Noticeboard – Click here to enlarge

Alison Smith, P7 teacher at Highlanders Academy Primary School in Inverclyde, was looking for an after school responsibility and looked at taking an ICT club. Given that she’s also the Glow Mentor at Highlanders she had also planned to find a purposeful use of Glow and this seemed like the ideal opportunity to team these up. She also had in mind that each school in Inverclyde has to produce a 4 page spread in the Greenock Telegraph and this responsibility usually sits with the P7s. She had worked with a previous P7 to produce a paper version of a newspaper which the pupils had really enjoyed. Alison thought it would be ideal to undertake something with the ICT Club, using Glow and also getting them ready for the spread in the Greenock Telegraph. The Highlanders’ Highlights Glow Group was born.

In this cookbook, we will find out:
• What the Highlanders’ Highlights Glow Group looks like
• How the pages and web parts were used to become a newspaper

Context
The Club started earlier this year and the pupils were told what kind of things the group would be working on and asked who would like to be a part of this. Alison met initially with the pupils in the ICT Club to discuss what the features of using Glow as a newspaper would look like. They planned together what pages would be required in the Glow Group. They then opened up the planning process to involve the rest of the school and the nine members of the Editorial Team went around all the classes conducting a survey, asking all the pupils and teachers what they would like to see in the group. Many of the suggestions from the rest of the school were what the Editorial Team had already planned.

Editorial Team Working – Click here to enlarge

The pupils then got down to work planning their first edition. They decided that interviews would be a good idea for a regular feature. For example, if there was a netball competition on then the pupils would go and interview the classroom assistant responsible for taking the netball team. They would interview someone if there was something interesting going on in the school or generally pick a random member of staff in the school to interview. There are also a couple of articles which the Team will write for every edition on things which have happened or are about to happen in the school. The very first edition contained a feature introducing the Editorial Team themselves. They chatted about why they had volunteered for the team and what they were hoping to learn from working on Highlanders’ Highlights.

Once the team had put the first edition together they went around every class introducing it to the pupils and the teachers. The teachers were then aware of the structure of the editions. This would make it easier for the Editorial Team every week to ask for submissions, such as homework tips.

Parental Involvement
The school felt that it would be easy to involve the parents of the older pupils in the school with Highlanders’ Highlights as they would naturally log on and show their parents from home but they wanted to find a way of making sure they were involving the parents of the younger pupils. They decided to run a workshop for parents to get them involved and let them have their say. As a parent would come in, a member of the Editorial Team would go and get that parent’s child and get them to log into Glow and be part of showing their own parent through the group. The school had a lot of good feedback from this event, especially from the parents of the younger pupils.

Parental Comments – click here to enlarge

They decided to get parental feedback at the workshop and build this into improving Highlanders’ Highlights. Parents asked for several sections to be added, the annual holiday list, the school menu, when the gym kit days were for each class, homework tips for each class and the school newsletter being added to Glow. Highlanders’ Highlights was a great way to simply get parents more involved in the school.

Enterprise Showcase
Inverclyde runs an Enterprise Showcase each year and Alison was asked to present on what they were doing at Highlanders. Highlanders’ Highlights was a perfect example of what was being looked for in the remit and they were already doing it and making a great job of it so it made sense to showcase this use of Glow to the rest of Inverclyde. It was the perfect opportunity to get the pupils on the Editorial Team involved and let them share their enthusiasm. The teachers were able to stand back at the event and allow the pupils to take everyone through what they were doing and encourage them to log into Glow and leave a comment on it.

Ingredients

Click here to enlarge

The Noticeboard
This page acts like the front page of a newspaper with taster items for what’s in a particular edition. The News web part contains headlines of the different articles to be found. There is a picture of the Editorial Team and a What’s On This Week? web part letting everyone know what’s coming up in the school. There are also web parts containing the Question of the Week and Celebrating Success with highlights from each class.

Discussions
The discussions page spans all of the issues and provides useful feedback from all of the teachers and the classes. There is also feedback here, left by the parents during the workshop and from teachers across the authority from the Enterprise Showcase. Replies have been typed by the child of a parent or by the Editorial Team during the showcase event with the poster’s name being given.

Documents

click to enlarge

The documents page contains a folder for every edition of Highlanders’ Highlights. The Editorial Team upload their articles into these folders and leave news items to point people to particular articles.

Homework Tips
This was a page which was requested when the Editorial Team were doing their research. It contains information for pupils and parents on the days gym kit will be required and a section for each class reminding them what they are working on for homework at the moment. It also has a web links web part with links to suggested external educational websites which parents have found particularly helpful.

Fun Page

The Fun Page – click to enlarge

This page is divided into an upper and a lower school with puzzles created by the Editorial Team from external websites and contained in a text editor web part.

Menu
The menu page contains an image of the school menu from the Inverclyde Council website. This allows parents to view information and decide whether their child will be having the school menu or a packed lunch on any given day. This was a page requested by the parents after the Parents Workshop.

School Holidays
This is Megan, on the Editorial Team’s favourite page! It contains information from the Inverclyde Council website to remind pupils, teachers and parents of when the holidays are coming up. This was another page requested by the parents.

Newsletter
The final page of the group and another one to be requested by the parents is the Newsletter page. A text editor web part contains the most recent issue of the school newsletter meaning that parents don’t have to worry if  they have mislaid it.

What did Alison and the pupils need to do to allow for the Highlanders’ Highlights Glow Group to work as a newspaper?

• A Glow Group built at school level
• Set Reader with Discussions membership for all teachers and pupils in the school
• Set the Editorial Team up with Administrator membership of the group
• Add extra pages for Homework Tips, Fun Page, Menu, School Holidays and Newsletter
• Add Folders for every edition into the Document Library and upload articles into these folders
• Make use of the News web part on the Noticeboard for headlines for each edition
• Change the title of the What’s On web part and use this for school events
• The Editorial Team had to delete old News and What’s On items every week
• Add text editor web parts for the Question of the Week and Celebrating Success and edit these every week
• Add an image of the Editorial Team to the Noticeboard page

Recipe
The first video below acts as a virtual tour by Alison of the Highlanders’ Highlights Glow Group. The videos that then follow show how some of the elements within the Group can be recreated. Details are:

Tour of the Highlanders Highlights Glow Group (4:26)
Highlanders’ Highlights School Magazine in Glow

How to change the title of the What’s On web part (1:18)
Highlanders’ Highlights School Magazine in Glow

How to add text editor web parts for the Question of the week and Celebrating Success (4:42)
Highlanders’ Highlights School Magazine in Glow

How to add folders to the document store for the editions (1:11)
Highlanders’ Highlights School Magazine in Glow

How to upload articles in the folders in the document store (1:28)
Highlanders’ Highlights School Magazine in Glow

How to add a new page for Homework Tips (1:37)
Highlanders’ Highlights School Magazine in Glow

How to edit the information in the Homework Tips text editor web part (2:00)
Highlanders’ Highlights School Magazine in Glow

How to add images and text into the text editor web parts on the Fun Page (2:37)
Highlanders’ Highlights School Magazine in Glow

Impact
Mairi Nock, DHT at the school notes how the pupils themselves really bonded as the Editorial Team. She comments on how they have all found different aspects within the production of Highlanders’ Highlights which they have strengths in. She speaks about them at the Enterprise Showcase:

“They appear to be quite quiet but when you listen to what they’re saying, they know exactly what they’re doing and they know why they’re doing it. They sat there with a lot of staff from other local schools [at the Enterprise Showcase] and went through exactly what they do, and what they do on a weekly basis and it was great. They had staff from all sorts of schools who posted very very positive responses.”

Enterprsie Showcase Comments – click to enlarge

A member of staff at Port Glasgow High School was so impressed that she came to Highlanders with her school’s system of positive response slips for each of the four pupils and an Easter Egg for each of them. She said this was because the pupils had taught her so much about Glow.

Parents were very positive about the project when they were involved in a workshop to allow the pupils to introduce it to them. One parent in particular had been very pleased about information regarding external educational websites that she was always looking to use with her child at home. Having the links available on the Highlanders’ Highlights Glow Group suited her in particular. In terms of the Eco nature of the project, the school had just got its first Green Flag last year and a lot of the parents were saying they were happier to have less bits of paper having to go home. The Highlanders’ Highlights really hit the mark as far as this was concerned.

Highlanders’ Highlights also became a great “hook” to get staff onto Glow. It became the only way of getting on with your class, as another teacher, and having a look at what was happening in the school and being able to make suggestions for homework tips etc. Classes and teachers were also asked to post responses to discussion boards and so everyone could become involved. As Mairi Nock notes,

“it’s been a learning curve for everybody in the school.”

The pupils are obviously very proud of what they’re doing. Chloe tells us,

“I thought it would be very good to do because we weren’t doing it for ourselves, we were doing it for the school.”

Megan adds to this,

“[I wanted to be involved] because we’re eco-friendly”

Megan tells us,

“my parents are really proud of me because they know I have a lot of responsibility and they always go online and see how it has turned out.”

Chloe echoes this,

“that’s the same with my mum and dad. They say they are very proud of me and that they want me to become a journalist because I write articles.”

Alison points out that as time went on, after the initial edition it has really been over to the pupils and they have been responsible for directing and putting everything together. It takes hardly any reminders to keep them on track.

Alison Smith speaks about the Highlanders’ Highlights – Part 1 (4:17)
Highlanders’ Highlights School Magazine in Glow

Alison Smith speaks about the Highlanders’ Highlights – Part 2 (2:59)
Highlanders’ Highlights School Magazine in Glow

Mairi Nock, DHT, speaks about the impact of the project (2:12)
Highlanders’ Highlights School Magazine in Glow

Mairi Nock speaks about parental involvement (2:31)
Highlanders’ Highlights School Magazine in Glow

Mairi Nock speaks about staff involvement (0:59)
Highlanders’ Highlights School Magazine in Glow

Chloe, Chloe, Megan and Jason talk about Highlanders’ Highlights – Part 1 (3:10)
Highlanders’ Highlights School Magazine in Glow

Chloe, Chloe, Megan and Jason talk about Highlanders’ Highlights – Part 2 (3:32)
Highlanders’ Highlights School Magazine in Glow

Through their involvement in the Highlanders’ Highlights Glow Group, the editorial team have been actively engaging with a range of Curriculum for Excellence Experiences and Outcomes. This range will depend upon many factors, namely, which roles the different pupils took within the team and which web parts were used. Amongst others, they include:

HWB 2-10a – I recognise that each individual has a unique blend of abilities and needs. I contribute to making my school community one which values individuals equally and is a welcoming place for all.

HWB 2-11a – I make full use of and value the opportunities I am given to improve and manage my learning and, in turn, I can help to encourage learning and confidence in others.

LIT 2-01a - I regularly select and listen to or watch texts which I enjoy and find interesting, and I can explain why I prefer certain sources.

I regularly select subject, purpose, format and resources to create texts of my choice.

LIT 2-06a – I can select ideas and relevant information, organise these in an appropriate way for my purpose and use suitable vocabulary for my audience.

LIT 2-22a – In both short and extended texts, I can use appropriate punctuation, vary my sentence structures and divide my work into paragraphs in a way that makes sense to my reader.

LIT 2-24a – I consider the impact that layout and presentation will have and can combine lettering, graphics and other features to engage my reader.

TCH 2-03b - Throughout all my learning, I can use search facilities of electronic sources to access and retrieve information, recognising the importance this has in my place of learning, at home and in the workplace.

TCH 2-04b – I can create, capture and manipulate sounds, text and images to communicate experiences, ideas and information in creative and engaging ways.

Tags to further Outcomes can be seen at the bottom of this page.

Context
One element of Stuart’s role is to bring together the ICT co-ordinators for the Authority’s 8 Secondary schools. As part of this remit, Stuart arranges quarterly meetings for the co-ordinators to enable them to share ideas and keep up to date with new initiatives, policies and resources. More often than not, the meetings have not been well attended by the co-ordinators, although not through a lack of willingness. Some have been unable to attend due to conflicting appointments whilst others have been unable to get out of school due to lack of availability of class cover. This has made it harder for Stuart to keep all schools equally up to date.

With schools facing increasing demands in staffing and budgets, Stuart felt that this problem would only be likely to worsen and so decided to use Glow as a way to try to combat the issues facing staff trying to get out of school for the ICT Co-ordinator meetings.

Stuart decided to hold the group’s most recent meeting via Glow Meet. He explains why in the following video clip:

Stuart Lennie: Why we held the meeting via using Glow Meet (1:16)
Maximising time and resources: using Glow Meet for Local Authority Meetings

Stuart emailed the Co-ordinators to tell them the date and time of the meeting, then one week prior to it he uploaded the meeting agenda, minute and other documents to be discussed, into the Secondary ICT Co-ordinators Glow Group. This enabled all 8 Co-ordinators to have access to them ahead of time.

Stuart tells us about this:

Stuart Lennie: Using the Glow Group to share meeting documents (0:18)
Maximising time and resources: using Glow Meet for Local Authority Meetings

For the meeting itself, each teacher remained in their own school and joined the meeting via the Glow Meet web part within the same Glow Group, using their web cams. They were able to take part in the meeting as normal, talk with one another, share information and view the documents being discussed, as Stuart uploaded these to the shared whiteboard within the Glow Meet meeting room.

Stuart recorded the Glow Meet session.
He then embedded it into a Text Editor web part within the Glow Group, making it accessible to all members. This served two purposes: It was still not possible for all 8 coordinators to attend the meeting, despite it taking place online. Those not present no longer have to rely on the summarised minute to know learn about what took place during the meeting, they can watch the entire meeting at a time convenient to them and see the full content. Also, there is a full, permanent record of what was discussed, avoiding any doubt or misunderstanding.

Stuart talks about recording the Glow Meets in the following video:

Stuart Lennie: Recording the Glow Meet sessions (0:35)
Maximising time and resources: using Glow Meet for Local Authority Meetings

Ingredients
Stuart did not need much to be able to hold the virtual meeting.
He needed:
- A Glow Group at Local Authority level to enable teachers from all eight schools to easily access it
- To make all of the ICT Co-ordinators members of the Glow Group.
- Document stores to host the agenda, minutes and other documents
- To add the Glow Meet web part to the Glow Group and create a meeting room
- A web cam, microphone and speakers/headphones. The other people attending the meeting also required these.

Recipe

Let’s have a brief look first of all at the Glow Group where the Glow Meet was held for the Falkirk ICT co-ordinators:

Falkirk Secondary ICT co-ordinators Support Glow Group tour (4:32)
Maximising time and resources: using Glow Meet for Local Authority Meetings
In the following videos we will find out how to replicate some of the elements listed above.

How to set up a Glow Meet in a Glow Group (5:36)
Maximising time and resources: using Glow Meet for Local Authority Meetings
How to join and take part in a Glow Meet (3:38)
Maximising time and resources: using Glow Meet for Local Authority Meetings
How to use the video, audio and chat facility within a Glow Meet meeting room (6:19)
Maximising time and resources: using Glow Meet for Local Authority Meetings
How to use the shared whiteboard in a Glow Meet meeting room (8:25)
Maximising time and resources: using Glow Meet for Local Authority Meetings
How to record a Glow Meet (2:09)
Maximising time and resources: using Glow Meet for Local Authority Meetings
How to play back a previously recorded Glow Meet (3:22)
Maximising time and resources: using Glow Meet for Local Authority Meetings
How to embed a video hosted online into the Text Editor web part (14:08)
Maximising time and resources: using Glow Meet for Local Authority Meetings
How to create a new Document Store (5:36)
Maximising time and resources: using Glow Meet for Local Authority Meetings

Impact

Stuart feels that there are great advantages to holding meetings via Glow Meet.
He talks about these in the following video:

Stuart Lennie: Advantages of holding meetings via Glow Meet (0:56)
Maximising time and resources: using Glow Meet for Local Authority Meetings

Feedback from those participating in the meetings has also been very positive and this has encouraged Stuart to hold future meetings virtually. He talks about this:

Stuart Lennie: Feedback from meeting attendees (0:27)
Maximising time and resources: using Glow Meet for Local Authority Meetings

In fact, it seems to be so advantageous that Stuart is now working with others within Falkirk Council to find out how they too might benefit from using Glow Meet for their meetings and how it may help maximise resources:

Stuart Lennie: Next steps (0:21)
Maximising time and resources: using Glow Meet for Local Authority Meetings

In all, using Glow Meet for the Secondary ICT Co-ordinator meetings has been and extremely positive experience and one which has delivered many benefits. Time and money have been saved by cutting out the need for travel; cover requirements have been reduced as there has been no need to cover anything other than the duration of the meeting (no travel time to be covered); paper (and therefore money) is being saved as there is less need to print out copies of minutes, agendas and documents; no catering has had to be supplied, again saving money.

Staff, who were previously not able, have been able to attend the meetings – even if just for part – as they do not need to travel. One of the ICT Co-ordinators was previously unable to attend due to having other meetings immediately before and after the ICT meeting, meaning he could not travel to Stuart’s meeting. He can now join via Glow Meet and take part, whilst still attending his other meetings. Another teacher commented that it was extremely advantageous to be able to start her class at the beginning of the period, which she was unable to do previously when she had to be out of school to attend the meeting.

Stuart hopes that these and other benefits can be extended to other areas of the Local Authority’s Education Department too.

Laura Gingell is the Curriculum for Excellence Development Officer for West Lothian Council, these responsibilities take up 0.5 of her timetable. For the rest of her week she is a Principal Teacher at Windyknowe Primary School in West Lothian.

Context

Within the West Lothian Curriculum for Excellence Team, each Cluster has two Curriculum for Excellence Development Post holders, one primary and one secondary. Laura set up the CfE Development Glow Group as an area which allows for sharing between the Development Post Holders. However, it is also functions as an area all teachers can access and learn from the practice in every cluster. Each cluster is represented by a page tab in the Glow Group. However, the Glow Group also contains information on page tabs such as which schools in West Lothian are involved in piloting the National Assessment Resource; information for in-service days and Building Your Curriculum information. This Cookbook will focus on the cluster page tabs.

Click on the video to find out why Laura set up the Glow Group and what information was in it. (0.56)
Supporting Curriculum for Excellence in a Local Authority

What does a Cluster Page within the West Lothian CfE Development Glow Group look like?

Contact Details

A Text Editor Web Part was used to show photos of the Cluster CfE Development Post holders, their names, schools and email addresses.

Document Library

Within the Document Library teachers and Development Post holders could share information such as action plans, CfE Newsletters, minutes from meetings and any other CfE documents relating to their Cluster.

Web Links

This web part was used to link to the websites of the Cluster Schools. It also has links to specific Glow Groups for that Cluster .

News

Each Cluster page has a News Web Part, so the CfE Development Post holders could keep the teachers within their Cluster up to date with any news, for example events, updates, etc.  

Ingredients

What did Laura need to set up the West Lothian CfE Development Glow Group?

1. Glow Group at a Local Authority Level
2. Several Pages
3. Text Editor Web Parts
4. Document Library Web Parts
5. Web Links Web Parts
6. News Web Parts

Recipe

In the following videos, we will take a look one of the Cluster pages within the West Lothian CfE Development Glow Group and find out how to replicate its structure and content.

What does a Cluster page within the Glow group look like? (1.13)
Supporting Curriculum for Excellence in a Local Authority

How to add a new page. (0.46)
Supporting Curriculum for Excellence in a Local Authority

How to add an image to a Text Editor web part. (2.36)
Supporting Curriculum for Excellence in a Local Authority

How to add two images to a Text Editor web part. (3.01)
Supporting Curriculum for Excellence in a Local Authority

How to create a Document Library and add a folder. (1.49)
Supporting Curriculum for Excellence in a Local Authority

How to create a Web Links web part and change the style. (2.12)
Supporting Curriculum for Excellence in a Local Authority

How to create a News web part. (2.05)
Supporting Curriculum for Excellence in a Local Authority

Impact

The intended impact of this Glow Group was to improve communication between colleagues within West Lothian and Laura feels this has been achieved. After the initial set up of the Glow Group, the responsibility was handed over to the CfE Development Post holders, so they selected the relevant information to display on their page.

Listen to Laura explain how the Glow Group improved communication. (0.30)
Supporting Curriculum for Excellence in a Local Authority

Listen to Laura explain who was responsible for the Glow Group. (0.33)
Supporting Curriculum for Excellence in a Local Authority

Winning Spring Read 2010 Logo – click here to enlarge

Ross McGregor and Janice McGill are school librarians at James Hamilton Academy and Auchinleck Academy respectively in East Ayrshire. Currently Ross is seconded as Glow Development Officer in East Ayrshire.

For the last 4 years they have been responsible for running a very successful author event called Spring Read. This year they teamed up with Live Literature Scotland to give groups of pupils from every secondary school the opportunity to meet one of five award winning authors.  With the assistance of East Ayrshire Library Services each school hosted one author visit and invited pupils from neighbouring secondary schools to join in to promote both literacy and co-operation between the schools.

Each individual school also ran events celebrating reading and writing throughout March. These included activities such as quiz heats for the Readers’ Cup, book awards or ‘Book Oscars’, book swaps, book fairs, displays and competitions. An inter-school competition to design a logo for the festival was run and was judged by the School Librarians with a pupil in Auchinleck Academy winning this year.

As an added feature, this year Ross and Janice decided to use a Glow Group to help them plan and promote the event. In this Cookbook we will look at the work Janice and Ross did to put the Spring Read 2010 Glow Group together.

In this cookbook, we will find out:
• What the Spring Read 2010 Glow Group looks like
• How the pages and web parts were used to feature the authors
• How an Animoto video (video slideshow made from images) was put together and will be used in the group in following years

Context

Spring Read 2010 – click here to enlarge

Some of the school librarians had received training on Glow as part of electing to become East Ayrshire Glow Champions. However, they held a training event back in December 2009 to level the playing field and make sure all school librarians had some Glow expertise. At this event it seemed like a natural step and a good fit to have a Glow Group for the Spring Read 2010. Initially the school librarians could use it as a way of becoming familiar with Glow and sharing information. However, they saw the potential of opening up the group to teaching staff and pupils as the project progressed.

At the meeting in December Ross set up the Spring Read 2010 Group with only the Noticeboard page developed. Ongoing plans were made to set up each author page and a discussion. From this they then decided to have a page for the logo competition which Janice looked after. Although the original idea for the group came from this meeting it was developed over the course of the next couple of months.

Ingredients

The Glow Group pages – click here to enlarge

The Noticeboard
The Noticeboard page contains the winning logo for the event in an image web part. It also has a text editor web part with details of the authors to be involved in the school visits. A What’s On web part has been renamed at the bottom of the page to be Programme and contains information on all the visits which took place. After the festival had taken place Janice put together a short Animoto video, showcasing the event. This will be useful when the event takes place next year.

Author Pages

Cathy MacPhail Page – click here to enlarge

There are pages for every author taking part in the event. These pages follow a pattern of giving some brief information about the author in a text editor web part, with images of them and of book jackets, along with a web links web part linking to an author website. In some of the pages a page viewer web part has been used to display the website on the Glow page.

Discussions
A discussions web part has a few starters in it but Janice and Ross feel that both Glow and the festival need to grow in popularity before this is more widely used.

Documents
At the moment this document library contains the flyer Janice had put together for the event.

Logo Competition

click here to enlarge

This page previously contained details about entering the competition but now displays the winning logo with details of the winning pupil.

What did Janice and Ross need to do to build activities around the author event and give pupils and teachers access to the Spring Read 2010 Glow Group?

• A Glow Group built initially at one school (in future years this will be cited at the local authority level)
• Set membership for S1 – S3 pupils and a range of teachers and school librarians from across the authority
• Build a page with information about every author involved in the event
• Make use of a Discussions web part
• Make use of the Documents library for the event flyer
• Build a page for the logo competition
• Use images from the event to make an Animoto video and embed this into the Noticeboard page

Recipe

The first two videos below act as a virtual tour by Janice and Ross of the Spring Read 2010 Glow Group. The videos that then follow show how some of the elements within the Group can be recreated. Details are:

Tour of the Noticeboard and Logo Competition pages (3:22)
Spring Read Project in East Ayrshire

Tour of the author pages, discussions and documents (4:20)
Spring Read Project in East Ayrshire

Janice’s Animoto video (0:47)
Spring Read Project in East Ayrshire

Adding pages to the Glow Group (1:40)
Spring Read Project in East Ayrshire

Building an Author page part 1 – Adding an image web part and using Cooltext (3:35)
Spring Read Project in East Ayrshire

Building an Author page part 2 – Adding more images and a text editor (4:23)
Spring Read Project in East Ayrshire

Building an Author page part 3 – Creating a new web links web part (4:06)
Spring Read Project in East Ayrshire

Building an Author page part 4 – adding and working with a page viewer web part (3:03)
Spring Read Project in East Ayrshire

Getting the Noticeboard ready part 1 – closing unwanted web parts and adding new ones (3:30)
Spring Read Project in East Ayrshire

Getting the Noticeboard ready part 2 – adding information to the web parts (4:54)
Spring Read Project in East Ayrshire

Producing an Animoto video (5:43)
Spring Read Project in East Ayrshire

Embedding a link to an Animoto video in Glow (1:39)
Spring Read Project in East Ayrshire

Impact

Although, this year, the membership and activity within the group was effectively limited to the school librarians, Ross sees the use of the Glow Group for the festival as having great potential. He points out that there are so many pupils involved in the author events and if all of these pupils go back to classes and use functionality like the Glow Forums then this could work really well.

Janice McGill and Ross McGregor speak about the background to the Spring Read Festival (4:27)
Spring Read Project in East Ayrshire

Janice and Ross speak about using Glow for Spring Read 2010 (3:23)
Spring Read Project in East Ayrshire

Future Plans for the use of Glow Meet as part of the event (0:46)

Spring Read Project in East Ayrshire

Ross and Janice speak about IPR on promotional materials (1:21)
Spring Read Project in East Ayrshire

Click to enlarge image

Overview

Gerry Munro is Head Teacher of Longhaugh Primary School in Dundee. As part of Longhaugh’s process of continuous improvement, Gerry set out to develop a Glow Group aimed at improving communications within the school. In this cookbook, Gerry will talk us through how the Longhaugh Staff Area Glow Group has become the first point of contact for staff when: looking for important information and documentation, sharing ideas, collaborating on planning activities, showcasing examples of practice or discussing where to go for the end of term lunch!

Video Clips

Ingredients

What Gerry used to develop the Longhaugh Staff Area Glow Group:

1. A Glow Group
2. Multiple Discussion Board web parts
3. Page Viewer web parts
4. Multiple Documents web parts

Impact

The Longhaugh Staff Area Glow Group has achieved Gerry’s aim of becoming :

A one stop centre for crucial information and staff development.

On a daily basis, staff access the group to:

• view administrative information
• share ideas
• collaborate on planning
• participate in CPD activity
• showcase learning and teaching practice from the classroom

In the video clip below, Gerry comments on how the Glow Group has become integral to the day-to-day running of the school.

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

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

Context

North Lanarkshire Glow Support – click to enlarge

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

Sharing Glow Groups Nationally

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

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

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

Click here to enlarge

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

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

Curricular Pages – Click here to enlarge

The Showcase Group contains the following pages:

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

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

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

Visitors Page

Visitors Page – Click here to enlarge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to create new web links web parts (2:08)
North Lanarkshire Glow Showcase

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Curricular Focus

Showcase Group Pages – click here to enlarge

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

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

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

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

Customisation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharing Glow Groups Nationally

All Glow and no action? “Can GLOW be used as a purposeful learning and teaching tool to increase participation and attainment levels in Literacy? Using the same stimulus, how do the findings compare between two Primary Six classes in Dumfries and Galloway with different socio-economic catchment areas?”

Click here to enlarge

These were the title and the original aims of Lindsay Sim and Barbara Chierici’s Probationer Mini-Research Project running in the year 2008/2009. Literacy had been a focus on the School Improvement Plans at both Calside and Hecklegirth Primary Schools and therefore was an ideal curricular area to develop. Literacy was also a very important area identified on Dumfries and Galloway’s Service Improvement Plan. Staff development and cluster days had targeted this and Lindsay and Barbara believed the introduction of Glow, could be used as a stimulus to enhance literacy at both schools. It was very important to the project that Literacy was initially identified before Lindsay and Barbara decided to use Glow. Glow was identified as the best way the teachers could see of introducing a collaborative element to the project. They wanted more collaboration than the teachers simply staying in touch; they wanted the pupils to be able to collaborate with each other. Glow provided this purposeful link for both the pupils and the teachers. The teachers were keen that Glow could allow them to focus on the main aims in Dumfries and Galloway of

“attainment, achievement and participation”.

In a series of Cookbooks we will look at the work Lindsay and Barbara undertook for the project and the Glow Group they built to facilitate this.

In this cookbook, we will find out:
• What the P6 Literacy Project Glow Group looks like
• How Lindsay and Barbara put together the project
• What they feel the impact of the project has been

Context

Click to enlarge

Glow had only just been introduced to the schools in Dumfries and Galloway and Lindsay and Barbara thought it was something they could develop with their classes and use for their own CPD at the same time. They wanted to use Glow as a learning and teaching tool to help improve literacy in their schools. For the pupils, the excitement was very much about using Glow and with the pupils the teachers played on this and played down their main aim of improving literacy. They knew, through the pupils’ motivation for the tasks, that literacy skills were definitely being improved as part of the project.

The first phase of the project centred on writing with the focus shifting in the second phase to reading, listening and talking.

Before Lindsay and Barbara introduced Glow to the two classes they used a traffic light system to survey their pupils about whether they would like to take part in a Burns Poetry competition being run within the authority. They were shocked by the results which they believed was an accurate measure of the pupils’ enthusiasm for literacy. Across the 2 primary 6 classes only 26% said they would like to take part, 60% said they wouldn’t like to and 14% weren’t sure.

Collaboration

The Glow Group pages – Click here to enlarge

To introduce the pupils to Glow they took a space topic and began some joint work. They matched each pupil from one school up with a pupil in the other school and they had access to their “e-buddy’s” email address. However, most of the time they used the discussion web part in Glow to communicate. They initially were set the target of talking about things they had learned in the space project and getting to know their e-buddy. This was deliberately kept very informal by Barbara and Lindsay to start with. Both teachers uploaded some photographs of what they were doing in the space topic and also put some web links to information and games there for the pupils to access. The teachers also put up discussion starters to get the pupils going. This gave them prompts to inform their discussions with each other. This was their taster of Glow and the teachers believed this really captured the pupils’ interest.

Barbara comments on this, “they were so excited to have another P6 pupil to make contact with in another town.”

Sometimes it was quite difficult to get computer suite time in their schools to allow the pupils to get onto Glow and contact their e-buddy. Lindsay and Barbara were very careful on the pairings of children they made between the 2 classes. In Lindsay’s class she had 6 Polish pupils, 2 of whom needed a lot of support with their English.

Poetry sneaks in!

One of the pupil's poems – Click to enlarge

With the teachers having in mind that their objective was the Burns Poetry competition they started to introduce this through the ‘back door’ by getting them to write poems about space. They began to introduce different types of poetry format with Cinquain, Haiku and Tanka, metaphor and simile. In order to improve the strength of their link with their e-buddy the teachers asked them to publish their poem on Glow and to peer assess each other’s work. Another Cookbook on this project will give more detail about the peer assessment element.

Peer Assessment on poetry – Click to enlarge

The pupils were then asked again about entering the Burns Poetry competition and told that this would be done in collaboration with their e-buddy. This time, only a short while after first being asked the numbers were completely different with almost 100% saying that they were keen to take part. Building upon the way they had learned to work with each other ,the teachers began to get them working on poems for the competition. This was going to be the end of the project but Lindsay and Barbara thought it worked so well and that the pupils had enjoyed it so much that they decided to extend it. Both Lindsay and Barbara could see that literacy levels in their classes were definitely improving through this process. They felt that the level of participation and enthusiasm they were experiencing from the pupils warranted the continuation of the project.

On the Radio!
At this point, Create, the creative Arts Team in Dumfries and Galloway contacted the teachers. They were particularly interested in what they were doing with Glow and asked to come along and record some audio of the pupils for a local radio show on West Sound. All pupils were over the moon to participate in this, including a pupil with a communication disorder, who surprised Barbara with his willingness to take part.

Project Extension

Extending the Project – click to enlarge

For the continuation of the project the teachers decided to take the focus away from writing and onto other aspects of literacy. They decided they would use the novel Wheels by Catherine MacPhail as the focus for the next section of the project. Initially they took a Writer’s Craft approach to this, stopping at the same point and asking the pupils to write the continuation of the next part of the story. The pupils would upload this onto Glow and then take part in further peer assessment with their e-buddies, adding another stage of the story and peer assessing this backwards and forwards.

Vokis

Using Vokis – click to enlarge

To work on talking and listening the classes worked on creating their own Voki and putting this onto Glow. This was the next step of introducing themselves to their e-buddy who they had only spoken to through email and discussion boards so far. Another Cookbook is available with a focus on this aspect of the project.

Glow Meet

Learning Intentions for Glow Meet – click to enlarge

With support from development officers in the local authority they decided that the next logical step would be to have a Glow Meet between the two classes. They felt it was the next natural step for the e-buddies to be able to see each other. They also wanted the pupils to have the experience of using more of the functionality within Glow. The Glow Meet was based on the novel study. Another Cookbook is available with a focus on this aspect of the project.

Survey

Lindsay and Barbara also used the survey tool within Glow to evaluate the literacy project. Another Cookbook is available with a focus on this aspect of the project.

Ingredients
In order to set up the Glow Group in the first place Lindsay and Barbara attended Glow 1,2 and 3, twilight sessions run by Dumfries and Galloway Glow Support team.

What did the teachers need to create within the Glow Group to allow the pupils to collaborate with each other?

• A local authority level Glow Group for the P6 Literacy Project
• Administrator membership for the 2 teachers involved
• Contributor membership for the P6 pupils
• A document library for uploading poems
• A poetry discussions web part
• Vokis created and uploaded onto the Group
• A Glow Meet web part
• Videos created and uploaded onto the Group
• Document web part with Writers’ Craft Task stories uploaded and commented on
• A Survey web part

Recipe
The videos below are part of a virtual tour by Barbara Cherichi and Lindsay Sim of the P6 Literacy Project collaborative Group. Details are:

The Noticeboard Tour (1:29)
All Glow and No Action? Background to a P6 Joint Literacy Project in Dumfries and Galloway

Tour of the Wheels, Meet Zone and Voki Pages (3:46)
All Glow and No Action? Background to a P6 Joint Literacy Project in Dumfries and Galloway

Tour of the Document Library and Discussion Board (3:30)
All Glow and No Action? Background to a P6 Joint Literacy Project in Dumfries and Galloway

Further How-To videos are available in the other Cookbooks on this project.

Impact
Both Barbara and Lindsay were very keen that their project was viewed as a Literacy project and not as an ICT project as other teachers might tend to view it.

They noted that the level of writing was definitely improving as part of the project:

Lindsay Sim, “I think when it’s that external person […] giving them that feedback and ways which they can improve that they were just falling over themselves to actually improve it. Then they were desperate for more feedback to come back, thinking, look, I’ve taken on your advice and improved it, what do you think now?”

What the teachers also found interesting is that the pupils took the collaboration outwith the school, often logging on from home and speaking to each other, contributing to the discussions and even coming up with poems at home. None of this process and the decisions the pupils were making were being directed by the teachers.

Barbara also felt that using Glow, for the teachers was so much easier than having to consult 32 different jotters for the pupils’ work.

“It’s good for teachers as well because you’ve got everything on the site. Glow makes it much easier for us as practioners.”

Glow Meet Assessment – Click to enlarge

“Their literacy skills developed immensely, not to mention their ICT skills. This was things they could not do before.” Lindsay Sim.

The teachers then used video cameras to record pupil evaluations of this whole process and upload these into the Group.

Wall display for the conference – Click here to enlarge

Lindsay and Barbara were asked to present on their project at the Probationers Conference in Dumfries and Galloway. It was almost unheard of to bring pupils along to this event and they had never been anywhere like this with hundreds of people there to hear what they had to say. The pupils were able to take questions from the audience about their learning. They took the whole thing in their stride and this speaks well of the confident learners they had been encouraged to become as part of the whole collaborative project.

Lindsay uses Glow with her current class in her new school, Newington Primary, in Annan. However, she feels what really drove forward the use of Glow and literacy gains for the pupils at Hecklegirth and Calside was the collaborative nature of the project. They feel that participation and attainment in all areas of literacy was improved for their pupils. All pupils participated fully in the project.

Lindsay notices that, “going back to our original aims of attainment, achievement and participation, we can categorically say that every child had achieved those 3 basic aims. I don’t think it would have been anywhere near as successful if we’d just done it individually and there wasn’t that collaboration and correspondence between us and the pupils.”

Barbara adds to this, “the children were motivated because of their e-buddies… We might have stopped at the end of the first phase if we were doing it on our own [without Glow].”

In the poetry competition a few of Barbara’s pupils came second and third and had their entries published in a book about the competition.

Their Glow Group is also frequently used in Glow training and support sessions in Dumfries and Galloway. They noted that it was difficult to move people to appreciating that all the evidence in terms of the project and the pupils’ work was online in the Glow Group. People were still looking for a lot of paper based evidence. Throughout the project Barbara and Lindsay often used Glow in their search for good practice across Scotland, keeping an eye out for national targeted news items and the like.

In terms of future planning and challenges Barbara and Lindsay would both like parents to be more involved in their children’s learning on Glow. They also worry about their previous pupils getting so much out of Glow and this not being followed up as the pupils move on to other teachers and secondary school.

The project ran in the 2008/2009 year and was whilst Barbara was at Calside and Lindsay was at Hecklegirth. Lindsay is now at Newington Primary, Annan and Barbara is at St Andrew’s RC Primary School, Dumfries.

The next section has various video clips where Lindsay and Barbara talk about various aspects of the set-up and impact of the project.

How the project came about (3:18)
All Glow and No Action? Background to a P6 Joint Literacy Project in Dumfries and Galloway

Setting up the first part of the project (4:37)
All Glow and No Action? Background to a P6 Joint Literacy Project in Dumfries and Galloway

Extending the project to another phase (1:51)
All Glow and No Action? Background to a P6 Joint Literacy Project in Dumfries and Galloway

Children presenting their project for the local radio programme (1:19)
All Glow and No Action? Background to a P6 Joint Literacy Project in Dumfries and Galloway

Evaluation the experience on video with the pupils (0:39)
All Glow and No Action? Background to a P6 Joint Literacy Project in Dumfries and Galloway

Presenting at the Probationers’ Conference (1:16)
All Glow and No Action? Background to a P6 Joint Literacy Project in Dumfries and Galloway

Summing up the project (1:57)
All Glow and No Action? Background to a P6 Joint Literacy Project in Dumfries and Galloway

Lindsay sums up the project for us,

“I think it was not that we did the poetry competition and not that we did [the novel] Wheels, it’s that we did it through Glow that we’ve got these results [where the pupils describe their literacy skills as being enhanced]. If we had done this without the technology side we wouldn’t have these results, at all. It just shows how literacy and ICT can work together as a purposeful learning and teaching tool.”

Identified Experiences and Outcomes –

Links to the other Cookbooks on the Project will be placed here as these Cookbooks are completed.

Through their involvement in the P6 Literacy Project Glow Group, the pupils have been actively engaging with a range of Curriculum for Excellence Experiences and Outcomes. They include:

Expressive Arts – Art and Design

EXA 2-02a – I have the opportunity to choose and explore an extended range of media and technologies to create images and objects, comparing and combining them for specific tasks.

Literacy and English – Listening and Talking

LIT 2-02a – When I engaged with others, I can respond in ways appropriate to my role, show that I value others’ contributions and use these to build on thinking.

LIT 2-03a - I can recognise how the features of spoken languages can help in communication, and I can use what I learn.

I can recognise different features of my own and others’ spoken language

LIT 2-04a – As I listen or watch, I can identify and discuss the purpose, main ideas and supporting detail contained within the text, and use this information for different purposes.

LIT 2-10a – I am developing confidence when engaging with others within and beyond my place of learning.  I can communicate in a clear, expressive way and I am learning to select and organise resources independently.

Literacy and English – Reading

LIT 2-16a – To show my understanding across different areas of learning, I can identify and consider the purpose and main ideas of a text and use supporting detail.

LIT 2-19a -I can:

• discuss structure, characterisation and/or setting
• recognise the relevance of the writer’s theme and how this relates to my own and others’ experiences.
• discuss the writer’s style and other features appropriate to genre.

Literacy and English – Writing

LIT 2-20a - I enjoy creating texts of my choice and I regularly select subject, purpose, format and resources to suit the needs of my audience.

LIT 2-24a – I consider the impact that layout and presentation will have and can combine lettering, graphics and other features to engage my reader.

LIT 2-26a – By considering the type of text I am creating, I can select ideas and relevant information, organise these in an appropriate way for my purpose and use suitable vocabulary for my audience.

LIT 2-27a – I am learning to use language and style in a way which engages and/or influences my reader.

LIT 2-31a – Having explored the elements which writers use in different genres, I can use what I learn to create stories, poems and plays with an interesting and appropriate structure, interesting characters and/or settings which come to life.

Technologies – ICT to enhance learning

LIT 2-03a – 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.

LIT 2-03b – Throughout all my learning, I can use search facilities of electronic sources to access and retrieve information, recognise the importance this has in my place of learning, at home and in the work place.

LIT 2-04a – 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.

LIT 2-04b – I can create, capture and manipulate sounds, text and images to communicate experiences, ideas and information in creative and engaging ways.

Context

Allan Reid (formerly Moray Glow Development Officer) and I were looking for a way to give schools more autonomy in managing their Glow Accounts. As a result of a change as part of the ongoing Glow Refresh, we are now able to give staff in schools the ability to manage the passwords of other members of staff without assigning full Accounts Service Manger (ASM) permissions.

The Glow roll-out began in Moray in Spring 2009 and over the course of a year the vast majority of staff in schools in the authority had logged into Glow. As of June 2010, ASMs had been trained in only a small number of Moray schools so requests for staff Glow accounts to be unlocked and passwords reset were dealt with centrally. As Glow is being used more and more regularly by staff in Moray, the number of support calls about forgotten passwords or locked accounts was increasing and it was felt that that this could be managed in a more efficient way. The facility to assign members of staff in schools with the permission to manage other staff passwords became available and this was the ideal way to achieve our goal.

Ingredients

1. A Glow login
2. An authority or school ASM to assign the required permission
3. The names of individuals within an establishment to assign the permission to
4. The guide explaining how to manage staff passwords

Recipe

1. Contacting schools

The following correspondence was sent to all schools asking them to identify an individual, or multiple individuals, to be given the permission to manage the passwords of other staff members:

“As part of the ongoing Glow refresh we now have the ability to assign staff the right to unlock other staff Glow accounts and reset staff passwords. In the event of a staff member being locked out of Glow, forgetting their password, or having written it down incorrectly, this could be resolved easily by another member of staff at your school. Whilst staff can already reset pupil passwords, devolving the right to reset staff passwords will allow your school to become more autonomous in managing your Glow accounts.

These rights can be assigned to any number of people in your school although it might make sense for staff who have previous experience of using Glow to be thus empowered in the first instance. Suitable candidates might be a Glow Mentor, IT technician, administrator, senior manager or any member of teaching staff with well developed ICT skills.

If you would like a member or members of staff at your school to be able to manage other staff passwords, please forward their name(s) to us by…”

Once schools had replied, the details of each member of staff identified were added to a spreadsheet and the required permission assigned.

2. How do I assign the permission?

How schools in Moray manage staff Glow passwords

3. Guidance

An email was sent to each named person with a step-by-step guide, detailing how to manage staff passwords. The guidance can be found in the following document:

How to Unlock Staff Accounts and Reset Passwords

Guidance on how to reset pupil passwords was also sent as many staff did not know how to do this or that they had the required permission to do so. Click the following link to download this document:

How to Unlock Pupil Accounts and Reset Pupil Passwords

4. How to manage another staff member’s password

How schools in Moray manage staff Glow passwords

5. Other Associated Changes

Prior to this Glow change a ‘Change other user’s profile’ link could be accessed by all staff from the Glow Settings webpart on their Staff home and could be used to edit pupil profiles. Unless you have been given the new ‘Change other user’s password’ permission by your school or authority ASM, this link will no longer be visible.

To locate and edit a pupil profile, use the Change profile link in your Glow Settings Webpart as shown below:

Handy hint – To locate a member of staff or a pupil, use the advanced search to search by first name, last name and base establishment name.

Please refer to the document above for full guidance on how to do this.

Impact

The majority of schools in Moray have at least one member of staff who can manage other staff passwords. There have been very few support calls for Glow passwords to be reset or accounts to be unlocked so this has been a success.

Ross Watson, Glow Development Officer
M: +44 (0)787 2415354
E: R.Watson@LTScotland.org.uk
Learning and Teaching Scotland
The Optima, 58 Robertson Street, Glasgow, G2 8DU
Moving Education Forward – www.LTScotland.org.uk

Overview

Fiona Tato is a P2/1 teacher at Strachur Primary School in Argyll and Bute. At present the upper and middle school pupils have been actively using their class Glow Groups.

In this cookbook we will look at how Fiona and her class used Glow Meet to link to a webcam in a bird box, and how this developed into being a stimulus for an interdisciplinary project.

Context

In conjunction with the Strachur Primary School’s Green Flag Projects they received a bird box with a web cam from Generation Green. Initially the National Park Ranger, Jim Downie set up the web cam in the bird box which was displayed to the pupils on the class SMARTboard. Fiona then came up with the idea of having the web cam connected to Glow Meet, as this would allow the pupils to watch the bird box from home, and they could show their parents. Also it allowed all pupils in the school and Local Authority to become involved in this project. Fiona used this project as a stimulus for Literacy, Art and Science lessons.  The pupils also had a hide where they could go and watch the birds and take photos using a digital camera.

Click on the video to see a pupil talk about their bird watching hide. (0.38)
Strachur Birdwatchers

Click on the video to see one of the pupils show us where the bird box is located. (0.16)
Strachur Birdwatchers

Listen to Fiona tell us how the project started. (0.57)
Strachur Birdwatchers

Listen to Fiona explain why she decided to use Glow for this project. (1.15)
Strachur Birdwatchers

How was the Strachur Nestbuilders Glow Group set up?

There are a number of areas within this Glow Group:

Noticeboard

On this page there is a title for the Glow Group, which was uploaded using a Text Editor Web Part. There is a link to a Discussion Board, which was put on the Noticeboard to encourage visitors to the group to leave comments about what they had seen. The Noticeboard also contains the Glow Meet Web Part and a Document Store which gives advice on how to use Glow Meet.

What can you see?

This page contains a Discussion Board where visitors can leave comments about their observations during the Glow Meet. There is a link to this page on the Noticeboard.

Calendar

A Calendar web part is used on this page. This allowed Mrs Tato and the class to add key events so the class had a record of what happened, for example when the project started , the size of the chicks at various times, etc.

Strachur Primary

This page used Image Web Parts to display various Literacy and Art projects the pupils had taken part in during lessons.

This topic has covered many Early and First Level Curriculum for Excellence Experiences and Outcomes:

LIT 1-22a I can write independently, use appropriate punctuation and order and link my sentences in a way that makes sense. 

LIT 1-24a I can present my writing in a way that will make it legible and attractive for my reader, combining words, images and other features.

LIT 0-02a / ENG 0-03a As I listen and talk in different situations, I am learning to take turns and am developing my awareness of when to talk and when to listen.

LIT 0-04a I listen or watch for useful or interesting information and I use this to make choices or learn new things.

SCN 0-01a I have observed living things in the environment over time and am becoming aware of how they depend on each other.

EXA 0-04a/EXA 1-04a I can create a range of visual information through observing and recording from my experiences across the curriculum.

HWB 0-05a / HWB 1-05a I am learning about where living things come from and about how they grow, develop and are nurtured.

Ingredients

What did Fiona need to set up the Strachur Nestbuilders Glow Group?

1. Glow Group at an Authority Level
2. Web cam placed in a bird box
3. 4 Pages within the Glow Group
4. Text Editor Web Part
5. Glow Meet Web Part
6. Document Store
7. Multiple Image Web Parts
8. Default Discussion Board
9. Calendar Web Part

Recipe

In the following videos, we will take a look at the Strachur Nestbuilders Glow Group and find out how to replicate some of its structure and content.

What does the Strachur Nestbuilders Glow Group look like? (2.46)
Strachur Birdwatchers

How to add, delete and rename pages. (1.49)
Strachur Birdwatchers

How to add a Text Editor web part and an image. (2.24)
Strachur Birdwatchers

How to add a Glow Meet Web Part and configure a Glow Meet room. (1.52)
Strachur Birdwatchers

How to create a Document Store and upload a document. (1.35)
Strachur Birdwatchers

How to add an Image Web Part and edit the image. (2.18)
Strachur Birdwatchers

How to add content to a Discussion Board. (1.29)
Strachur Birdwatchers

How to add a Calendar Web part and edit the settings. (2.00)
Strachur Birdwatchers

Impact

Fiona feels this project has a huge impact on learning and teaching. The pupils were able to collaborate with another school in the area, which allowed the pupils to ask each other questions about their observations. It has given the parents an insight into how Glow can be used to collaborate with other pupils within their school and the local area using a safe and secure area. It allowed for numerous cross-curricular opportunities. The pupils have an excellent understanding of bird classification and also the importance of nature conservation.

Listen to the pupils explain what they have seen via Glow Meet. (0.56)
Strachur Birdwatchers

Listen to pupils explain how they can watch the birds. (0.44)
Strachur Birdwatchers

Listen to the pupils discuss what class activities they have taken part in related to this topic. (0.40)
Strachur Birdwatchers

Listen to Fiona explain the impact on learning this project has had.  (0.46)
Strachur Birdwatchers

Click here to visit the Glow Group.

Click to enlarge image

Overview

Jessie Porter Nursery School in Dundee is a pre-school centre catering for close on one hundred children aged three to five years. Jessie Porter was recently recognised by HMIE as providing a “positive, supportive and purposeful learning environment” where well planned use of ICT features to “promote links across the children’s learning”.

In this cookbook, Jo Bell, an ICT Staff Tutor (Early Years / Primary), describes how she worked with Jessie Porter to develop a Glow Group aimed at showcasing the work that is going on in the nursery, strengthen Nursery / Primary  transition links and to share how they are planning for and developing the Curriculum for Excellence in the early years.

Video Clips

Ingredients

What was used to develop the Jessie Porter Glow Group:

1. A Glow Group
2. Documents web part for storing planning and evaluation documents
3. Text editor web parts to display video and images

Impact

Particular strengths of the centre

Use of information and communications technology (ICT) to promote links across children’s learning.

Are staff and children actively involved in improving their centre community?

Priorities identified for improvement are evidently having an impact on children’s development and learning. The nursery shares their good practice with other nurseries and schools through their GLOW group.

HMIE April 2010

The Jessie Porter Nursery School Glow Group serves to showcase the work that is going on and acts as an aid to Nursery / Primary transition. Through the Glow Group membership, the planning and evaluation documents used by the nursery staff are available not only to the P1 teachers of the associated primary schools but also to the staff of early years establishments across Scotland.  Dorothy McHattie, Head Teacher of Jessie Porter, is rightly proud of the work that is going on at Jesse Porter and in the era of Curriculum for Excellence is delighted to be able to share what she and her staff are doing through Glow. Moving forward, Dorothy is keen to incorporate Glow into the children’s evaluation of their learning and to further develop parental access to the Jessie Porter Glow Group.

Follow the links below for cookbooks on how Dundee’s ICT Support Team is providing Glow support for early years practitioners: