North Lanarkshire Glow Showcase

Overview
Scott Clark and Eileen Mallaghan were seconded as Development Officers for Glow in North Lanarkshire Council for the session ending June 2010.

In this Cookbook we will look at the work Scott and Eileen did to put the NLC Glow Showcase Group together. They created the NLC Glow Showcase as part of their role in supporting the development of Glow in North Lanarkshire. The purpose of the Group was to allow teachers in North Lanarkshire who were starting out with Glow to see what other schools in the authority were already doing. It also served to enhance the use of Glow once the teachers had started by being able to share ideas and continually develop and to allow opportunities for collaboration within North Lanarkshire.

In this cookbook, we will find out:
• What the NLC Glow Showcase Group looks like
• How the pages were arranged for purpose
• How web links web parts were used to give access to Groups from across the authority

Context

North Lanarkshire Glow Support – click to enlarge

Scott and Eileen had identified some really great practice in local schools as part of their support and development role in Glow. They were given access to these Glow Groups and were regularly choosing to demonstrate these groups to others at courses and awareness raising sessions. However, they felt that when you’re showing things to people for the first time they can become overwhelmed. They wanted people to have the chance to go back and explore other teachers’ groups in their own time.

Sharing Glow Groups Nationally

They were impressed by the idea in the national group, Glowing Potential, where staff from across Scotland are encouraged to share their groups. At first they tried to encourage staff to use this national group and share their Groups at this level. However, teachers were anxious about sharing their groups with the whole of Scotland. Scott and Eileen felt that by having an inter-authority version that this was a first step to North Lanarkshire teachers sharing their Groups further.

Some arm-twisting had to be done as people didn’t realise that what they had created for use in their own classroom was a fantastic example of Glow in use. Originally the group was constructed in a different way with a web part for teachers to submit their own group to be shared but Scott and Eileen found they had to take a little more control of this and actively encourage teachers to share.

The Team were very keen that teachers didn’t leave training and then work away on Glow in isolation. They know that the security of Glow allows people to keep their groups private and not to share them and yet the showcase group was a way of using Glow to open up to others and allow them to share what they were doing. Everyone was coming along for training together and then Scott and Eileen were seeing what a great job people were doing when they got back to their schools but this was effectively happening in seclusion as they couldn’t see each other’s. They weren’t able to get the message that theirs was as good as everyone else’s. The reality was that everyone was doing fabulous things and the Showcase was a way of letting other people see.

Click here to enlarge

Groups range from one group for a class with lots of different pages for all the different activities to groups with various sub-groups instead. The Showcase has allowed a range of options for teachers to use to get started with. The teachers are seeing real local class Glow Groups rather than it being an abstract concept group which is being demonstrated and discussed.

Ingredients
One of the things Scott and Eileen have always stressed in their training on Glow is the curricular nature of it: that it’s not about the tools and the technology within Glow but it’s about using it for a clear and relevant curricular purpose. The Showcase allowed Scott and Eileen a place to enable teachers to get those learning and teaching ideas. That’s part of the reason that they organised the Group into Literacy, Numeracy and Cross-Curricular sections. This allowed staff to access relevant groups suited to what they wanted to do in Glow.

Curricular Pages – Click here to enlarge

The Showcase Group contains the following pages:

Noticeboard
The Noticeboard page welcomes people to the group and gives contact details of the development officers to enable people to volunteer a Group to become part of the Showcase.

Recently Scott has added a Discussion Forum to this page as an alternative to the Discussion Board located on the last page of the group.

Literacy and Language, Numeracy and Maths, Interdisciplinary Projects
There are pages for each of these curricular areas. Each page contains a web links web part displaying the links to the school groups and notes with additional information. On each page, above the web links web part is a text editor web part with a link to the Discussion Board encouraging people to comment on the groups.

Visitors Page

Visitors Page – Click here to enlarge

This page contains a text editor web part encouraging people to contribute their comments on the groups displayed on the previous pages. Beneath the text editor web part is a discussion board for any comments to be added to.

What did Scott and Eileen need to do to put together the NLC Glow Showcase Group?

• Create a local authority level Glow Group
• Set contributor membership for staff across the authority
• Request staff set Reader membership for all staff in the authority on their individual groups to be shared
• Add pages with a curriculum basis
• Create new web links web parts for each area and customise the view to include notes
• Include text editor web parts on each page to link to the discussion board
• Publicise the group

Recipe
The first video below is a virtual tour by Scott of the NLC Glow Showcase Group. The videos that then follow show how some of the elements within the group can be recreated. Details are:

The NLC Glow Showcase Group as a whole (4:46)

How to re-organise the pages in a Glow Group to change titles and remove web parts (5:33)

How to add a text editor web part to the Noticeboard page (3:51)

How to place a discussion board onto another page in the group (2:33)

How to create new web links web parts (2:08)

How to create text editor web parts with links to another Glow page (2:53)

How to set the membership for an individual Glow Group you wish to showcase (3:48)

How to add a link to another Glow Group to the web links web part (1:40)

How to change the view of the web links web parts to include notes (2:24)

How to set the membership of the Showcase Glow Group (2:18)

Impact
There were many obvious benefits to North Lanarkshire staff with the creation of the Glow Showcase. A few of these are detailed in text below and there are also videos of Scott and Eileen explaining what they believe the benefits are towards the end of the page.

A Curricular Focus

Showcase Group Pages – click here to enlarge

By designing the Showcase Group along curricular lines it enabled a secondary teacher to get an idea from a primary teacher’s group and vice versa. They also have a couple of special schools who have contributed groups to the Showcase. One of these schools makes good use of the text editor web part to create hotspots to make navigation of the group much easier for the pupils. Scott and Eileen know that this example is there and they can point people to it whenever they need help with this particular aspect. They are then able to see this method being used in a real Glow Group with real pupils.

It has also helped teachers with their planning for A Curriculum for Excellence in terms of being able to see how other teachers are addressing this through Glow, getting ideas and being able to use these themselves.

The Trainers being trained
Scott and Eileen also found that they were learning from the groups and what teachers were using Glow for. It enabled them to fill the gap that was left by them not having their own classes to work with in Glow whilst they are seconded to work in the Central Team. It allowed them to see real pupils using Glow and observe their progression over a period of time. They could then share this with others.
Scott and Eileen feel they’ve learned from the teachers’ work they’ve showcased. For example, a teacher who was sharing learning outcomes and pupil targets using text editor and discussion web parts. This allowed Scot and Eileen to highlight this teacher’s work in the Showcase and fellow teachers have now adopted this same way of working.

Scott, “When you think about it our authority has achieved a lot [with this] because we trained someone, who then came up with a good use for Glow and through the Showcase that was disseminated further.”

Customisation

Scott notes that when he was first introduced to Glow, “I wasn’t always clear on the level of customisation that teachers can do beyond the template when they first create a Glow Group. The Showcase allows us to show how different every Glow Group can be and how a teacher can tailor it to their needs.”

Scott feels that when teachers first see Glow they don’t always appreciate the level of customisation which can be done with their Glow Groups. The Showcase has the advantage of presenting many different views or versions of Glow Groups to teachers and helps them to be able to see how their own Glow Group can be tailored to suit the specific needs of their class.

Real life relevant examples
Scott notes that it’s allowed them to show real teachers and real pupils in their authority as part of a training session. This can have much more impact that fictional groups. It allows them to say, these are schools in your authority with issues similar to yours, with technology for example, but look at the dates, look at the times. This work has been done this week, this month, etc, and this has made it more relevant for the teachers they were training. A lot of teachers have come back and said, “I didn’t know what to do with my group until I saw this.” It has been very much built into the training which is delivered. They would get the participants to log into Glow, go onto the Showcase and spend time just browsing. This has also allowed training participants to personalise the training experience as they have been able to choose the groups they wanted to investigate. A simple benefit has also been to allow teachers in training to get used to navigating between different areas in Glow as they look at the different groups.

Eileen notes, “The staff we’ve trained just recently have benefitted from what’s already there. Their Glow Groups have emerged into something fabulous really, really quickly, because they’ve already got this idea of what they could do with it.”

Collaboration
There have also been times when teachers have looked at the groups and realised that they’re doing the same topic with their own class and a chance to link up or collaborate is provided. For example, a teacher studying the same novel had left a comment for one of the teachers whose group was being showcased. She was noting how it gave her lots of ideas. The teacher who was showcased then posted on the discussion board to ask if it would be possible for the 2 classes to collaborate on their work with the novel.

A warm Glow
Eileen notes that whenever they use the Showcase as part of headteachers presentations, the heads are thrilled to have their school showcased. She goes on to note that when teachers receive praise for their Groups in the Showcase they go back and celebrate this with the pupils, letting the pupils know how well their group is being received.

In the two videos which follow Scott and Eileen speak about how and why they set the group up and what they believe the benefits have been.

Scott and Eileen speak about the NLC Glow Showcase – Part 1 (5:10)

Scott and Eileen speak about the NLC Glow Showcase – Part 2 (4:27)

If you would like to share your Glow Group nationally please click here to follow the link to the relevant page in the Glowing Potential Glow Group.

Sharing Glow Groups Nationally

North Lanarkshire Glow Showcase5.053