Sandaig’s Be Very Afraid

Stephen Heppel fronts this celebration of young people’s use of technology.  For Scottish Educators it is exciting to see Sandaig Primary to the fore.

Stephen Heppel is always interesting and what he showcases here is certainly thought provoking and should make any died in the wool educational backwoodsman or person very afraid.

Glow Feedback

I am always one for recycling especially if I can use the product of my word processor more than once! Te following is a copy of what I recently put in the Mentor School feedback on Glow.

The use of Glow will evolve over time but here are some fairly mundane
suggestions.

Use a Glow Group to host a single topic. Only invite the class which
is to use it. At the end of the topic, remove the users so that the
group remains available for another year but cannot be tampered with
meanwhile. While using the group make a chatroom available for just a short
time slot each day for pupils to ask questions of the teacher about
homework or research. Think of it as a tutorial group. If possible make
some of the work active learning so pupils need to research a part of
the topic and then allow them to post and comment on the results. Allow
appropriate photographs to be posted by pupils.

e-twinning will allow all sorts of collaboration with other schools and
countries, using email and Glow Meet. This is not about the
technology, as any project needs a lot of preparatory work and clear learning
outcomes for both sides. Many years ago I ran a project where several
continental schools and my own exchanged a weekly roundup of the news in
their local papers. This encouraged reading, writing, analysis,
critical thinking, etc.

Glow will allow teachers to illustrate almost any subject with
up-to-date video footage and news. Pupils can be encouraged to display work
and accept comment and criticism. Realising that their work is in the
public arena will raise their self-esteem and give them a sense of
purpose.

Changing the style of teaching from providing pupils with notes to one
where they have to research their own notes and post them to be
discussed by the class will create a sense of ownership of knowledge.

Glow Meet looks like an excellent part of Glow. It can be used in
conjunction with an e-twinning project, to provide a platform for outside
experts to “come into class”, to provide assistance in minority subjects
in S5 and S6 between schools, to give Hearing Impaired units
inter-school signing opportunities, to name but a few.

Obviously there are far more things which Glow will make possible, but
its style of use will also depend on hardware resources. If all
classrooms have projectors, that will be a start but the recent HMIe report
calling for rethinking the allocation of resources in schools should be
taken seriously.

Dundee School Blogs

Over the last few months I have been involved in setting up a WordPress MU blogging system on a Dundee server. We now have several blogs from classes in Primary and Secondary.

As with any blog they need to start creating a network. In particular the Ancrum Road Primary School blog ARC is beginning to flourish and world love your support.

Glow Pilot

I have rather let the blog lapse recently as I have been busy exploring Glow, as part of another trial. I have spent most of my time using Glow Meet, which is the name given to the Video Conferencing system which is actually a Marratech product. It is a bit slow to start up but once going it is certainly one of the better VC systems I have used. The main video window tracks to whoever is speaking and it does it pretty well so it is easy to follow a conversation. So far we have hosted up to about a dozen concurrent users with no deterioration in quality. It is definitely a plus for Glow and I am sure will prove a very useful tool.

The second online conference with as small group of mentors administered by Tess Watson and including John Johnston, Andrew Brown, Neil Winton, David Noble and others was a great success which I for one certainly hope becomes a regular feature of Glow.

There is ongoing criticism of the Glow Groups and the difficulties using it for a multiplicity of discussions. However, as I have said elsewhere, if we think of the group as meeting space or collaborative working space where pupils will concentrate their efforts around a single topic, a lot of the problems are reduced. This is highlighted by the fact that pupils in earlier trials were very happy with the Glow Groups whereas more experienced users have found that it does not fulfill their need for a slick discussion forum. There is a case as suggested by Neil Winton, for using one of the free discussion forums as a plugin to Glow.

There are still some inconsistencies in the Glow interface which are being reported and I hope will be corrected by the time of the full roll-out. For relatively inexperienced users it is essential that there is no ambiguity in the navigation or the terminology.