Glow Scotland

February 16th, 2009

Virtual Learning and Mentor Training at the UoA

mbrown

Comments: Comments Off Tags: Tags: TTI UoA Universities
 : Categories Aberdeen City, UoA

The University of Aberdeen, School of Education is the first Teacher Training Instituion to develop Glow for teacher training. While they have a great deal of expertise in teaching for virtual learning Glow is new to them.

Katie Barrowman and I were presenting to a large number of lecturers, BEd and PGDE students from the School of Education, in the Macrobert Building on Wed 4^th of Feb. Our glow messages and tour of Glow were filmed for the benefit of those students who could not be there, due to heavy snow. We were also in the Macrobert Building on Friday 13th to give Mentor training to fourteen people: ten staff and four students. Thanks to Terry Allan, Linda Stevens and UoA ICT support for making these events run smoothly. The UoA establishment home page looks a little different from other establishments and it is still being developed to suit their needs. It is a home page for both trainee teachers and lecturers and not as we find in most establishments with seperate home pages for Pupils and Staff. In the UoA all users have author rights in Glow, they can create Glow groups. This is an improvement over their existing intranet and VLE: Web CT. During the four one hour presentations we gave on Wed 4th, we took a number of questions about how can Glow fix traditional problems in education generally, such as linking up rural establishments and supporting transitions between establishments: pupils moving from primary to secondary school, students taking up placements and students moving to take up offers of work in schools .

Katie and I returned to the UoA thinking that the attendees would be highly motivated and quick to learn, most with an excellent knowledge of virtual learning and ICT. This turned out be correct. While Katie and I were facilitating hands on with Glow in the classroom, Rob Grant ICT coordintator, facilitated training for George Drew, an absent colleague, by Glow meet. George had laryngitis and could not speak but he managed to take part in training using a small logitech camera trained on the presenter, while he communicated with Rob via the messaging tool in Glow meet. George also took part in the main Glow meet hands on sesion after lunch with the whole class and two teachers from school establishments outside Aberdeen. They had been invited by Katie using Twitter. Rob and I also experimented with Application sharing to allow George to access Rob’s screen in the whiteboard. In this way Rob was able to show George around Glow groups that were created during the day by attendees. George is our first virtually trained mentor.

The Glow groups that attendees created are impressive and I look forward to seeing more of these in the UoA establishment next Friday when I return to the UoA for the second day of training.