The War Poetry Glow Group on the National site
Overview
Barry Wright is an English teacher at Carluke High School in South Lanarkshire. Last year he participated in a Building Glow Communities event held at Stirling and, with a number of other English teachers, created the War Poetry Glow Group on the National site in Glow. In this cookbook, Barry describes the purpose and content of the Group.
Context
A number of ‘Building Glow Communities’ events take place each year. The aim of the events is to bring together practitioners to discuss ideas, share interesting practice and to collaborate in building national Glow Groups. Further information about the BGC events can be found here. The Glow Groups created at the events can be accessed from the Join In! page of the Glowing Potential Glow Group on the National site. Click here to go directly to the Join In! page.
At the English BGC event last year, Barry teamed up with other English teachers to develop a Glow Group to support the teaching of war poetry. As Barry explains in his commentary about the Group, pupils often find the topic inaccessible, as they may have little understanding of the historical and social context. The aim of the Glow Group then is to provide historical background, biographical information, sounds, video clips and images which will enable pupils to develop greater understanding and gain some empathy with the experience of the poets.
The Noticeboard page of the Glow Group contains links to information about a number of conflicts, from the Crimean War through to the current conflict in Afghanistan.
Other pages of the Glow Group focus on five poets: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Alan Seeger and Carol Ann Duffy. The pages contain texts of poems (where permissible under copyright law), biographical information, images, video clips and audio recordings. Notes and guidelines about critical response to poetry are provided to develop pupils’ written skills.
Barry Wright provides a tour of the War Poetry Glow Group
Ingredients
The War Poetry Glow Group was created on the National site. By default, school staff do not have the rights to create National Glow Groups, but once a Group has been created (as in the case of the War Poetry Glow Group) they can be given Administrator rights to it.
If there is a theme or area of the curriculum which you feel is not represented by a national Glow Group, and would be interested in running such a Group, please contact LTS (glowadmin@ltscotland.org.uk).
Recipe
The ‘how-to’ clips below show how you can replicate some of the ideas used in the War Poetry Glow Group:
* How to add, edit or remove pages
* How to add text to a Text Editor web part
* How to add images to a Text Editor web part
* How to create hyperlinks in a Text Editor web part
* How to use a table in Text Editor to display images, text and hyperlinks
* How to add an audio file to a Text Editor web part
Information on how to create additional Documents web parts (mentioned in the ‘how to add a sound file’ clip) can be found here.
The War Poetry Glow Group also displays YouTube videos in XML web parts. Note that if YouTube (and similar sites) are blocked in your school, using Glow to link to the site will not circumvent this. However, it can be a useful way of directing pupils to a video clip that you would like them to watch from home.
* How to use the XML web part to display video clips
Impact
The aim of this national Glow Group is to support English staff teaching war poetry and to provide resources which will help their pupils not only to engage with the poetry, but also to understand the social context and the impact of each conflict.
The Glow Group is open to all staff and pupils to be used as a resource bank of information and ideas. Barry and the other administrators of the Group would also be pleased to hear from schools who would be interested in working collaboratively on War Poetry.
Barry Wright describes the purpose and impact of the War Poetry Glow Group
