Glow Scotland

April 28th, 2011

Choices for Life

Jennifer McDougall

Comments: 2 Comments » Tags: Tags: alcohol, Choices for Life, peer pressure, Stornoway
 : Categories Curriculum for Excellence, Events, Expressive Arts, Glow Meet, Health and Wellbeing, Pupils, Western Isles

Many of you will have been involved in the highly popular Choices for Life event aimed at Primary 6/7 ages pupils. In May, Choices for Life will be travelling to the Scottish Islands. This will be the last time you can see Choices for Life in its current format before its transformation into Choices for Life Online.

The Choices for Life team would like you to join them live via Glow Meet on Monday 9th May when they will be in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis. Start time is 10.30 and you can join them from about 10am. The format will be as in previous years, but for those who have not been to the event before, pupils will see a live stage show presented by Mark Martin from Forth One. There will be video clips depicting real life stories and a 4 part drama around alcohol and peer pressure. PACE Theatre group from Paisley will perform a live, on stage play called ‘Ready or Not’ and there will be music from Carrie Mac, new boy band GMD3 and MC Enel.

The event on the 9th May will last around 2 hours, but nearer the time we’ll post a running order that may help you to link with parts you’ll find most useful, although we would encourage pupils to watch it all and hear all the messages.

After May, Choices for Life will transform and there will be competitions, opportunities for questions around set topics (drugs, alcohol and tobacco this year) and the details of how you can take part in our live Glow meet in November with Choices for Life Online.

Why not sign up and join this exciting event and find out more about the presenters and performers who will be at the event live in Stornoway? Sign up in the Choices for Life National Glow Group.

April 10th, 2011

Glow Light Images 11.4.2011

Lesley Dickson

Comments: Comments Off Tags:  : Categories Glow Light Images, Western Isles

Winning Entries from the Western Isles

Curracag, the Outer Hebrides Natural History Society, runs an annual photographic competition with 7 categories.

The adult categories are:

1. Landscapes/seascapes

2. Crofting life including fishing

3. Flora including all types of wild flowers and seaweeds

4. Fauna i.e. wild fauna of all types

5. Collages including stories and multiples images

Categories for those under 17 years old are:

6. Flora and Fauna

7. Any other category listed above

Images must have been taken in the Outer Hebrides. The 2011 competition received over 190 entries which were judged by Steve Carter, Biology Teacher, Sgoil Lionacleit, on Friday 18 February, in the Sgoil Lionacleit Museum. The photos are currently on exhibition in the Museum.

The under 17 entries were of a very high standard and it was great to see entries from a range of local schools including Castlebay, Sgoil Lionacleit, Sgoil nan Loch, Balallan, Tolsta – and Switzerland! The competition is sponsored by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH).

2011 Curracag Photographic Competition Winners:

Under 17′s Flora and Fauna

1st - Scotch Burnet Moth, South Uist, by Megan McCabe, Age 13 (Friday/Weekend picture)

2nd - A Most Delicate Flower, by David Macleod, Age 12, Sgoil nan Loch (Thursday picture)

3rd - Natural Beauty, South Uist, by Megan McCabe, Age 13 (Wednesday picture)

Under 17’s Any other category

1st - Sea Shells at Traigh Cille-Bharra, Isle of Barra, by Megan McCabe, Age 13 (Tuesday picture)

2nd - Power and Rock, by Calum Copeland, Age 11, Sgoil nan Loch (Monday picture)

Note: Megan McCabe lives in Switzerland and took the winning photographs while on holiday in the Western Isles in 2010.

For further information about Curracag visit www.curracag.org.uk

Learn more about the work of SNH at http://www.snh.gov.uk/

Find out more about the Western Isles (Outer Hebrides) at: http://www.visithebrides.com/

October 25th, 2010

Tam on Tour in the Western Isles

Jennifer McDougall

Comments: Comments Off Tags: Tags: right blether, SCCYP, Tam Baillie
 : Categories Curriculum for Excellence, Glow Meet, Local authorities, Pupils, Western Isles

This time Tam Baillie, Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People is on tour in Stornoway. He will be there on Friday 29th October from 11am - 12pm (please note the change of date from the Thursday 28th)

Tam will be in Sgoil nan Loch (Lochs School) to talk about the right blether vote. There will be lots of information about how you and your school can make sure you get the chance to vote in November and pupils at the Glow Meet will be the first ones to have the opportunity to put their voting cards in the ballot box.

Tam will also be using Glow Meet to listen to, and answer as many questions as possible from children and young people.

Sign up today in the SCCYP Glow Group to take part in the Glow Meet and have your say!

September 20th, 2010

Co-Create at the Scottish Learning Festival

Julia Fenby

Comments: Comments Off Tags:  : Categories Argyll and Bute, Co-Create, Curriculum for Excellence, East Ayrshire, Expressive Arts, Glasgow City, Glow, Glow Groups, Inverclyde, North Lanarkshire, Outdoor Learning, Perth and Kinross, Renfrewshire, Sciences, Shetland Islands, Social Studies, South Lanarkshire, Technologies, West Lothian, Western Isles

Throughout 2010, ten demonstration projects are taking place in 18 local authorities across Scotland. Arts organisations are working together with teachers, pupils and other partners to explore and develop new approaches to teaching and learning using Glow and supporting delivery of Curriculum for Excellence. Four projects are presenting at the Scottish Learning Festival. Don’t miss:

S1A – Make Art Not War: A Dynamic, Interactive, Cross-curricular Experience for S2 pupils
Paul Gorman from Visible Fictions Theatre Company talks about ‘State of Emergency’, an ambitious project in which a series of webisodes and ‘live’ broadcasts from an online fictional country will be created and broadcast through Glow in November. This seminar outlines the process so far to highlight how creative approaches, facilitated within Glow, can ensure best practice in Curriculum for Excellence.

B1C - Curriculum for Excellence: Enhancing Performing Arts Experiences through Glow This seminar presents a new online learning resource that aims to support teachers and pupils to evaluate and appreciate performing arts experiences. The new resource supports teachers in meeting Curriculum for Excellence expressive arts experiences and outcomes across all levels and is a development of Imaginate’s range of resources on art appreciation.

B1E - Glow Co-Create model project: Hooks + Bites
Barbara Chalmers and the Plan B Collective team give a presentation on how they worked together with nursery, P7 and S6 pupils from St John’s Academy Perth to create a digital art bank for Glow made up of sound journeys, percussion and digital animation based on the pupils’ experience of ‘transition’.

B1H - Co-Creating with Glow: Walking Within Langass Wood
Join Sarah MacIntyre to hear about this collaborative project involving S2 pupils and staff from Sgoil Lionacleit (Benbecula), Carinish and Lochmaddy Primary Schools, Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre, Urras nan Craobh Uibhist a Tuath (North Uist Woodland Trust), and Scottish Natural Heritage. The project aims to creatively interpret the ecology and heritage of Langass Woods on North Uist through visual art, creative writing, science, history, geography and music.

Co-Create is funded through a partnership between Learning and Teaching Scotland and the Scottish Arts Council National Lottery Fund.

Image credits: Visible Fictions; Screen Media & Imaginate; Plan B Collective; Sgoil Lionacleit

September 17th, 2010

Walking Within – Langass Woods

Julia Fenby

Comments: Comments Off Tags: Tags: Co-Create
 : Categories Co-Create, Curriculum for Excellence, Expressive Arts, Glow, Outdoor Learning, Sciences, Social Studies, Technologies, Western Isles

‘Walking Within – Langass Woods’ is a truly interdisciplinary project which combines outdoor learning and the arts with social subjects, sciences, languages and new technologies. Importantly, it is encouraging children and young people to make a valuable contribution to the care and future of their own natural environment.

I had the pleasure of spending yesterday with Sarah MacIntyre, Cultural Access Officer at Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre, north Uist, and meeting some of the pupils and teachers involved in Walking Within, one of ten Co-Create projects for Glow.

S2 pupils from Sgoil Lionacleit, and P5-7 pupils from Carinish and Lochmaddy primary schools, have been working with artist and publisher Alec Finlay, musician Rhodri Davis, poet and naturalist Colin Will, and poet Ken Cockburn to create a ‘Letterbox trail’ for the woodland, with an accompanying digital guide for handheld mobile devices.

This project is a fantastic example of the power of partnership working. Urras nan Craobh Uibhist a Tuath (North Uist Woodland Trust) and Scottish Natural Heritage (South Uist) have spent time with pupils talking about the history and ecology of the woodland and helping with the pupils’ research, identification and interpretation of local species of plants, trees and birds. Graphic designer Lorraine Burke ran a workshop on logo design, and the resulting designs by S2 pupils have been uploaded to the project Glow Group.

Outdoor education specialists, Wild Knowledge, are developing a digital guide to accompany the woodland trail which will be populated by pupils’ photographs, poems, sound recordings and research, giving visitors an even richer experience of this community owned woodland.

Teachers and pupils are clearly getting a huge amount out of this project. Principle teacher of Art and Design at Sgoil Lionacleit, Anne Reid, enthused about having worked in collaboration with the English department on illustrated Haiku. S2, now S3 pupils, who took part in the project last term, are now meeting after school to continue working on their contribution to the digital guides. The pupils I met at Carinish primary had loved using the mobile devices, and had particularly enjoyed writing mesostic poems with Alec Finlay.

For more information on the project see today’s TESS article
or go to the Walking Within Langass Wood presentation at the Scottish Learning Festival on 23 September at 1pm.

April 7th, 2009

An Island Adventure with Glow

Tina Stevens

Comments: 2 Comments » Tags:  : Categories Local authorities, Western Isles

Last week I embarked on a week long visit to the most southern of the populated Western Isles. My whirlwind tour which covered Lewis, Harris, Benbecula and Barra was the next phase in a series of Glow training events for teachers and school staff in one of the most remote local authorities in Scotland.

My first stop was E. Scott School in Tarbert, where the original Western Isles mentors had been trained the year before. Here, I spent the day with teachers from across Lewis and Harris exploring ideas for learning and teaching and demonstrating how much easier Glow would make communication across the islands. This turned out to be slightly ironic when internet access across the whole island went down in the middle of the afternoon! (This was due to a mainland problem on the interconnect link).
Obviously used to such minor setbacks the group and myself simply set up wirelessly in a local Hotel using laptops until normal service was resumed. For myself and some of the teachers there, there was a real sense of deja vu as exactly the same thing had happened the year before!

On Tuesday I flew to Benbecula to catch a connecting flight to Barra - only to be told at Benbecula that the Barra flight had not left Glasgow! After the local Glow contact Hamish Budge scrabbled to hire a car there followed a mad dash to catch the local ferry to Barra. Finally arriving in beautiful Castlebay at 4 I was introduced to the teachers at Castlebay School who had all stayed on to attend a twilight session on Glow and left showing real enthusiasm about the difference that it could make in their classroom and school community.

On Wednesday I spent the day with Barra school management and administration staff discussing how Glow would make the dissemination of school information much easier and again Glow was received very enthusiastically. The group came up with many excellent ideas for the types of information that could be circulated including absence lists and school news. I then left Castlebay glowing… and headed back on the ferry to Benbecula.

On Thursday I spent the day at Sgoil Lionacleit with Uist based school management and administration staff. After hearing about some of the ideas from their Barra counterparts they also quickly realised the huge difference that having access to Glow would make to their schools.

On Thursday evening and Friday morning Hamish and I did a double-act to deliver sessions to a special Glow working group of teachers from Sgoil Lionacleit who are preparing to roll Glow out to the rest of their staff after Easter. They were incredibly excited about the learning and teaching opportunities that Glow could offer, and both Hamish and myself helped them plan a strategy to give the rest of the staff their best first experience of the portal.

Kenny Matheson and the entire Western Isles central team have worked incredibly hard to get Glow going in their authority and thanks to them after the Easter holidays every school in the Western Isles will have Glow available to them. It was this wonderful thought that made the ferry to Skye and then the long drive back to Glasgow worthwhile. My thanks in particular go out to Coleen, Jane and Hamish for their expertise, company, humour and enthusiasm during the course of an unforgettable week.

March 1st, 2009

A week in the Western Isles Glow journey

Ian Hoffman

Comments: 3 Comments » Tags: Tags: Glow Learn, SCA, Site Collection Administrator, tagging, Western Isles, XML web part
 : Categories Curriculum for Excellence, Glow Groups, Glow Learn, Western Isles

One of the most satisfying aspects of my job supporting Glow roll out in a local authority involves sharing the eureka moment experienced by users new to Glow. That moment when the potential of a Glow Group or particular Glow tool sparks a flurry of activity, discussion or questions. Last week I spent five days in the Western Isles supporting Kenny Mathieson and his team in what turned out to be an intensive and rewarding experience with some eureka moments worth sharing.

Curiously, the first eureka moment of the week was experienced by me when a group of staff training at Back School launched into creating class Glow Groups within ten minutes of me finishing the introductory demo of Glow. They did this without instruction or help sheets and had little trouble putting together groups that could instantly be used by their classes.

Later in the week, I spent two days with school administration staff from across Lewis and Harris, taking them through Site Collection Administration (SCA) training. This group of staff quickly got to grips with populating their school sites with content. It was obvious that they were delighted at how straightforward the process was.

Following a day of training at Sgoil Nan Loch, Katie Ann MacLeod (Depute Head), Margaret Joan MacLeod (Principal Teacher), Hamish Budge (Glow Coordinator) and I brainstormed potential Glow developments for the school. Earlier in the week Katie Ann had represented the school at a conference attended by all of the Head Teachers on the Isles. Presenting at the conference were four pupils from Bernera school who demonstrated what they had been doing on Glow. As the four confident learners regaled the stunned audience with descriptions of how they embedded code into XML web parts, Katie Ann had her own eureka moment determining that she needed to get her school realising the benefits of Glow sooner rather than later.

My week ended working with staff from the Nicolson Institute, the largest school in the Western Isles. Glow Learn was on the agenda and it did not take the staff long to acknowledge the need for suitable tagging of resources or that we had in Glow Learn a tool that could finally break down barriers across schools and local authorities when it came to sharing resources.

I started this post commenting on job satisfaction. Working with staff in local authorities as they come to grips with the challenges faced by rolling out Glow is energising and inspiring. It is good to know that the commitment of Kenny, his team and the staff in schools will ensure that the impressive pupils from Bernera and across the Western Isles will continue to have opportunities to develop through Glow.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Kenny and his team for their usual warm welcome and hospitality throughout the week.

November 25th, 2008

Historic Glow Learn Training

J Jelly

Comments: 1 Comment Tags: Tags: Glow Learn, profiles, SMC
 : Categories Aberdeen City, Clackmannanshire, Dundee City, Events, Glow Learn, South Lanarkshire, Uncategorized, Western Isles

24th & 25th November saw the first national Glow Learn training sessions, held at Stirling Management Centre. Representatives of Aberdeen, Clackmannanshire, Dundee, South Lanarkshire and Western Isles attended this well-structured, intensive two-day residential course – the first of several to come over the next few months.
The course was introduced by Ian Hoffman, who gave an overview of Glow’s virtual learning environment, Glow Learn, and its potential as a tool for teaching and learning. The possibilities to create, organise and share digital resources; to search for, copy and amend other teachers’ resources and courses; to plan courses comprising these digital resources; to set digital tasks for enrolled pupils; to monitor pupil progress in these assignments - and how to incorporate all this in a Glow Group Learning Space was all covered over the two days!
Those attending were full of ideas for how they might take Glow Learn forward back in their schools or local authorities – and documented these in a specially set up national Glow Group devoted to Glow Learn Training.
We all also amended our profiles (look on the page you first see when you log into Glow for the link to this) to include “Glow Learn” as an area of interest. This will let other folk find us when they search the Glow membership using “area of interest” as the key field. If you have a Glow login, try it! (It’s a good idea to add your areas of interest such as sector or subject to your profile if you like the idea of collaborating with others in a similar situation. Once we all document our interests, we’ll be able to make such useful contacts!)
Several hands on sessions were held to take us all through the various steps involved in using Glow Learn, interspersed with presentations covering important issues such as observing IPR (intellectual property rights).
There were some light-hearted moments: Ian claimed to be the “supervisor” of the training team and his role was even celebrated in an ode by one of the participants, but his “lassies” – Karen-Anne, Dawn, Gerri and Lesley, the very able workshop leaders - were not so sure!
Ian rounded off the two days with a challenge to those of us who had attended – to go back to school or L.A. and use Glow Learn soon in earnest, to keep in touch and to help our colleagues to move forward with Glow to the benefit of all our learners.
If you are interested in using Glow Learn, have a look at the tutorials.

October 28th, 2008

Glow in the Western Isles - the best tool for the job.

Tina Stevens

Comments: Comments Off Tags:  : Categories Uncategorized, Western Isles

Last week I found myself back in the beautiful (and very stormy!) Western Isles on a support visit for Glow. Over the course of the two days I spoke to many teachers and was able to see first-hand the difference that Glow is making in this remote community.
The best part of the visit for me was seeing that the tools making a real difference were not the ‘whizzy’ ones that we hear so much about, but the nuts-and-bolts ones which require minimal bandwith and little preparation to use.
One teacher in Benbecula used her time during my session at the school to upload all her resources into the shared documents store on the local authority site. Her remit requires her to support many teachers over a wide area and she was delighted that this simple tool made all of these resources available to everybody who needed them so quickly and easily.
Another teacher in South Uist told me about the pupil-teacher council Glow group which was running in her school. The most successful tool within it was the discussion board where the pupils had uploaded all of their requests and questions for the next meeting. At the same school they have decided to do a whole school cross-curricular topic based on ‘the Sea’ and in preparation for this their Glow mentor has set up a Glow group. She told me that although the topic doesn’t begin until term 3, already many of the staff are posting their plans into it to share with one another.
My visit really brought home to me the power Glow has to support education, and the best part about it was that none of the teachers using it had changed their plans to fit Glow in - for them, it was simply the best tool for the job.

May 22nd, 2008

A nurturing Glow at Bernera Primary

Anne Ward

Comments: Comments Off Tags:  : Categories Western Isles

When Western Isles Glow Mentor Kirsteen Maclean told her pupils at Bernera Primary School she would be attending last month’s Glow conference in Stirling, she encouraged them to post their thoughts and ideas on the Glow discussion board. Checking the forum, Kirsteen was pleased to see that pupils had not only posted summaries of their Glow work to date, but that they had also commented on each other’s work.

‘One little boy had gone from post to post making comments like ‘I like what you’ve done here’ or ‘I like the way you’ve described this,’ laughed Kirsteen. ‘I have children who are really encouraging of one another and the older ones really nurture the younger ones. To actually see that in action is so encouraging.’

Kirsteen first introduced her pupils to Glow through a Judaism Glow Group where she uploaded all of her lessons, including worksheets, photos and videos. She then taught pupils the key skills they would need, such as how to resize photos, hold a discussion and upload their work.

‘So far, our experience with Glow has been very positive,’ Kirsteen said. ‘It all boils down to making Glow activities relevant and meaningful for both staff and pupils.’

Read more about a nurturing Glow at Bernera Primary and Glow in the Western Isles.