Lisa Chalmers is a Support for Learning teacher at Arbroath High School. She was keen to explore how Glow could enrich learning for a small group of S1 pupils who need additional support with English, Maths and Social Skills.

Context

Glow was introduced at Arbroath HS a couple of years ago and is now used widely throughout the school. Last year, for example, a very successful Transition Glow Group linked the school with its associate primaries: this work is featured in the cookbook Transition Glow Groups in Angus schools.

Lisa felt that Glow could be the perfect tool for her S1 Social Skills class. This small group of pupils require additional support to consolidate basic skills in English and Maths. Individual needs range from a pupil recently arrived in Scotland and needing time to develop her skills in English as a second language, through to pupils with poor reading skills or mild dyslexia.

Many of the pupils also need time and support to develop independent learning skills, such as having confidence in their own ability, taking responsibility for their learning, staying on task, and interacting supportively with their peers.

With such a diversity of abilities and needs, it’s frequently impractical to teach them together as a class. Lisa aims to find time and space in each session to work in a focussed way with one or two pupils at a time. This requires other pupils to be able to work unaided and remain on task.

As Lisa has access to 4 computers in her room, she is able to rotate pupils around a number of activities, including using Glow.

Lisa Chalmers shows how she uses the S1 Social Skills Glow GroupDeveloping confident and independent learners

Having introduced pupils to Glow and shown them how to log on and navigate to the S1 Social Skills group, she has developed a routine that gives pupils the confidence to work independently. Lisa first uses the News web part to post up information for the lesson. This gives instructions about tasks, and sets expectations about how pupils will work and what they will achieve.

Web links. Click to enlarge.

In the Documents web part, Lisa has created a folder for each pupil. Each folder contains the resources that she wants the pupil to use. This suits the class perfectly, as Lisa is able to provide differentiated materials, according to each pupil’s needs. Pupils have become confident with finding these folders, and using the resources.

Once pupils have completed the structured tasks they’ve been set, they can choose from a list of educational web sites that Lisa has listed in the Web Links web part. This element of choice provides an opportunity to take responsibility for their learning and to consolidate skills through activities such as Maths games.

A Voki. Click to enlarge.

Lisa uses the Voki web site to create her own Voki (or avatar) to communicate information and instructions in the Glow Group. Pupils have enjoyed using the same web site to create their own Vokis and add these to the Glow Group. This has provided an excellent opportunity to build ICT skills and to develop pupils’ talking and listening skills, through using the Voki to give instructions, voice opinions or reflect on their learning.

Ingredients

For the S1 Social Skills group, Lisa has:

• created a Glow Group, giving the S1 pupils Contributor permissions
• used the News web part to list lesson activities and objectives
• used the Documents web part, creating folders for each pupil and uploading learning materials
• used the XML web part to display Vokis

Recipe

* Creating folders and uploading files into the Documents web part Developing confident and independent learners

* Changing the display of a Documents web partDeveloping confident and independent learners

* Creating a Voki and adding it to a Glow Group pageDeveloping confident and independent learners

* Changing Glow Group permissions to allow pupils to add VokisDeveloping confident and independent learners

Impact

Lisa describes her use of Glow as being very much ‘a work-in-progress’ and that she’s just beginning to see the potential. She’s been delighted with the impact that it has had already with her Social Skills class – the way that it had changed the dynamics in the classroom, encouraging pupils to be more independent and therefore allowing her to focus her attention on one or two pupils at a time. She had seen pupils becoming more confident and more willing to tackle tasks and remain focussed on them.

Lisa Chalmers talks about the impact of using Glow with her S1 Social Skills pupilsDeveloping confident and independent learners

Having met other Glow users at a ‘Building Glow Communities’ event in Stirling in May and hearing how they’re using Glow in their classrooms, Lisa is excited at the prospect of continuing to use Glow with the same group of pupils in S2 and see where Glow will take them!

Gillian Orr is a Principal Teacher for Support for Learning in Stirling Council. In August the network was disbanded and Support for Learning teachers were allocated to specific schools. In order to provide consistency of the service within schools throughout the authority, Gillian is using Glow to communicate with Support for Learning teachers and to store important documentation and resources as well as provide CPD and support.

Context

Gillian Orr has developed a Glow Group within Stirling Local Authority to maintain a network for Support for Learning teachers now working in schools. Originally working together in a base recent changes have seen Support for Learning teachers located to a school with the Head Teacher of the establishment having responsibility for recruiting new Support for Learning teachers. Gillian as Principal Teacher wanted to ensure continuity in what was happening  in schools and maintain what was good about the service they were providing. One of the ways Gillian and her team are trying to maintain the network is through a Glow Group which was created in consultation with all the Support for Learning staff  throughout the authority

The first page, the Noticeboard, lists who is working where and within which establishments and clusters as there had been a recruitment of twelve new members of staff in August so there was a need in order to keep in contact with one another and be familiar with which teachers were working in which establishments. News items are listed to keep staff updated on changes, for example retirals, and information is given that should be shared throughout the team. There is a list of useful web links given by teachers to share with one another. There is also a feature of a main resource that is being used, for example a reading scheme to support learners and this is updated regularly so that staff are familiar with the resources that are available at the base and within the authority.

Gillian and her colleagues have created a discussions page to provide an opportunity for staff to have professional discussions, this has been developed through CPD twilight sessions and used not only as a discussion forum but as a way of training staff in the components of Glow.

The document page contains two folders, one of which has proforma which the Principal Teacher has created to ensure staff continue to use the appropriate paperwork within their establishments/cluster groups in order to provide continuity throughout the authority. Another folder contains resource information which lists resources and also catalogue information that staff can look at in order to propose the purchase of new resources. There is also policy information that would be relevant to the staff within their establishments.

Termly newsletters are displayed in the Newsletter page using Page Viewer and back copies are also available for staff as they contain some helpful information on resources, articles and good web sites for use in schools.

Previous to the changes within the network, CPD was provided centrally and all staff attended together. Within the Glow Group a Staff Development page has been set up with relevant CPD which is available on line, with links to useful websites and information on how, for example, how to follow someone on Twitter to keep up to date with Educational discussions. The change in the provision of CPD has provided the opportunity for leadership at all levels with staff taking responsibility for sourcing their own CPD through the resources provided.

As a result of the introduction of the twelve new members of staff with varying experience Gillian has created a page within the Glow group entitled , Mentoring Programme, this provides information on courses and relevant information for the new staff.

The Support for Learning Teachers requested more information on Dyslexia and a page has been allocated for this. This page feeds back information from the Dyslexia Working Party which is currently established within the authority through a section entitled Working Party Update. There are also useful web links which will provide further professional reading for staff on Dyslexia. Relevant documentation which has been produced by the Working Party is also available for staff to read and download, including a Dyslexia training pack from the LTScotland web site.

Staff asked for more specific information on the Additional Support Needs of learners within the authority and a page listing several needs has been created with relevant information provided.

Finally a page has been given to Early Years which is maintained by a member of staff who works with partnership nurseries within the authority. This teacher uploads information that staff may wish, for example documentation on support for learning materials that are being used in Early Years.

*Watch Gillian give a tour of her group and talk about how it supports the Supprt for Learning Staff within Stirling

Stirling Support for Learning Teachers Support Glow Group

Ingredients

What did Gillian need to create her Glow Group

*A Glow Username and Password

Recipe

Watch the videos below to find out how to recreate elements of the Support for Learning Glow Group

*How to create a new Glow Group

Stirling Support for Learning Teachers Support Glow Group

*How to add the Glow Group to Favourites

Stirling Support for Learning Teachers Support Glow Group

*How to add members to a Glow Group

Stirling Support for Learning Teachers Support Glow Group

*How to add, remove and change page titles within a Glow Group

Stirling Support for Learning Teachers Support Glow Group

*How to add images to a Glow Page

Stirling Support for Learning Teachers Support Glow Group

*How to create a discussion using Glow Forums

Stirling Support for Learning Teachers Support Glow Group

*How to add information using text editor and minimise it to list titles

Stirling Support for Learning Teachers Support Glow Group

Impact

Watch Gillian discuss the impact of using Glow to maintain consistency within Stirling for Support for Learning

Stirling Support for Learning Teachers Support Glow Group

Context
Isobel Mair School, East Renfrewshire, has a holistic approach to the education of pupils aged 5 -18 years who have a very wide range of additional support needs. Meeting the needs of pupils with complex learning difficulties demands a high degree of structure and staff expertise.
All staff are suitably qualified in the education of pupils with severe/complex learning difficulties and additional Communication and Language Disorders. Staff are involved in the educational process which is always self-questioning. There is an openness and trust where self-questioning is seen as constructive.
Staff are encouraged to share values, direction and responsibility for the benefit of the pupils / school. Educational provision is seen as partnership with parents, pupils, specialists and other professionals. The school strives to seek to celebrate success at all levels and to ensure the dignity and respect of all stakeholders.
The school’s ICT Quality team – whose remit is to promote effective use of ICT throughout the school – were keen to encourage the staff to engage with Glow and access the benefits of using it. Class teacher Iain Hallahan had been using Glow for over a year and was given the responsibility of developing Glow training within the school. He decided to set up a Glow Group within the school Glow site to allow staff to share effective internet resources they had found with each other.

Ingredients
What did Iain need to create the Delicious Resource area?
*The rights to create a Glow Group at school level (most teachers will have this by default).

Recipe
In this section we will hear Iain talking about the use of the web part he created and the impact that it has had in supporting the sharing of valuable teaching and learning resources from the web with the staff of the school. He explains how the staff are able to share and search for resources and his vision for the future use of the resource.

Internet Swapshop – Using Glow to share web resources with colleagues

*How to add Delicious Resource to a web page.
Internet Swapshop – Using Glow to share web resources with colleagues

Impact
*Watch Iain talk about the impact of the use of this resource in his school.
Internet Swapshop – Using Glow to share web resources with colleagues

Overview

Lorna Gourley is a peripatetic music teacher within South Ayrshire. She has found that Glow has been a great way to organise her resources and communicate with teachers and pupils throughout South Ayrshire, answering questions, offering resources and supporting learning.

Context

Lorna’s job as a peripatetic music teacher requires that she travels from school to school throughout the authority to deliver music in partnership with the schools. She found that in moving from place to place it was difficult to keep track of resources and remember to gather everything back in at the end of the working day for the next day. When she was in schools teachers and headteachers had lots of questions for her and she found herself answering the same questions from establishment to establishment.

Lorna had been using Glow for about a year when she met with the Glow support team within her authority to develop two music Glow groups. After a Building Glow communities event for ASN Lorna found out about Hotspots and hidden pages and saw this as a great way forward for supporting learners with coordination diffciulties and learners in the Early Years.  Lorna has creted  group where children can listen to a variety of musical instruments and even an orchestra at the click of a button.  She has insured that all resources are copy-right friendly by creating many of them on her own and linking directly to well known web sites.

 As Lorna is moving around within the authority it was deemed best to have these groups created at Local Authority level so that everyone throughout the authority could have access and make use of the resource.

*Watch Lorna guide us through her Glow groups to show how she is supporting teachers and pupils in music using Glow

Exploring Sound – Music for All

 Ingredients

*Glow username and password

*Access at Local Authority level to create a Glow Group at this level

Recipe

*How to add Glow Groups to My Favourites

Exploring Sound – Music for All

*How to change page titles

Exploring Sound – Music for All

*How to add images for hotspots

Exploring Sound – Music for All

*How to create hidden pages and hotspot to them

Exploring Sound – Music for All

Impact

*Watch Lorna tell us all about her work

Exploring Sound – Music for All

Overview

Lorna Gourley is a peripatetic music teacher within South Ayrshire. She has found that Glow has been a great way to organise her resources and communicate with teachers and pupils throughout South Ayrshire, answering questions, offering resources and supporting learning.

Context
Lorna’s job as a peripatetic music teacher requires that she travels from school to school throughout the authority to deliver music in partnership with the schools. She found that in moving from place to place it was difficult to keep track of resources and remember to gather everything back in at the end of the working day for the next day. When she was in schools teachers and headteachers had lots of questions for her and she found herself answering the same questions from establishment to establishment.
Lorna had been using Glow for about a year when she met with the Glow support team within her authority to develop two music Glow groups. As Lorna is moving around within the authority it was deemed best to have these groups created at Local Authority level so that everyone throughout the authority could have access and make use of the resource.

*Watch Lorna guide us through her Glow groups to show how she is supporting teachers and pupils in music using Glow
South Ayrshire Music Group

Ingredients
*Glow username and password
*Access at Local Authority level to create a Glow Group at this level

Recipe
*How to add Glow Groups to My Favourites
South Ayrshire Music Group
*How to add members of other establishments to your group
South Ayrshire Music Group
*How to view another web page within a page on Glow
South Ayrshire Music Group

Impact
*Watch Lorna tell us all about her work
South Ayrshire Music Group

Overview

Invergarven School, South Ayrshire

Invergarven is a non-denominational nursery, primary and secondary school in Girvan, South Ayrshire. It caters for pupils with a wide range of additional support needs from behaviour all the way through to complex and profound. Pupils attend from a wide catchment area across South Ayrshire Council. As the ICT co-ordinator, Kat McClure is responsible to delivering ICT across the school. She has been using different aspects of Glow and after attending a course has recently been using Glow Learn.

The Glow Learn Course

In this Cookbook we will look at how Kat has put a Glow Learn course together, what she sees the impact of this has been and what her plans for further development with Glow Learn are for the school.

In this cookbook, we will find out:

• What the Media Matters Course looks like
• How to build a Glow Learn Course
• How to control the resources the pupils see
• How the pupil accesses their Glow Learn course and their assignments
• How the teacher can use Glow Learn to track progress

Context

Kat McClure

Kat has been using Glow Learn with ICT Groups for the whole school. The goal at Invergarven is to use Glow Learn with pupils to enable them to become more ICT literate but also to enable them to become more independent in their learning. This is very much an aspiration at Invergarven in terms of using ICT and Glow. They want to promote the pupils’  independence through creating learning materials with the 4 capacities of Curriculum for Excellence in mind.

Forward Plan for Media Matters

This block the topic they had been looking at was Media Matters. Kat thought it was important to use as many media tools as was possible for the project. They used simple animation applications, as well as the internet, images, word etc. She made a number of resources available to the pupils through Glow Learn, for example links to You Tube with videos of car adverts and an assignment designed for pupils to submit a message to Kat detailing their comment about their favourite car. The pupils also used a newspaper template assigned to them which they worked on and submitted back to Kat and also a simple assessment she had created.

Kat was impressed by the way she could use the tracking tools within Glow Learn to review assignments, looking at who’s accessed it, who’s handed it in, when they’ve handed it in etc. Indeed, Kat was checking on who had done what whilst away on a course herself.

In terms of how the project operated one of the groups of pupils involved as the ICT Group were a more able group. They were told to go on and use their Glow Log-ons to access the resources. It was pointed out to them that the assignments were all there waiting and it was up to them how they tackled them and submitted them back with messages to their teacher.

With the more complex need group Kat has put videos on for the pupils, linked to what they have done in class. This is to try to get the parents of these pupils accessing the materials with the pupils themselves and to allow the parents to be more onboard helping the pupils with their learning and discovering what the pupils are actually working on in school. Kat acknowledges that there may be some internet access issues with parents but feels that the school can get around these. She feels this brings more feedback from the parents back into school and allows them to work effectively in partnership.

In the future she is hoping to use Glow Learn with her Access 1 – Listening and Responding to Scottish Stories and push all the resources out to the pupils and the parents this way, giving everyone a chance to have a bit of input and to have more effective multi-disciplinary working.

Ingredients

• A Glow Learn course with various resources
• Pupils enrolled in this course
• Assignments pushed out to pupils through Glow Learn
• Pupils with Glow logins who are able to access Glow Learn

Links to Curriculum for Excellence

As I extend and enhance my knowledge of features of various types of software, including those which help find, organise, manage and access information, I can apply what I learn in different situations.
TCH 1-03a / TCH 2-03a

I explore and experiment with the features and functions of computer technology and I can use what I learn to support and enhance my learning in different contexts.
TCH 1-04a/TCH 2-04a

Recipe

Pupil Newspaper Assignment 2

Kat built a course in Glow Learn with a range of resources she wanted to give the pupils access to. She enrolled the pupils on this course and then assigned or “pushed out” work to them at the pace she thought appropriate. She was then able to view information about how many pupils had accessed the work and track when they had handed this in. She used the monitor and mark process to mark the work and release feedback to the pupils. You can learn more about this in the Glow Learn Training Guide (Glow login required).

In the videos which follow we will look at rebuilding the steps for some of the things she did. The videos begin with a tour through the course that Kat created:

What does the Media Matters Course looks like?
Using a Glow Learn course in ASN

How to create a Glow Learn Course
Using a Glow Learn course in ASN

How to add a file based resource to a Glow Learn course
Using a Glow Learn course in ASN

How to add a link based resource to a Glow Learn course
Using a Glow Learn course in ASN

How to add a simple text resource to a Glow Learn course
Using a Glow Learn course in ASN

How to add a test resource to a Glow Learn course
Using a Glow Learn course in ASN

How to enrol pupils in a course
Using a Glow Learn course in ASN

How to hide resources from pupils
Using a Glow Learn course in ASN

How to push out assignments to pupils
Using a Glow Learn course in ASN

How the pupil accesses their Glow Learn course and their assignments
Using a Glow Learn course in ASN

How the teacher can monitor the pupils’ progress
Using a Glow Learn course in ASN

Impact

Kat was keen to use Glow to encourage the pupils’ independence. The pupils enjoyed being given this independence. They liked that it was marked and then posted back to them on Glow with the comments. It made them feel good about themselves and promoted their wellbeing. Kat also liked that she could hold back the pace of the assignments and the tracking of them with the tools in Glow Learn. Rather than allowing them to get straight into everything, she could plan the pace of the pupils access.

Progress Records for the Course

The pupils themselves are wanting more and more from Glow in terms of assignments and are motivated to work in this way. As Kat says, “they want it now!”

Kat speaks about the impact of using Glow Learn
Using a Glow Learn course in ASN