Story Telling in Early Years using Glow Meet

Please note that this cookbook refers to Glow Meet using Marratech.  Glow Meet is now delivered over Adobe Connect which offers enhanced functionality.  To find out more about Glow Meet using Adobe Connect click here.  The principles around the benefits of Glow Meet are the same regardless of the technology used for Glow Meet.

Overview

Margo Kerr is currently seconded from her nursery post at Kirknewton Primary School and is working as the Early Years ICT Development Officer within the West Lothian Council Early Years Team. Margo’s remit is to provide curricular ICT support to all Early Years practitioners (nursery – P3) within the Local Authority and to drive forward and support the implementation of Glow within the Nurseries.

There are five standalone Early Years Centres and eight Nursery Schools in West Lothian. Since these Early Years establishments are not attached to a school, they do not have access to a school Glow establishment site. West Lothian therefore asked to have a separate, single Glow establishment created for the standalone Early Years establishments. The staff in all of these nurseries had their Glow accounts provisioned within this establishment, which is called ‘West Lothian Early Years’ to enable them to all work together.

Margo was keen to provide a place where the Nursery staff could communicate and collaborate and so created a Glow Group at Local Authority level. It was created at this level to enable all nursery staff, from both the standalone nurseries and those attached to schools, to be able to access the Group if they wanted to. Margo tells us a little bit about this and how she introduced staff in the standalone nurseries to the Glow Group:

Margo Kerr – Why I set up the Early Years Group 0:55

Margo Kerr – Introducing the Glow Group to the Nurseries 0:41

The Early Years Group is intended as a ‘one-stop-shop’ for practitioners in the standalone nurseries to enable them to share resources, have discussions and take part in collaborative events. Due to popularity though, requests to join the Group have been regularly received from nurseries attached to schools and also from teachers in the schools themselves.

There are a number of different pages within the Group and a range of web parts have been used. In the following video, we can take a closer look at the Group:

What does the West Lothian Early Years Glow Group Look Like? 6:04

One of the most popular features within this Group is the Story Room and that will be the focus of this cookbook.

Story Telling using Glow Meet

Margo was looking for a way to provide collaborative activities for the nurseries, and came up with the idea of story telling sessions using Glow Meet.

Story telling sessions take place on a Friday morning and the stories are read by pupils in the upper stages of Primary schools. Children in the nurseries – and also in Primary classes too – watch and listen to the stories being read via Glow Meet.

The first story to be read, was one written by the P7 pupils in Mid Calder Primary School. The pupils had been working on a project about ‘Hamish the Haggis’, which involved writing stories about the adventure of Hamish and creating illustrations and animations to accompany them. The children were then asked to write stories about Hamish which would be suitable for an Early Years audience, requiring them to consider and adapt their language to suit.

During the first Glow Meet story room session, one of the pupils from Mid Calder Primary read the Hamish story, and the illustrations drawn by the children to accompany it, were uploaded to the shared whiteboard within Glow Meet.
After the session, children were able to talk about the story they had heard with their own class and teacher, discussing whether they had enjoyed it and what they had liked or disliked about it.

The session proved extremely popular and was well received by the entire audience. As a result of this session, requests came flooding in to Margo from teachers of all Primary stages, to be made members of the Glow Group, to enable them to participate in the story telling events.

Margo tells us about the story telling sessions (1:27)

The story telling sessions are all recorded, to be uploaded into the Glow Group to form a library of stories that nurseries and schools will be able to access and playback at any time. So, if a group of children misses a session, they will still be able to access it at a later time.

The story telling has enabled Margo, the nursery staff and Early Years teachers to involve children in activities which contribute to the following Early Level Literacy and English Experiences and Outcomes:

Listening and Talking
LIT 0-01b / LIT 0-11b I enjoy exploring and choosing stories and other texts to watch, read or listen to, and can share my likes and dislikes.
LIT 0-01c I enjoy exploring events and characters in stories and other texts, sharing my thoughts in different ways.
LIT 0-07a / LIT 0-16a / ENG 0-17a To help me understand stories and other texts, I ask questions and link what I am learning with what I already know.
LIT 0-19a I enjoy exploring events and characters in stories and other texts, sharing my thoughts in different ways.

Through the use of Glow too, teachers have had the opportunity to introduce technology to children so provide a context for the Early Level Technologies outcome:

TCH 0-04a I enjoy exploring and using technologies to communicate with others within and beyond my place of learning.

Ingredients

What did Margo Kerr need to do to set up the Story Room within the Early Years Glow Group?
• A Glow Group at Local Authority level
• A Glow Meet web part
• A web cam
• A microphone

Although Margo’s story telling room is at Local Authority level, something similar could easily be set up within one school, with, for example, older children reading to the younger ones – and vice-versa. In the following videos, we will take a look at how the story telling room could be replicated.

How to set up a Glow Meet 5:36

How to join a Glow Meet 3:38

How to play back a recorded Glow Meet session 3:22

Impact

There has already been a lot of very positive feedback about the Early Years Glow Group.

Staff in the nurseries have, for the fist time, a single place where they can communicate and collaborate. This helps alleviate any feelings of isolation for the staff in the standalone nurseries. They have access to all relevant documents and information, and are sure of these being the most up to date versions. They can hold discussions and meetings via Glow Meet and reduce travel time and costs, so making the most of their time.

Children in the nurseries are given the opportunity to engage with older children from right across the Local Authority and will soon have access to a library of stories from all previous Glow Meets, so opening up the range of resources they can learn from.

Due to the popularity of the Early Years Group’s story-telling sessions, Margo has now moved the Story Room out of the Early Years Glow Group and created a new group at Local Authority level. This new “Early Years Story Room” Group is solely dedicated to this purpose and all teaching and non-teaching staff within the Local Authority have been granted automatic membership. The Glow Group comprises only two pages – the Noticeboard Page which hosts the Glow Meet web part and a second page called “Previous Stories”. This is where Margo plans to embed videos of all of the story-telling Glow Meets to form the library bank.

Margo tells us about the initial impact that the group has had.

Margo Kerr- Feedback on the Early Years Glow Group 1:05

Read about the time that Mrs Claus read a story in the Story telling room in the Glow-Meeting with Mrs Claus cookbook!

Story Telling in Early Years using Glow Meet5.056