Spring Read Project in East Ayrshire
Overview
Winning Spring Read 2010 Logo – click here to enlarge
Ross McGregor and Janice McGill are school librarians at James Hamilton Academy and Auchinleck Academy respectively in East Ayrshire. Currently Ross is seconded as Glow Development Officer in East Ayrshire.
For the last 4 years they have been responsible for running a very successful author event called Spring Read. This year they teamed up with Live Literature Scotland to give groups of pupils from every secondary school the opportunity to meet one of five award winning authors. With the assistance of East Ayrshire Library Services each school hosted one author visit and invited pupils from neighbouring secondary schools to join in to promote both literacy and co-operation between the schools.
Each individual school also ran events celebrating reading and writing throughout March. These included activities such as quiz heats for the Readers’ Cup, book awards or ‘Book Oscars’, book swaps, book fairs, displays and competitions. An inter-school competition to design a logo for the festival was run and was judged by the School Librarians with a pupil in Auchinleck Academy winning this year.
As an added feature, this year Ross and Janice decided to use a Glow Group to help them plan and promote the event. In this Cookbook we will look at the work Janice and Ross did to put the Spring Read 2010 Glow Group together.
In this cookbook, we will find out:
• What the Spring Read 2010 Glow Group looks like
• How the pages and web parts were used to feature the authors
• How an Animoto video (video slideshow made from images) was put together and will be used in the group in following years
Context
Spring Read 2010 – click here to enlarge
Some of the school librarians had received training on Glow as part of electing to become East Ayrshire Glow Champions. However, they held a training event back in December 2009 to level the playing field and make sure all school librarians had some Glow expertise. At this event it seemed like a natural step and a good fit to have a Glow Group for the Spring Read 2010. Initially the school librarians could use it as a way of becoming familiar with Glow and sharing information. However, they saw the potential of opening up the group to teaching staff and pupils as the project progressed.
At the meeting in December Ross set up the Spring Read 2010 Group with only the Noticeboard page developed. Ongoing plans were made to set up each author page and a discussion. From this they then decided to have a page for the logo competition which Janice looked after. Although the original idea for the group came from this meeting it was developed over the course of the next couple of months.
Ingredients
The Glow Group pages – click here to enlarge
The Noticeboard
The Noticeboard page contains the winning logo for the event in an image web part. It also has a text editor web part with details of the authors to be involved in the school visits. A What’s On web part has been renamed at the bottom of the page to be Programme and contains information on all the visits which took place. After the festival had taken place Janice put together a short Animoto video, showcasing the event. This will be useful when the event takes place next year.
Author Pages
Cathy MacPhail Page – click here to enlarge
There are pages for every author taking part in the event. These pages follow a pattern of giving some brief information about the author in a text editor web part, with images of them and of book jackets, along with a web links web part linking to an author website. In some of the pages a page viewer web part has been used to display the website on the Glow page.
Discussions
A discussions web part has a few starters in it but Janice and Ross feel that both Glow and the festival need to grow in popularity before this is more widely used.
Documents
At the moment this document library contains the flyer Janice had put together for the event.
Logo Competition
click here to enlarge
This page previously contained details about entering the competition but now displays the winning logo with details of the winning pupil.
What did Janice and Ross need to do to build activities around the author event and give pupils and teachers access to the Spring Read 2010 Glow Group?
- A Glow Group built initially at one school (in future years this will be cited at the local authority level)
- Set membership for S1 – S3 pupils and a range of teachers and school librarians from across the authority
- Build a page with information about every author involved in the event
- Make use of a Discussions web part
- Make use of the Documents library for the event flyer
- Build a page for the logo competition
- Use images from the event to make an Animoto video and embed this into the Noticeboard page
Recipe
The first two videos below act as a virtual tour by Janice and Ross of the Spring Read 2010 Glow Group. The videos that then follow show how some of the elements within the Group can be recreated. Details are:
Tour of the Noticeboard and Logo Competition pages (3:22)
Tour of the author pages, discussions and documents (4:20)
Janice’s Animoto video (0:47)
Adding pages to the Glow Group (1:40)
Building an Author page part 1 – Adding an image web part and using Cooltext (3:35)
Building an Author page part 2 – Adding more images and a text editor (4:23)
Building an Author page part 3 – Creating a new web links web part (4:06)
Building an Author page part 4 – adding and working with a page viewer web part (3:03)
Getting the Noticeboard ready part 1 – closing unwanted web parts and adding new ones (3:30)
Getting the Noticeboard ready part 2 – adding information to the web parts (4:54)
Producing an Animoto video (5:43)
Embedding a link to an Animoto video in Glow (1:39)
Impact
Although, this year, the membership and activity within the group was effectively limited to the school librarians, Ross sees the use of the Glow Group for the festival as having great potential. He points out that there are so many pupils involved in the author events and if all of these pupils go back to classes and use functionality like the Glow Forums then this could work really well.
Janice McGill and Ross McGregor speak about the background to the Spring Read Festival (4:27)
Janice and Ross speak about using Glow for Spring Read 2010 (3:23)
Future Plans for the use of Glow Meet as part of the event (0:46)
Ross and Janice speak about IPR on promotional materials (1:21)
