employ their own creativity and choice, they can be shown simply how to use the kit and then come up with their own ideas for projects backed by a framework of teacher planning. Patrick ended by speaking about how amazed he continues to be about how much effort pupils are willng to put into these projects - the planning, storyboarding, scripting, celebrating and performing. Pupils who have been very much switched off from the writing process are happily immersed in it due to the motivation of moving image education.

Gillian Penny

Gillian Penny is Headteacher at Gavinburn Primary School in West Dunbartonshire and is passionate about the wider text and digital creativity. Her presentation alternated between short, amazing video clips of pupils from her school and her explanation of the different projects they are invloved in.

Let’s have a listen to Gillian describe her presentation:

Click on the radio to hear Gillian describing what she will be speaking about in the seminar.

Gillian believes it is very important for children to have an audience and purpose for their work as this is highly motivating for them and can change the effort and pride they take in this work. She is also interested in creating opportunities for her pupils to be involved in more interdisciplinary and active learning. In the school they frequently use animation as she feels it is a very powerful tool for pupils planning and storyboarding their work. She notes that it forces them to really think about the story they are telling.

The school also uses the I Can Present tool and green screening to allow pupils to make presentations. We saw a video of children pretending to be in a band and making award acceptance speeches. Gillian notes that for teachers who need persuading about these ways of working it is hard to ignore the quantity and quality of written work from the pupils as part of their planning process when working with these kinds of tools.

The school also makes very successful use of Guitar Hero and other tools for what Gillian calls their ‘Band in a Box’ or ‘Band out of a Box’ project. Pupils are arranged into groups of 4 which are made up by the teachers in order to get an appropriate mix. They create a rock band with imaginative back stories for every member of the band. They write lyrics and put these to music and create a music video to go along with it. They also go on tour virtually to another country and have to plan all the arrangements for this down to hotels, sticking to budgets and preparing a speech in the language of the country. They have performances, including dance and awards sessions within the school. These award sessions have a red carpet where real awards are given out and important dignitries and parents come to watch.

Click here to see this video example from the Consolarium blog of one of the music videos a group of Gillian’s pupils put together:

Gillian showed a video of the pupils reflecting on the process, they are clearly very excited by and thrilled with the whole project. They are able to talk at length about all the aspects of it, how they approached these and how much of their work went into it all. Pupils get to play to their strengths, Gillian commented on the fact that perhaps the pupil who hasn’t succeeded before has a great idea for the band and the other members are able to help make this idea come to fruition.

Click on the radio to listen to some audience reactions to the seminar.
Click on the radio to listen to some audience reactions to the seminar.

So what’s next for Gavinburn? From next week Gavinburn will have their own channel on Glow TV where they will be showcasing digital work every week. This is work that is ongoing in Gavinburn but might not normally make it out of the computer.

You will catch the SLF11 Glow TV interview with Gillian Penny by clicking here where you will be asked to log in with your Glow username and password.

The Glow TV session interview with Gillian and 2 of her pupils is now available below:

In addition you might want to have a look at a video of Gillian presenting at the Games Based Learning Conference 2010:

September 21st, 2011

SLF Extra - Using iPads in Music education

carolegillespie

Comments: Comments Off Tags: Tags: music, SLF
 : Categories Curriculum for Excellence, Expressive Arts, North Lanarkshire, Technologies

John McLaughlin from Taylor High School, North Lanarkshire opened the Scottish Learning Festival this morning with an inspirational seminar on the use of iPads in the secondary music classroom.

With the emphasis on pupil engagement and creativity, John had his “virtual S1 pupils” (4 delegates) playing Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water within 5 minutes of picking up their iPads, much to the annoyance of the seminar next door!

It was a stunning demonstration of the enormous potential of the iPad in the music classroom, encouraging pupils’ creativity and making music appreciation, composition and performance more accessible to all.

The impact of the loaned iPads from Education Scotland has been marked in John’s class, with pupils who “haven’t got a scooby” making music, composing ringtones and participating in interdisciplinary learning by selling their ringtones in an Enterprise activity.

Using Apps such as GarageBand and AmpliTube, pupils from S1 to S6 can multitask on the iPad, recording their own podcast, researching its content on the web, and then use the text application to write their script.

For music composition, pupils can plug real instruments in to the iPad. Then, as John says, “the best thing is pupils can share their compositions and ideas with their friends using Bluetooth and iTunes.”

For early years and pupils with Additional Support Needs two applications were highlighted – Beatwave and Soundrop. John gave the seminar a demonstration of the amazing potential of these Apps for young learners and those with physical or learning difficulties.

This was a ringing endorsement of using the iPad in the music classroom from a real, hands-on music practitioner and the audience were reluctant to leave, Mr McLaughlin definitely left the crowd wanting more.

Watch the video below for more information on the seminar:

SLF11-ipads to teach Music from GlowTV on Vimeo.

September 19th, 2011

Daily Quote - Metaphor and Simile Dictionaries at P7 in St Brigid’s

ggallacher

Comments: Comments Off Tags:  : Categories Glow, Glow Groups, Health and Wellbeing, Literacy, North Lanarkshire, Technologies

“Glow has worked for us because it has become a team effort and it has been developed through the everyday work we are doing naturally in school but in a 21st century way”

Karen Sommerville is the Headteacher at St Brigid’s Primary School in Newmains.

Find out more by visiting the Glow Cookbook here