Last session, the Computing Department in John Ogilvie High School, South Lanarkshire, decided to create a Glow Group to host all of the resources that pupils studying Higher Computing would need access to throughout the year. Joe Kane is Head of the Business Education and Computing faculty and undertook the task of building the Group,

Context

Click to see full image

Joe was keen to ensure that pupils studying Higher Computing had easy access to all information and resources they would need for the course and also would have a place where they could give feedback.

He wanted to simplify the look of the Glow Group and aid pupils’ navigation around it and so decided to use a graphical interface along with hidden pages.

On the Noticeboard page of the Group, Joe deleted the default web parts from the page, added a Text Editor web part and uploaded an image to it. He then created ‘hot spots’ on the image to provide links to each of the hidden pages.

Each part of the image then acts like a button, linking to a separate hidden page and gives pupils access to course notes, tests, past papers, homework, study information, useful web links, a pupil voice feedback area and a blog giving specific course information.

Because of the use of hidden pages, only the Noticeboard page tab is visible in the Group, so Joe chose to create a navigation system on each page, to enable pupils to go from page to page without having to go back to the main page each time.

Like the Noticeboard page, this was done by uploading an image to a Text Editor Web part and creating hot spots to each page.

The Pages

Each page in the Glow Group is beautifully simple and easy to use, containing only a few web parts. For example:

Past Papers Page

Click to see full image

This page contains only three web parts – two text editors and a Document Store. Both text editor web parts have had their borders and title bars removed so that only the images which have been uploaded into them are visible.

The Document Store hosts Past Paper exam questions and marking schemes to aid pupils in their exam preparation and enables the staff in the Department to ensure that all relevant information is shared with pupils.

Notes Page

This page also contains Text Editor web parts (3) and a Document Store.

In order for Joe to ensure that each page contained a different Document store, containing the folders and documents relevant to the purpose of the page, he had to create new Document Library web parts from scratch for each page, using the Advanced Settings link in the Glow Group. Had he not done this and had simply added a document store to each page from the web parts gallery, he would have had the same document store, containing the same documents, on every page. You can find out more about this and how to create new web parts from scratch in the ‘how to’ videos in the Recipe section below.

Blog Page

Joe created a Higher Computing blog to enable him to give up to date information to pupils. Once he had created the Glow Blog, he copied the web address of the view of the blog. Joe then removed the blog web part from the page and instead added a Page Viewer web part, adding in the web address of the view of the blog to it. This enabled pupils to have a direct view of the blog content.

In the blog, Joe was then able to write posts to share information about the course revision guides, holiday revision and Supported Study.

Pupil Voice Page

The Pupil Voice page gives pupils the chance to give feedback on the Higher Computing course, to enable staff to then make changes in order to help them continually improve the learning experience for pupils.

On the page there is a Document store with evaluation documents which pupils can use to give their opinions on Positive, Negative and Interesting elements of the course. In here also are the results of a survey which Joe did with pupils last session to gather their thoughts on the course. This was done using ‘Survey Monkey’, however this year, Joe has decided to use a Glow Survey instead and so the web part for this is also on the Pupil Voice page. Using the Glow Survey will enable Joe to have an overview of the whole class’s feedback, as well as being able to see individual pupil responses. Results can be displayed in a variety of ways, including graphically.

These are just four of the pages in the Glow Group. In the following video we can take a look at the whole Group:

Tour of Higher Computing Glow Group (13:44)
Higher Computing- Pupil support and Pupil Voice

Ingredients

Joe chose to create the Higher Computing Glow Group using hidden pages, with links made to them via a graphical interface. This is done by uploading an image to a Text Editor web part then creating ‘hot spots’ to each of the pages on selected parts of the image.  In order to do all of this, Joe therefore needed to do the following:

-    Create a Glow Group at school level
-    Delete the Documents, Discussions and Glow Groups pages
-    Create Hidden Page
-    On the Noticeboard Page, delete the default web parts, upload an image to a Text Editor web part and create hot  spots on the image to link to each of the hidden pages
-    On each of the hidden pages, upload an image to a Text Editor web part and create hot spots on the image to link to each of the other hidden pages.

Since Joe needed separate document stores on many of the pages in the Glow Group, he also needed to create new Document Libraries from scratch, to avoid simply having the same Document store duplicated on every page.

A Glow Blog had to be created. Joe chose to then use the Page Viewer web part to show the view of the Blog.

A Glow Survey was created, with multiple choice questions using the ‘ratings scale’ option, to enable Joe to gather pupil feedback on the Higher Computing course.

Recipe

The following videos explain how to replicate some of these elements of the Higher Computing Glow Group. The context of these videos is different, but the process is exactly the same.

How to remove pages from a Glow Group and close web parts from a page (2:22)
Higher Computing- Pupil support and Pupil Voice

How to create a hidden page and hyperlink text to access it (10:39)
Higher Computing- Pupil support and Pupil Voice

How to hotspot an image and link it to a hidden page (6:22)
Higher Computing- Pupil support and Pupil Voice

How to create a new Document Store (5:57)
Higher Computing- Pupil support and Pupil Voice

How to add a Glow Blog to a Glow Group and create the blog (6:12)
Higher Computing- Pupil support and Pupil Voice

How to view a Glow Blog through the Page Viewer web part (4:53)
Higher Computing- Pupil support and Pupil Voice

How to create a survey (14:16)
Higher Computing- Pupil support and Pupil Voice

How to respond to a survey (5:19)
Higher Computing- Pupil support and Pupil Voice

Impact

Perhaps the best way to judge whether the Glow Group has been beneficial is to listen to the thoughts of the pupils who used it. Here are what some of them had to say:

“I thought that the glow group was very useful as it had all the required course notes which was easily accessible from home. I liked this because it meant that if I had missed a set of notes or lost a set I could easily get a new copy without using up the teachers time”. Sean

“Sitting Higher Computing last year, I felt glow was a great study tool.  With the online daily guide of what to study each night, it really helped me keep my studying on track, as it gave you a guide line of what to study, for how long and what was coming up. This section also updates us on homework or tests that were coming up. It allowed you to submit homework online at any point. This was great as you could receive immediate feed back, the following day. It also prevented you from losing or forgetting sheets.   It covered all the course and recalled on subtopics that we had done at the start of term. The notes on power point were also a great help to look over if I was unsure on any particular parts of a topic, these notes went into further detail and helped explain when I did not understand. With the past papers and marking schemes, this was a great study revision, as they were easy to access and find. Also the previous class test that we had sat were available online, this was a further study guide that was available nowhere else. The site was very easy to use and navigate around. I personally feel this would be a great revision and home tool for all subjects.  All of this helped me greatly to stay on track and achieve my grade B that I had hoped for.” Alix

“The Glow program was useful by providing remote and digital access to homework as well as a balanced revision timetable. Being able to download homework meant that the problem of losing sheets disappeared completely and being able to upload digital documents meant that when homework was handed in there was no loss of a jotter and thus access to notes, so studying could carry on in lots of little chunks instead of needing a big rush to catch up after a few days. I would recommend using Glow just because of how useful digitised work is when you have written notes, and having a good revision timetable always handy is a bonus”. Daniel

“Glow last year was good as Mr Kane was able to set us a study plan every week so we knew which to study every night in order to achieve the best grade possible. We were also able to access past papers as well as the marking instructions. Glow was effective when coming up to our exams as I was able to know what to study for when at home as well as at school”. Tommy

“I think glow was a useful, educational tool in which we were able to access at home and see our study plan and online past papers. This benefited me greatly and allowed me to work the best of my ability and achieve a high grade.” Stephen

“Good points about using the glow group in Higher Computing last year were that it allowed the class to gain access to all resources needed for the course and all past papers that would be needed for revision. It also gave us a study guide for specific subjects to study when at home which was optional which was good as it gave us areas that people may need help on as well as being able to issue homework and do homework on computer and send it back to the teacher”. Connor

Joe Kane also talks about the benefits that he got from using the Glow Group with the pupils. He feels that the blog has been the most useful element: 

“For me, the blog had the biggest impact as pupils would come to school having checked the revision guide. They would then be able to informally feedback on the aspects of the course that they found tricky when revising.”

Practising Mandarin. Click to enlarge.

Jacqui Clark is a Primary 5 teacher at Lynburn Primary School in Fife. She has been using Glow for about eighteen months initially just with her own class and now supporting colleagues throughout the school. Jacqui is very positive about the learning opportunities Glow has opened up – allowing pupils to discuss and collaborate, to share their work with their peers and their families, to record and assess their own progress.

This cookbook illustrates a number of ways in which Jacqui has embedded Glow in daily learning and teaching.

Context

Jacqui’s first use of Glow was a project on the Declaration of Arbroath. Her class contacted a history teacher at Arbroath High School who was able to support their project remotely through a Glow Group and a Glow Meet session. This provided an excellent testing ground for Jacqui to explore the potential of Glow to expand learning beyond the classroom. Through Glow Meet pupils engaged in a question and answer session with the history teacher, their learning enhanced by his expertise and local knowledge.

The children subsequently became very enthusiastic about participating in national Glow Meet events, often checking the calendar on the National Site themselves and asking if the class could sign up for events of interest.

Jacqui Clark talks about how she got started with Glow (2:26)Lynburn Primary: enthusing learners and promoting responsibility

Following the success of her first experiences of Glow, Jacqui this year created a class Glow Group for her P5s. The Group evolves during the course of the year, as the learning progresses.

Her class have begun to learn Mandarin. Resources used in class, such as PowerPoint files, and links to websites have been added to the Glow Group for pupils to use to support their homework. Pupils have used a discussion board to post their thoughts about the Mandarin lessons.

A story in the Daily What about the arrival of two new pandas at Edinburgh Zoo caught the children’s attention. They studied the story together in class and then used some of the accompanying lesson suggestions and resources. They researched what pandas would require in a zoo environment, designed suitable habitats and wrote reports. The results were uploaded into the Glow Group to be shared with the rest of the class and discussed with parents and carers at home.

Learning Tai-Chi. Click to enlarge.

A trip to Edinburgh Zoo was then organised, where pupils enjoyed furthering their understanding of Chinese culture by taking part in a tai-chi lesson, and learning from zoo staff about the logistics of transporting pandas and settling them into a new environment. Evidence of pupils’ learning is recorded in the photos uploaded into the Glow Group and through the presentations they created, recording their experiences.

Jacqui Clark talks about the P5 Glow Group, pt 1 (4:30)Lynburn Primary: enthusing learners and promoting responsibility

Santa visits Lynburn. Click to enlarge.

Jacqui is keen to use Glow to develop pupil e-portfolios. As a pre-cursor she is introducing the children to the concept of blogging. At Christmas Jacqui used two additional Glow accounts, created in the names of Santa C and R. Rudolph, to post messages on a blog. The posts rapidly engaged the pupils’ interest – indeed the scenario snowballed with other classes becoming caught up in the story of Santa’s search for his missing reindeer! Pupils responded to the tasks set through discussion boards and by adding their own posts to the blogs.

 Jacqui Clark talks about the P5 Glow Group, pt 2 (2:58)Lynburn Primary: enthusing learners and promoting responsibility

The enthusiasm of the P5s for Glow is evident in their independent use at home, such as updating their own pages (described in a separate cookbook), showing their parents and carers work they’ve been doing, and using games and activities on the National Site. Their parents have been keen to find out more about Glow and how they can support their children’s learning. Jacqui created a Homework page where parents could post up questions or comments, use links to suggested online activities and contribute their own website recommendations. To date, it has been the pupils, rather than their parents, who have used the discussion board to post comments, but it has remained a useful point of contact with families.

 Jacqui Clark talks about the P5 Glow Group, pt 3 (2:19)Lynburn Primary: enthusing learners and promoting responsibility

The Wedding invitation. Click to enlarge.

Jacqui’s remit includes supporting her colleagues with Glow. One facet of this has been establishing whole school Glow Groups which everyone can use. In April, a Glow Group was created to support a whole week of activities around the Royal Wedding. In a hectic, but clearly very enjoyable, few days pupils were involved in many aspects of wedding planning including making a cake, creating invitations and collecting the replies, organising the caterers and making sure the bride had something to wear! The week culminated in the school’s very own wedding on the Friday morning. A wealth of photos capturing evidence of the learning has been uploaded to ‘The Royal Wedding’ Glow Group. Jacqui’s P5 pupils provided peer mentoring to other classes in the school, supporting them with undertaking a series of challenges posted in the Glow Group. Pupils also supported members of staff in creating their own Glow pages. The week’s activities stimulated a lot of interest from staff about Glow, and this together with the pupil peer mentoring, has had quite a substantial impact on uptake within the school.

 Jacqui Clark talks about ‘The Royal Wedding’ Glow Group (3:07)Lynburn Primary: enthusing learners and promoting responsibility

Ingredients

For her P5 class Glow Group Jacqui:

* created a Glow Group on the school site

* added all her pupils as ‘Contributors’

* added additional pages

* created multiple Documents, Web links and Discussions web parts

* added topical features, such as the snowflakes and red noses

Method

The video clips below explain the processes of customising a Glow Group as Jacqui has done.

* how to add, rename or delete pages (2:56) Lynburn Primary: enthusing learners and promoting responsibility

* how to upload a document (2:24) Lynburn Primary: enthusing learners and promoting responsibility

* how to add a post to a discussion board (3:00)Lynburn Primary: enthusing learners and promoting responsibility

* how to add a web link (3:56)Lynburn Primary: enthusing learners and promoting responsibility

* how to create an additional Documents web part (7:42)Lynburn Primary: enthusing learners and promoting responsibility

* how to close, restore or move web parts (4:21) Lynburn Primary: enthusing learners and promoting responsibility

* how to compress images before uploading to Glow (8:12) Lynburn Primary: enthusing learners and promoting responsibility

* how to upload images to an Image Gallery web part (8:51)Lynburn Primary: enthusing learners and promoting responsibility

The Glow Help blog contains information about adding snowflakes and red noses to your own Glow Groups.

Impact

Jacqui feels that she has learnt much about using Glow – about the activities that she would definitely continue, such as pupils’ own pages – and the things she’d do differently (compressing photos before uploading, to speed up how long they take to display). She has been impressed by pupils’ enthusiasm for learning, and the motivation that Glow provides. She’s been delighted too with pupils’ sense of responsibility and their confidence: they have provided peer mentoring, supported school staff and talked about Glow to a meeting of Fife headteachers. Next year she’s keen to progress with introducing e-portfolios into the school.

Jacqui Clark talks about her next steps with Glow (0:44)Lynburn Primary: enthusing learners and promoting responsibility

Pupils have been keen to lead the learning, talking about news stories they’ve seen in the ‘Daily What’, games and activities they’ve found on the national site, or national Glow Meet events that they want to participate in.  

Lynburn pupils talk about their favourite activities on the National Site (0:58)Lynburn Primary: enthusing learners and promoting responsibility

Lynburn pupils talk about teaching others about Glow (1:14)Lynburn Primary: enthusing learners and promoting responsibility

Lynburn pupils talk about Glow Meet (2:22)Lynburn Primary: enthusing learners and promoting responsibility

The pupils' own Glow Group. Click to enlarge.

Jacqui Clark is a P5 teacher at Lynburn Primary School in Fife. She has been using Glow for about eighteen months, first with her own class and then supporting colleagues and pupils throughout the school.

This is the second of two cookbooks about Jacqui’s work. The first focused on how Jacqui used Glow to support learning in areas as diverse as Mandarin, Christmas and the Royal Wedding! In this cookbook we look at how she has given the children in her class their own Glow Group and given them the responsibility for ensuring it is used appropriately. She is delighted with the way they have responded to that challenge.

Context

Jacqui’s Primary 5 class were already well used to Glow, to the Glow Group environment and in particular to using Discussion boards to post comments about their work or to ask questions.

One pupil's page. Click to enlarge.

The class were then keen to have their own Glow pages. While pupils could have used their ‘My Glow’ for this purpose, Jacqui decided to create a Glow Group with one page per child. Pupils use these pages to post messages for each other, upload photos of activities they are involved in outside school, post up personal news, announce when they have uploaded new work for peer assessment and store pieces of work they want to be able to share with their families

The P5s have been given ‘Administrator’ rights to this Glow Group, allowing them to be able to create new web parts when required. This is an uncommonly high level of rights for pupils to be given on a Glow Group (’Reader with Discussions’ or ‘Contributor’ are more typical), and could cause some problems, such as with pupils deleting each others’ work. However, the class have proved very mature in their use of the Glow Group and handled the responsibility well. Indeed they have taken the messages of internet safety and being responsible citizens to heart, rapidly flagging up to Jacqui any item that they feel is inappropriate.

Jacqui Clark talks about her pupils’ Glow Group (1:47) Lynburn Primary: giving pupils responsibility for their own Glow Group

Ingredients

For the class Glow Group, Jacqui needed to do the following:

* created a Glow Group on the school site

* gave her pupils Administrators of the Group

* created a page for each pupil

The pupils themselves then:

* created multiple web parts, so that each had their own News, Documents and Discussions web parts

* added a Glow Image Gallery web part

* added content to their own pages and to their friends’

Method

The following video clips show how to customise and use a Glow Group as Jacqui and her class have done.

* how to add, rename or delete pages (2:56) Lynburn Primary: giving pupils responsibility for their own Glow Group

* how to upload a document (2:24) Lynburn Primary: giving pupils responsibility for their own Glow Group

* how to add a post to a discussion board (3:00) Lynburn Primary: giving pupils responsibility for their own Glow Group

* how to create an additional Documents (or other) web part (7:42) Lynburn Primary: giving pupils responsibility for their own Glow Group

* how to close, restore or move web parts (4:21)  Lynburn Primary: giving pupils responsibility for their own Glow Group

* how to compress images before uploading to Glow (8:12) Lynburn Primary: giving pupils responsibility for their own Glow Group

* how to upload images to an Image Gallery web part (8:51) Lynburn Primary: giving pupils responsibility for their own Glow Group

Impact

Using a Glow Group for ’social’ purposes have proved a hit with Jacqui’s class. While every pupil has a ‘My Glow’ space, it is not easy to allow other pupils access to this, nor easy for staff to keep an eye on what is posted. Use of a Glow Group gives all members of the class easy visibility of everyone’s pages. For staff it can provide a good teaching environment in which to reinforce lessons about internet safety, to discuss the implications of copyright when sourcing images on the web, and to encourage respect for peers.

Lynburn pupils talk about their pupil Glow Group (0:35)Lynburn Primary: giving pupils responsibility for their own Glow Group

Context

Operation Safety was conceived in 2000 as an expansion of the Road Safety course being rolled out in primary schools and initially involved Schools Services, Police, Fire Service and Ambulance Service.  Over the years Operation Safety has developed and additional partner agencies now participate. There are now 12 scenarios giving life skills in a safe environment to enhance the pupils’ knowledge of what to do in these situations.  It is hoped they remember these lessons in future if they find themselves in a similar position in real life.  The scenarios evolve to keep up to date with the current issues, for example, Internet Safety includes bullying on-line and on mobile phones. Each year over 2,200 P6/7 pupils attend Operation Safety. Operation Safety was first mentioned at one of the Glow Training courses attended by Community Police Officers as one of the officers involved saw the potential of using Glow.

Diane Webb is a Development Officer for Glow with Dumfries and Galloway. It was decided at a meeting attended by both the police and education that a Glow Group would be created for use within the authority to enhance the experience for the pupils attending the sessions. Discussions were held to decide what would be included in the Glow Group. They decided that a Glow Group would work well to showcase art work and creative writing by the pupils and also to facilitate feedback from the pupils themselves after they took part in the project. They were also keen that the Glow Group could contain film of the pupils, from different schools, participating in some of the activities and also films of interviews with the pupils about the activities. The plan was that pupils would only get access to the Glow Group once they had attended their Operation Safety session.

Ingredients

Tour of the Operation Safety Glow Group (6:30)
Operation Safety in Dumfries and Galloway

The basic template for the Group was created and the surveys were created and added.  The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) film, Jigsaw, was added after seeking permission from CEOP and the YouTube video, Children See, Children Do. The layout changed as Diane and her team added various items to the pages to make them more attractive and useful for the pupils and teachers.

Creative Writing Page

Be Safe Be Bright – click to enlarge

The Glow Group also includes a Creative Writing Page and they’re hoping to expand this to include more pieces of pupil writing as the Glow Group starts to be used.

Picture Library Page

Posters – click to enlarge

There were hundreds of posters available from running the project previously and it is was really difficult for the team to choose which ones to showcase on this page. Again, it is hoped that they will be able to use this page to showcase pupil artwork from around the local authority.

Filming

Armed with a video camera, tripod and microphone Diane and her colleague Andrea Austin attended Operation Safety in Stranraer and filmed the scenarios they wanted to use for the Glow Group.  They also collected pupil work from PC Milven.  The videos were edited back at base by one of their colleagues on the Glow Team. It is intended to extend the range of videos available on the Glow Group by filming further videos the next time Operation Safety runs.

Beer Glasses film from the Glow Group (2:16)
Operation Safety in Dumfries and Galloway

What did Diane need to successfully set up the Operation Safety Glow Group?

• A Glow Group created at local authority level in Dumfries and Galloway.
• Pupils to be added into the Glow Group school by school, once they have completed the Operation Safety course.
• Surveys created and put onto the Noticeboard page for the pupils and staff from the schools to respond to.
• Various pages created within the Glow Group.
• A picture library created to hold pupils’ art work.
• A Creative Writing documents web part to hold pupils’ work.
• Various videos uploaded to TeacherTube and then embedded into xml web parts within the Glow Group.

Recipe

There are many aspects of the Operation Safety Glow Group which could have been included in the recipe section. However, I have chosen creating the survey for the focus and you will find videos on this below. You will find links to other Cookbooks containing how-to videos on similar aspects to the ones additioanlly included in the Operation Safety Glow Group.

Creating a Survey (10:04)
Operation Safety in Dumfries and Galloway

Adding the survey to the page (2:06)
Operation Safety in Dumfries and Galloway

These Cookbooks contain information about embedding video in your Glow Group:

Embedding Video as a Stimulus for Writing

Engaging Videos in an Earth and Space Glow Group at Coylton Primary

LEGO activities at SLF: Part 4- Pictures and Videos

These Cookbooks contain further information about using surveys in Glow

Embedding Glow in daily learning and teaching

Raising attainment in literacy in Primary 3

Encouraging deeper learning: pupils creating surveys

Enabling Pupil Voice – using a Glow Survey

Impact

The following videos are really about the impact of the project rather than the Glow Group as it is too early yet to be able to tell how well the Glow Group is extending the learning.

The first video is Diane describing the project and the Glow Group and the remainder of the videos are from the What we Learned page of the Glow Group and also available on Teacher Tube.

Diane Webb speaks about Operation Safety (3:06)
Operation Safety in Dumfries and Galloway

In their own words (0:37)
Operation Safety in Dumfries and Galloway

The Best Bit of Operation Safety – Pupil Comments (0:50)
Operation Safety in Dumfries and Galloway

What scared us most – Pupil Comments (1:36)
Operation Safety in Dumfries and Galloway

Top Tips – Pupil Comments (2:51)
Operation Safety in Dumfries and Galloway

What we learned about online games (0:19)
Operation Safety in Dumfries and Galloway

Graphica Interface. Click to enlarge.

Glenwood High School in Fife, with a roll of 860 pupils and with 90 teaching staff, has seen a significant increase in the use of Glow over the last six months. By the end of the year, around 75% of staff and pupils had active accounts and in an average week over 200 pupils were using Glow during school hours.

The cookbook, “Glowing across the curriculum at Glenwood High School“, describes how a number of staff from different departments, have been using Glow to enhance learning and teaching.

In this cookbook we focus on the work of the Computing department. In the Recipe section, video clips show how you can replicate the use of avatars, vokis and forums.

Context

In January 2011, a number of Glow training courses were run in Fife and staff from eight secondary schools were invited to attend. At Glenwood, volunteers were sought from across the school and 14 participated in the training. Most of the sessions offered were one-day Glow Basics training, which covered how to create a curricular Glow Group to support learning with a specific class. At the end of the day’s session, staff had a Glow Group ready to go and a good idea of how they wanted their pupils to use it. The aim for many of the staff was initially to upload revision documents in preparation for prelims and for pupils to be able to use discussion boards or forums to ask questions or look for help.

Clare Hunt is PTC of Business, Enterprise and Computing at Glenwood. She and her colleagues have begun to use Glow across S1-S6, and have created a series of attractive graphical interfaces to allow users to easily navigate between the different Glow Groups.

Pupils' work. Click to enlarge.

The S1 ICT course contains a unit of work on Cyber-Bullying. Following a class discussion, pupils were asked to create presentations to share their understanding of what cyber-bullying is, how it should be dealt with and how to avoid becoming a victim of a cyber-bully. Pupils uploaded their completed presentations into the S1 Glow Group, as it provided an ideal place for pupils to share their work. The Group enabled them to view each others’ presentations and to show their work to parents and carers at home. A number of parents have commented to Clare about how valuable this has been in stimulating a discussion with their children about staying safe online.

Pupils' forum avatars. Click to enlarge.

A Glow forum was then used to encourage pupils to think about the advice they would give if they discovered a friend was being bullied. Introducing the forum to the pupils enabled Clare and her colleagues to reinforce internet safety messages about keeping personal information private. Rather than displaying a photograph of themselves in the forum, pupils learnt how to create an avatar (a cartoon representation) using a free website, and how to upload this into their forum profile.

Clare Hunt: S1 Cyber-Bullying presentations and discussions (1:59) “Glow is an ideal place to share pupils’ work”

Pupil's voki

Towards the end of the academic year S2 classes were introduced to the Voki web site. Here they each created their own Voki (a talking avatar) to give their evaluation of the Computing course. The website allows users to give their Voki a voice, either by entering text or by using a microphone to record. Microphones work well with a bit of peace and quiet, but not so effectively with 20 pupils recording simultaneously. So the second years typed in their text and took great care over the comments, spelling and punctuation, as the Voki’s speech is only as good as the text that’s been entered. The Vokis were then shared through a Glow blog, so that pupils could see each others’ and Computing staff could hear all the feedback on the course. Pupils clearly found this a highly motivating activity, and the quality of comments was better than might have been recorded on a paper evaluation form.

Clare Hunt: S2’s Computing course evaluations (2:14)“Glow is an ideal place to share pupils’ work”

Ingredients

For the S1 Cyber-bullying project, Clare required:

- an S1 ICT Glow Group

- all relevant pupils given Contributor membership

- a suitable website for creating avatars

- Microsoft Office Picture Manager, or similar image editing software, to resize the avatars

For the S2 end of year evaluations, Clare required:

- an S2 Computing Glow Group

- all the relevant pupils given Contributor membership

- the Voki website

- a Glow blog created within the Glow Group

Method

* How to add the Glow forum web part and create a forum (2:57) “Glow is an ideal place to share pupils’ work”

* How to post messages on a forum (5:59) “Glow is an ideal place to share pupils’ work”

* How to create an avatar to use in a Glow forum (3:46) “Glow is an ideal place to share pupils’ work”

* How to upload an avatar to a Glow forum profile (1:36) “Glow is an ideal place to share pupils’ work”

* How to create a Voki (4:41) “Glow is an ideal place to share pupils’ work”

* How to add a Voki to a Glow Group page (6:50) “Glow is an ideal place to share pupils’ work”

* How to add a Voki to a blog post (4:50) “Glow is an ideal place to share pupils’ work”

Impact

The use of Glow at Glenwood has grown very rapidly over just a few months, not just in Computing. Glow is becoming well embedded in the curriculum: it’s not viewed as an adjunct, but a tool to be used, when appropriate, to enhance learning and teaching.

In the video clip below, Dave Dawson, DHT at Glenwood, explains the progress that has been made.

Dave Dawson: uptake and usage of Glow at Glenwood (1:35) “Glow is an ideal place to share pupils’ work”

The challenge now is to continue to develop. In the new academic year, each department has been asked to have a Glow representative and for Glow to be included in development plans.

Dave Dawson: next stages of Glow development at Glenwood (0:36) “Glow is an ideal place to share pupils’ work”

 

SG Drama Glow Group. Click to enlarge.

Glenwood High School in Fife, with a roll of 860 pupils and with 90 teaching staff, has seen a significant increase in the use of Glow over the last six months. By the end of the year, around 75% of staff and pupils had active accounts and in an average week over 200 pupils were using Glow during school hours.

The cookbook, “Glowing across the curriculum at Glenwood High School“, describes how a number of staff from different departments, have been using Glow to enhance learning and teaching.

In this cookbook we focus on the work of one teacher, Clare Todd, and how she uses Glow Groups with each of her Drama classes. In the Recipe section, video clips show how you can replicate Clare’s use of surveys for self-evaluation.

Context

In January 2011, a number of Glow training courses were run in Fife and staff from eight secondary schools were invited to attend. At Glenwood, volunteers were sought from across the school and 14 participated in the training. Most of the sessions offered were one-day Glow Basics training, which covered how to create a curricular Glow Group to support learning with a specific class. At the end of the day’s session, staff had a Glow Group ready to go and a good idea of how they wanted their pupils to use it. The aim for many of the staff was initially to upload revision documents in preparation for prelims and for pupils to be able to use discussion boards or forums to ask questions or look for help.

Homework dropbox. Click to enlarge.

Drama teacher, Clare Todd, attended the training having been put forward as the representative for her department. She comments that she “was really excited when I first heard about Glow. It was exactly what I’d been looking for.” What Clare wanted was a collaborative area where pupils could find learning resources, use forums to discuss their work, hand-in homework and use surveys to evaluate their learning. While she didn’t have the skills to create her own website, she could immediately see the potential for Glow to deliver what she was needed.

Clare first created a Drama Glow Group open to all pupils in the school. The Group showcases current work, with videos of recent trips, photos of class productions and discussion boards where pupils can post comments. All pupils can interact in this Glow Group and get excited about what they might be involved in as they progress through the school.

Clare Todd: Drama Glow Groups – part 1 (7:14) “Just what I’d been looking for…”

Next Clare created a Glow Group for each year group, with separate pages for each teaching group. This structure allows her to upload materials appropriate for each class, guiding pupils in their learning. In the Standard Grade Glow Group, for example, there are links to theatre review websites, discussion boards where questions are set for homework, and a spreadsheet where pupils assess themselves against grade-related criteria.

The Documents area of each Glow Group has proved particularly useful. Learning resources are uploaded, so that pupils have access to all the materials, such as the course handbook, from home.

As a number of colleagues in other departments have also done, Clare has created a homework web part, where pupils can submit work for review. This has proved very successful in encouraging pupils to complete their homework, and in addition it allows Clare to monitor the progress of draft pieces before final submission. Clare gives feedback either within the web part or in more detail on the pupil’s document which is then returned to them. Permissions on the web part are set so that while Clare can see everyone’s work, pupils can see only their own.

Clare Todd: Drama Glow Groups – part 2 (2:29) “Just what I’d been looking for…”

Survey questions. Click to enlarge.

Survey results. Click to enlarge.

With many of her classes Clare has used surveys for self-evaluation exercises. The surveys are quick to create, easy for the pupils to respond to and, as the data is automatically collated, pretty painless for the teacher to review. For multiple-choice type questions, such as “When working in a group, I contributed imaginative and sensible ideas”, a bar chart provides a valuable overview of the responses. For free-text questions, such as “What were your main strengths in Drama?”, the bar chart view is less useful, but viewing pupils’ individual responses provides excellent personal feedback. When first experimenting with the survey options, Clare had hoped that it would provide a means of creating vocabulary tests, but having been introduced to Glow Learn by one of her colleagues, now feels that would be a more effective tool for assessments and tracking progress.

Ingredients

For each year group Clare required:

* a Glow Group

* the relevant pupils given Contributor membership of the group

Recipe

Having created each Glow Group, Clare has added many features, such as discussion boards, video clips, surveys and a homework web part. The video clips below focus on the use of surveys and show to replicate each part of the process from creating a survey to viewing pupils’ responses. A cookbook about Clare’s colleague, Kayleigh Brown, shows how to create and use the homework web part.

* How to create a survey (4:15) “Just what I’d been looking for…”

* How to add the Survey web part to a Glow Group (1:54) “Just what I’d been looking for…”

* How to change the permissions on the Survey web part (2:37) “Just what I’d been looking for…”

* How pupils respond to a survey (1:44) “Just what I’d been looking for…”

* How to view the results of a survey (2:42) “Just what I’d been looking for…”

Impact

From the outset Clare was impressed with how Glow would support her learners and it has lived up to expectations in day-to-day usage in the classroom. She’s already looking ahead to the next stages in her own learning and progression, ready to explore the potential benefits of using the assessment and tracking facilities offered by Glow Learn.

The use of Glow at Glenwood has grown very rapidly over just a few months, not just with Drama classes. Glow is becoming well embedded in the curriculum: it’s not viewed as an adjunct, but a tool to be used, when appropriate, to enhance learning and teaching.

In the video clip below, Dave Dawson, DHT at Glenwood, explains the progress that has been made.

Dave Dawson: uptake and usage of Glow at Glenwood (1:35) “Just what I’d been looking for…”

The challenge now is to continue to develop. In the new academic year, each department has been asked to have a Glow representative and for Glow to be included in development plans.

Dave Dawson: next stages of Glow development at Glenwood (0:36) “Just what I’d been looking for…”

SG History Glow Group. Click to enlarge.

Glenwood High School in Fife, with a roll of 860 pupils and with 90 teaching staff, has seen a significant increase in the use of Glow over the last six months. By the end of the year, around 75% of staff and pupils had active accounts and in an average week over 200 pupils were using Glow during school hours.

The cookbook, “Glowing across the curriculum at Glenwood High School“, describes how a number of staff from different departments, have been using Glow to enhance learning and teaching. In this cookbook we focus on the work of one teacher, Kayleigh Brown, and explore how she has used Glow with her Standard Grade History class. In the Recipe section, video clips show how you can replicate Kayleigh’s use of an “Upload your homework” web part to allow pupils to submit work confidentially.

Context

In January 2011, a number of Glow training courses were run in Fife and staff from eight secondary schools were invited to attend. At Glenwood, volunteers were sought from across the school and 14 participated in the training. Most of the sessions offered were one-day Glow Basics training, which covered how to create a curricular Glow Group to support learning with a specific class. At the end of the day’s session, staff had a Glow Group ready to go and a good idea of how they wanted their pupils to use it. The aim for many of the staff was initially to upload revision documents in preparation for prelims and for pupils to be able to use discussion boards or forums to ask questions or look for help.

History teacher, Kayleigh Brown, was keen to use Glow with her fourth year class. Just before the prelims, she created a Standard Grade History Glow Group, the main purpose of which was to encourage pupils to revise at home. Learning resources, such as PowerPoint slides and revision mind maps, were uploaded to the Glow Group, along with web links directing pupils to websites relevant to the course topics. Kayleigh has shared these materials with other history teachers in her authority, through the ‘Fife Study Support’ Glow Group.

Kayleigh Brown: Standard Grade History (6:36) Using Glow to support an exam class

Kayleigh introduced pupils to Glow in a class lesson, showing them how to log in to Glow, navigate to the Glow Group and use the uploaded resources. She had also posted a question in a forum and asked pupils to reply to this. She was very pleased with the response to this: some pupils who rarely speak up in class were the first to get on and post their comments in the forum. Others were reluctant initially, but gained confidence through reading the contributions of other pupils and building upon them. As a first task, this proved very successful and Kayleigh feels there’s real potential in using the forums to stimulate pupils’ interest and build their skills in structuring exam answers.

Survey results. Click to enlarge.

Following the prelim Kayleigh asked pupils to respond to a survey she’d created and added into the Glow Group. This asked pupils to give feedback on their prelim result, how they’d revised and which topics they felt most or least confident about. The survey permissions were set so that pupils could see only their own response. The ‘graphical summary’ option on the survey results enabled Kayleigh to see at a glance the responses on questions such as ‘In the recent prelim were you pleased with your result?’ and then to look in more detailed at individual responses to read the more personal feedback that pupils had given, describing the topics they were finding difficult.  

Submitted homework. Click to enlarge.

One of the biggest benefits of the Glow Group for Kayleigh has been providing her pupils with a quick method of submitting homework and practice papers. Using the ‘Custom List’ option in a Glow Group, she created an ‘Upload your homework’ web part. Pupils attach the file(s) they have been working on and submit the work for assessment. The permissions on the web part are set so that, while Kayleigh can see everyone’s work, pupils can see only their own. Through the web part, Kayleigh is able to assess the work and give overall comments, or can re-attach the document giving detailed feedback. Pupils have appreciated the quick feedback they have received in this way.

As the Glow Group developed, Kayleigh has begun to add separate pages for each of the different units in the SG course. Each page contains everything pupils will need for revision, such as learning resources and web links, reducing the risk of pupils finding wrong materials or studying the wrong periods, as has always been the danger when pupils are asked to research using the internet. For topics that pupils struggle with, Kayleigh has added video clips from YouTube and similar sites. While these may be blocked by school filtering, it’s proved an effective way of directly pupils to use these clips at home. 

Ingredients

For her Standard Grade class, Kayleigh required:

* a Glow Group

* pupils given Contributor membership of the group

Recipe

Having created the Glow Group, Kayleigh customised it to fit, for example adding on additional pages, adding in a Glow forum, creating surveys and embedding YouTube video clips. For Kayleigh, one of the most useful features was the ‘Upload your homework’ web part that she created. The video clips below show how to replicate this web part, if you’re interested in using something similar with your own classes. For ‘how-to’ video clips on surveys, see the cookbook focusing on another Glenwood teacher, Clare Todd.

* How to create a web part for homework submission (4:57) Using Glow to support an exam class

* How to add the homework web part to a Glow Group page (4:42)Using Glow to support an exam class

* How to set permissions on the homework web part (3:39) Using Glow to support an exam class

* How to check the homework web part is ready to use (3:53) Using Glow to support an exam class

* How to view pupils’ work submitted in the homework web part (4:30) Using Glow to support an exam class

* How the Site Collection Administrator can save the homework web part as a template (3:40) Using Glow to support an exam class

* How to use the template to create a homework web part (4:10) Using Glow to support an exam class

Impact

Kayleigh has been very pleased with the response of her S4 pupils to Glow. Having seen the value of the Glow Group tools, and in particular the ‘upload your homework’ web part, she has established similar ways of working with first and second year classes.

The use of Glow at Glenwood has grown very rapidly over just a few months, not just with History classes. Glow is becoming well embedded in the curriculum: it’s not viewed as an adjunct, but a tool to be used, when appropriate, to enhance learning and teaching.

In the video clip below, Dave Dawson, DHT at Glenwood, explains the progress that has been made.

Dave Dawson: uptake and usage of Glow at Glenwood (1:35) Using Glow to support an exam class

The challenge now is to continue to develop. In the new academic year, each department has been asked to have a Glow representative and for Glow to be included in development plans.

Dave Dawson: next stages of Glow development at Glenwood (0:36) Using Glow to support an exam class

Click to enlarge.

Glenwood High School in Fife, with a roll of 860 pupils and with 90 teaching staff, has seen a significant increase in the use of Glow over the last six months. By the end of the year, around 75% of staff and pupils had active accounts and in an average week over 200 pupils were using Glow during school hours.

The cookbook, “Glowing across the curriculum at Glenwood High School“, describes how a number of staff from different departments, have been using Glow to enhance learning and teaching.

In this cookbook we focus on the work of one teacher, Kim Yapp, and how she found that Glow solved a long-standing problem. In the Recipe section, video clips show how you can replicate Kim’s ideas.

Context

Saving group work. Click to enlarge.

Kim teaches Modern Foreign Languages. For the last couple of years, the department has run a Culture Project for first year pupils. At the end of each unit of work, different aspects of French culture, such as Christmas celebrations, school and leisure, are introduced. At the end of the year, pupils are asked to work in groups, create a presentation on a cultural theme of their own choice, and deliver the presentation to their class. 

Prior to the arrival of Glow in the school, the project, though very successful, had presented a number of logistical difficulties. The classes worked in the ICT suites and at the end of the lesson each pupil saved their work to their own network area. As common to many school networks, a pupil’s network area is inaccessible to teachers and to other pupils. If a pupil was absent in subsequent lessons, their work could not be retrieved to be added to the group presentation.

Similar difficulties occurred once the presentations were completed and ready to be delivered to the class. If saved to a pupil’s network area, then the presentation lessons involved one group after another each needing to log in to the PC linked to the projector. Often half of the lesson time was lost, simply in this repeated logging in and out of the network. 

An alternative solution that Kim had tried, involved the finished presentations being saved onto a memory stick. This meant that the last 20 minutes of the lesson in which pupils were completing their presentations were spent passing around a USB stick and all groups saving their work onto it. Again a significant amount of time was lost, but this method did have the advantage of ensuring that the lessons where the presentations were delivered to the class ran much more smoothly.

Kim Yapp: S1 Culture Project (6:36)Using a Document Library to facilitate group presentations

When Kim began to use Glow earlier this year, she was hopeful that it would deliver a simple solution to these logistical problems – and was delighted to find that it did! To test the waters she ran a mini-project with her class, asking them to research a European country, create a project document and upload it into Glow. This activity gave Kim time to ensure that all pupils had Glow accounts, and knew their passwords, and allowed her to show them how to navigate around the Modern Languages Glow Groups and upload their work.

Pupil's work. Click to enlarge.

She then created an S1 Culture Project Glow Group, customising it to leave just the Documents web part. Folders for each group of pupils were then added, to enable each to organise their work effectively. Pupils then had four periods in the ICT suite in which to research and create the presentations. At the end of each lesson they saved their work into their folder in the Glow Group. This meant that if an individual was away at any point during the following lessons, the group leader could still add the work to the collated presentation. No time was wasted during the research period with replicating missing work or saving to a communal USB stick.

Delivering the presentations was greatly simplified too. Kim simply logged on to the network herself, then logged into Glow, and all groups’ work was immediately accessible. Each team could then come, in turn, to Kim’s PC and deliver to the class with no time lost logging in and out of the network.

A simple Glow Group had provided a way around the logistical barriers, as Kim had hoped, but there were unexpected additional benefits too. As the work was in a shared area from the start of the four periods, it was easy for Kim to monitor progress as the presentations developed and to step in quickly if any pupil was not pulling their weight. The Glow Group also enabled pupils to continue their work at home and to discuss it with their parents and carers.

Ingredients

To support the S1 Culture Project, Kim required:
* a Glow Group

* pupils given Contributor membership of the Glow Group

Recipe

Having created the Glow Group and set the permissions, Kim then customised the Group to meet the needs of the project. She simplified the layout, removing unneeded pages and web parts. In the Documents web part she created a folder for each group of pupils. Reminders to the pupils about how to save their work were displayed in a Text Editor web part. The instructions for each stage of these processes are shown in the clips below.

* How to delete pages from a Glow Group (1:47) Using a Document Library to facilitate group presentations

* How to add and close web parts (2:35) Using a Document Library to facilitate group presentations

* How to create folders in a Documents web part and upload a file (3:50) Using a Document Library to facilitate group presentations

* How to add the Text Editor web part to a Glow Group to display instructions (3:24) Using a Document Library to facilitate group presentations

Impact

The use of Glow at Glenwood has grown very rapidly over just a few months, not just in Modern Languages. Glow is becoming well embedded in the curriculum: it’s not viewed as an adjunct, but a tool to be used, when appropriate, to enhance learning and teaching.

In the video clip below, Dave Dawson, DHT at Glenwood, explains the progress that has been made.

Dave Dawson: uptake and usage of Glow at Glenwood (1:35) Using a Document Library to facilitate group presentations

The challenge now is to continue to develop. In the new academic year, each department has been asked to have a Glow representative and for Glow to be included in development plans.

Dave Dawson: next stages of Glow development at Glenwood (0:36) Using a Document Library to facilitate group presentations

Alison Wood

Glenwood High School in Fife, with a roll of 860 pupils and with 90 teaching staff, has seen a significant increase in the use of Glow over the last six months. By the end of the year, around 75% of staff and pupils had active accounts and in an average week over 200 pupils were using Glow during school hours.

The cookbook, “Glowing across the curriculum at Glenwood High School“, describes how a number of staff from different departments, have been using Glow to enhance learning and teaching. In this cookbook we focus on the work of one teacher, Alison Wood, and explore how she has used Glow with English classes from first year to Higher. In the Recipe section, video clips show how you can replicate some of Alison’s ideas, such as creating collaborative wikis. 

Context

In January 2011, a number of Glow training courses were run in Fife and staff from eight secondary schools were invited to attend. At Glenwood, volunteers were sought from across the school and 14 participated in the training. Most of the sessions offered were one-day Glow Basics training, which covered how to create a curricular Glow Group to support learning with a specific class. At the end of the day’s session, staff had a Glow Group ready to go and a good idea of how they wanted their pupils to use it. The aim for many of the staff was initially to upload revision documents in preparation for prelims and for pupils to be able to use discussion boards or forums to ask questions or look for help.

Book review forum. Click to enlarge.

English teacher, Alison Wood attended one of the training courses in January and came away, she says, “quite inspired”. She has since introduced Glow to her S1, S3 and Higher classes.

With her first year class she was keen to encourage pupils to tackle more challenging texts. Pupils wrote book reviews, uploaded them into a Glow Group and commented on each others’ reviews in a Glow forum. Alison felt this activity worked very well, and was one that she would repeat, and adapt for use with older classes.

One of Alison’s key aims with beginning to use Glow was to support her Higher class. She had read a number of cookbooks, focusing on using Glow to support exam classes, and she was interested in the possibilities. She wanted pupils to complete close reading activities, answer questions in Glow, and use a forum to discuss their responses with other members of the class. Lack of time in the run-up to the exams meant the activity did not get as well established as Alison would have liked, but she feels that this has the potential to be a very valuable way of developing pupils’ skills and understanding. 

Graphical summary. Click to enlarge.

During a class lesson with the Higher pupils, Alison used a survey to assess pupils’ knowledge of key points in “A Streetcar named Desire”. Once pupils had responded to the survey, she asked them to use the ’graphical summary’ option, to view the results as a series of bar charts. Pupils could rapidly see for themselves where their responses differed from other pupils’. An interesting debate ensued about where different responses were appropriate – and where they indicated poor recall! Pupils could identify for themselves where they’d got work to do, and Alison was able to underline the necessity of going back and revising the text thoroughly. Following the success of this activity, Alison can see a lot of potential for using surveys again. As she emphasises in the video clip below, survey questions need to be designed carefully in order to catch the areas that pupils are finding difficult.

Alison Wood: Glow enhancing learning and teaching in English (3:32) Enhancing learning and teaching in English classes

The 'Protest and Poetry' wiki. Click to enlarge.

With her third year class Alison has created a wiki to develop pupils’ understanding of the context of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”. Following a lesson in which the class looked at the concept of protest songs, and studied the lyrics of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”, Alison asked the pupils to bring in a protest song of their own choice. In Glow she created a wiki and added an introduction. She then asked pupils to each add a page to the wiki, explain their choice of song and provide their own interpretation of it. Beyond these basic requirements, pupils were free to develop their page in any way they wished.

The class responded very well and were intrigued by the possibilities of the wikis. Many have gone well beyond the initial requirements, spending additional time at home on adding further text and images and inserting links to websites, containing videos of the singers or bands.

Alison has been delighted with pupils’ engagement in this work and the results they’ve achieved. She’s keen to explore the potential of wikis further: completed wikis could be downloaded as a document and printed as an example of informative writing. They could be included in pupils’ folios and would be a very different format from anything Alison has included in a Standard Grade folio before.

Alison Wood: ‘Poetry and Protest’ wiki created by S3 (1:51) Enhancing learning and teaching in English classes

With other classes Alison has used ‘ The Daily What’ and found this to be an excellent resource to encourage pupils to read newspaper articles. She’s looking forward to making more use of it in the coming year when she will have a data projector in her classroom and be able to use this with a whole class, without needing to book an ICT suite.

Ingredients

To use ’The Daily What’ with a class, no setting up was required, other to ensure that all pupils had Glow accounts and could log on. ‘The Daily What’ is launched from a link on the National Site. If you wish to integrate it into other work pupils are undertaking in Glow, there is a ‘Daily What’ web part which can be added into your own Glow Groups.  A video clip in the Ingredients section shows how to do this.

To create a wiki, Alison required:

* permissions to be set by the school’s Account and Services Manager (ASM), allowing Alison and the S3 class the rights to use wikis;

* a Glow Group;

* the S3 class to be given Contributor membership of the Glow Group.

Recipe

The clips provide step-by-instructions showing how to use ‘The Daily What’ online newspaper and how to create wikis.

* How to use the ‘Daily What’ and its associated resources (5:12) Enhancing learning and teaching in English classes

* How to add the ‘Daily What’ web part to a Glow Group (3:20) Enhancing learning and teaching in English classes

* How the ASM sets the permissions to allow staff and pupils to use wikis (4:09) Enhancing learning and teaching in English classes

* How to add the Glow wiki web part to a Glow Group and create a wiki (3:57) Enhancing learning and teaching in English classes

* How to add text and images to a wiki page (3:42) Enhancing learning and teaching in English classes

* How to create new pages in a wiki and add hyperlinks and video (7:46) Enhancing learning and teaching in English classes

Impact

The use of Glow at Glenwood has grown very rapidly over just a few months, not just in Alison’s English classes. Glow is becoming well embedded in the curriculum: it’s not viewed as an adjunct, but a tool to be used, when appropriate, to enhance learning and teaching. 

In the video clip below, Dave Dawson, DHT at Glenwood, explains the progress that has been made.

Dave Dawson: uptake and usage of Glow at Glenwood (1:35) Enhancing learning and teaching in English classes

The challenge now is to continue to develop. In the new academic year, each department has been asked to have a Glow representative and for Glow to be included in development plans.

Dave Dawson: next stages of Glow development at Glenwood (0:36) Enhancing learning and teaching in English classes

Glenwood High School

Glenwood High School in Fife, with a roll of 860 pupils and with 90 teaching staff, has seen a significant increase in the use of Glow over the last six months. By the end of the year, around 75% of staff and pupils had active accounts and in an average week over 200 pupils were using Glow during school hours.

This cookbook describes how a number of staff, from different departments, have been using Glow to enhance learning and teaching. The video clips and Glow Group tours show the work that has been undertaken, the pupils’ responses and the lesson learned. Additional cookbooks focus on each teacher in turn, and provide the detail of how you can replicate (or adapt) their ideas.

Context

In January 2011, a number of Glow training courses were run in Fife and staff from eight secondary schools were invited to attend. At Glenwood, volunteers were sought from across the school and 14 participated in the training. Most of the sessions offered were one-day Glow Basics training, which covered how to create a curricular Glow Group to support learning with a specific class. At the end of the day’s session, staff had a Glow Group ready to go and a good idea of how they wanted their pupils to use it. The aim for many of the staff was initially to upload revision documents in preparation for prelims and for pupils to be able to use discussion boards or forums to ask questions or look for help. As can be seen from the clips below, while these basic Glow features were used extensively, staff have also progressed on rapidly to using other tools, such as wikis, blogs and Glow Meet.

In the first clip here, Dave Dawson, DHT at Glenwood, describes the progress over the last few months:

Dave Dawson: uptake and usage of Glow at Glenwood (1:35)Glowing across the curriculum at Glenwood High School

Alison Wood

Alison Wood attended one of the training courses in January and has since used Glow with S1, S3 and Higher English classes. With her first year class she was keen to encourage pupils to tackle more challenging texts. Pupils wrote book reviews, uploaded them into a Glow Group and commented on each others’ reviews in a Glow forum. For her Higher class Alison created a Glow Group, and uploaded notes and past papers for pupils to use at home in the run up to exams. She also used surveys during lesson time for pupils to assess their own knowledge of the set texts. Viewing the survey results allowed pupils to quickly see where their responses differed from those of other pupils. This generated a very valuable class discussion where pupils could identify for themselves where they’d got work to do, and the necessity of going back to revising the text.

With third year pupils Alison has created a wiki to stimulate pupils’ interest in the background of a set text. The third years have been intrigued by the possibilities of the wikis and many have gone well beyond the initial requirements in developing their own pages.

Alison Wood: ‘Poetry and Protest’ wiki created by S3 (1:51) Glowing across the curriculum at Glenwood High School

Alison has found the ‘Daily What’ an excellent resource in encouraging pupils to read newspaper articles. She can see a lot of potential for this, and is looking forward to making more use of it in the coming year when she will have a data projector in her classroom and therefore able to use this with a whole class, rather than needing to book an ICT suite.

Alison Wood: Glow enhancing learning and teaching in English (3:32) Glowing across the curriculum at Glenwood High School

The full cookbook on Alison’s work can be found here. This includes ‘how-to’ video clips which show how to create wikis and how to make best use of the ‘Daily What’.

Clare Hunt is PTC of Business, Enterprise and Computing at Glenwood. She and her colleagues have begun to use Glow across S1-S6. With first year pupils, Glow offered an ideal place to share the work that pupils had been undertaking in class on a ‘Cyber-bullying’ project. Pupils’ presentations were uploaded to a Glow Group and discussed at home with parents and carers. In class the discussion around internet safety continued with pupils creating avatars and posting comments in a Glow forum.

Clare Hunt: S1 Cyber-Bullying presentations and discussions (1:59) Glowing across the curriculum at Glenwood High School

At the end of the year S2 classes created Vokis to record their evaluations of the Computing course. Pupils found this a highly motivating activity, and took great care over their comments, spelling and punctuation, as the Voki’s speech is only as good as the text that’s been entered! The Vokis were then posted into a Glow blog, so that pupils could see each others’ and Computing staff could hear all the feedback on the course.

Clare Hunt: S2’s Computing course evaluations (2:14)Glowing across the curriculum at Glenwood High School

The full cookbook on Clare’s work is available here. It includes ‘how-to’ video clips on using Glow forums, and on creating Vokis.

Kim Yapp teaches Modern Foreign Languages. For the last couple of years, the department has run a Culture Project at the end of first year. Pupils are asked to work in groups, create a presentation on a cultural theme and deliver the presentation to their class. Prior to the arrival of Glow in the school, the project, though very successful, presented logistical difficulties, as pupils saved their work to their own network area, which is inaccessible to the teacher or to each other. If pupils were absent, their work could not be added to the group presentation. In addition, when classes were delivering their presentations, accessing the completed group work again caused problems. Either all work needed to be saved to a single location such as a memory stick or each group in turn needed to log on and off the network. Kim was delighted to find this year that using Glow easily solved all these problems! One Glow Group was all that was needed – for pupils to upload their individual work, to save their completed group work and from which to present it to the class. There were unlooked-for benefits too – Kim could monitor progress after each lesson as the presentations were being developed, allowing her to intervene with any pupil not pulling their weight in their group – and pupils could show their work to their families.

Kim Yapp: S1 Culture Project (6:36) Glowing across the curriculum at Glenwood High School

Further details on how Kim set up her Glow Groups and ran the Culture Project are available here. This cookbook includes ‘how-to’ clips on creating and customising Glow Groups, and using a Documents web part.

Janet Rutterford

Janet Rutterford teaches English, and as a guidance teacher also has a remit for primary-secondary transition. When Glow was introduced at Glenwood earlier this year, she was interested to look at ways in which it could facilitate transition. As a first experiment, a Glow Meet session was arranged between a first year class and a P7 class at Southwood Primary. Both classes were very well prepared. The P7s drafted their questions and sent them to the high school, giving the first years time to think about their responses. The preparation proved invaluable when the day came for the Glow Meet, as no-one got stage fright in front of the web-cam and all were happy to ask and answer the questions!

On the back of the overwhelmingly enthusiastic feedback from the first year, Janet has continued to develop the transition Glow Group. Pupils generated a wide range of ideas of the content they thought would be useful for the P7s, and Janet was impressed with their skills and confidence with Glow.

Janet Rutterford: using Glow to support transition (2:27)Glowing across the curriculum at Glenwood High School

A cookbook on Janet’s transition work will be coming soon. The ‘how-to’ clips will include the basics of setting up and using Glow Meet.

Craft and Design Technology teacher, David Lumsden, attended one of the Glow Basics courses but has since concentrated on using Glow Learn. He and colleagues in his department find this ideal for classwork and class tests. They are also developing a S1 and S2 homework policy which will be entirely delivered through Glow Learn, potentially offering considerable savings in paper and duplicating costs.

David uses Glow Learn to create tests and assessments. A range of question types, including multiple-choice and short answer, can be used and most will be automatically marked. Progress records allow him to see a summary of the class’s performance on all questions. Individual pupil’s responses can also be viewed, marking reviewed and feedback given to the pupil.

David Lumsden: assessments in craft and design technology (2:37)Glowing across the curriculum at Glenwood High School

David comments that pupils’ response to Glow Learn have been very positive and the hand-in rate for tests and homework has been much higher than previously.

More information on David’s work, including ‘how-to’ video clips on Glow Learn will follow shortly.

Kayleigh Brown teaches History at Glenwood and has used Glow extensively with her fourth year class to prepare them for the Standard Grade exam. For the prelims Kayleigh has uploaded PowerPoint files and revision mind maps – resources that pupils had used in class and were familiar, but uploading them to Glow ensured that pupils had access for homework and during holidays. Kayleigh has also shared these resources with other History teachers and departments through the Fife ‘Study Support’ Glow Group.

Kayleigh Brown: Standard Grade History (6:36) Glowing across the curriculum at Glenwood High School

Kayleigh asks her pupils to submit their homework through the Glow Group. She created a ‘Upload your homework’ web part, which allows a pupil to hand in their work but not to see the work of any other pupil. Kayleigh can see all the work her pupils submit, review it, add notes to it, and give feedback. Both teacher and pupils have found this invaluable. Using a survey to gather feedback from pupils about their performance in their prelim was also a big hit with Kayleigh. The graphical summary allowed here a rapid overview of where pupils felt they needed help, and viewing individual responses allowed her to see any private concerns about their progress which pupils had expressed.

A cookbook providing more detail on Kayleigh’s Glow Group can be found here. This includes video clips showing how to create a homework web part.

Drama teacher, Clare Todd, comments that she “was really excited when I first heard about Glow. It was exactly what I’d been looking for.” Clare wanted pupils to be able to access learning resources at home, use a forum to ask questions and discuss what they’d been doing in class. She knew that she didn’t have the skills to create her own website, so Glow’s arrival in the school really enthused her. She now has a Drama Glow Group accessible to all pupils in S1-S6 to give a flavour of what classes are doing in lessons and on trips. There are also separate Glow Groups for S1, S2, Standard Grade, Higher and Advanced Higher classes.

Clare Todd: Drama Glow Groups – part 1 (7:14)Glowing across the curriculum at Glenwood High School

Clare Todd: Drama Glow Groups – part 2 (2:29) Glowing across the curriculum at Glenwood High School

Like Kayleigh, she asks pupils to submit homework and makes use of surveys for self-evaluations. She’s recently been introduced to Glow Learn by colleagues in other departments in the school and sees this as her next step, as it provides better options when asking pupils for personal responses, and will be easier to monitor and record pupils’ progress.

The cookbook describing Clare’s work in more detail can be found here. The ‘how-to’ videos show how to create and use surveys.

Next steps

Dave Dawson

The use of Glow at Glenwood has grown very rapidly over just a few months – thanks to the hard work of teaching staff and to those responsible for creating the accounts. Glow is becoming well embedded in the curriculum: it’s not viewed as an adjunct, but a tool to be used, when appropriate, to enhance learning and teaching.

The challenge now is to continue to develop. In the new academic year, each department has been asked to have a Glow representative and for Glow to be included in development plans.

Dave Dawson: next stages of Glow development at Glenwood (0:36) Glowing across the curriculum at Glenwood High School