Learning, Teaching and ICT

I’d not really heard of MIICE before being seconded to my new post. I wonder if that’s the same for other classroom teachers? I went along to Glasgow University on Friday not knowing what to expect.  I really enjoyed the conference, but two items have stayed with me – hence the reason for this post.

The first item was a presentation about how GLOW has been rolled out in one of the Local Authorities. My own L.A. has recently signed up to GLOW and I was interested because the L.A. representative giving the presentation talked about the challenges, the successes the how they envisaged the way forward.

Here’s my interpretation of what was said – I might have heard only what I wanted to hear, though, and realise what I’m recording here may not be what was meant by the presenter, so I’ve not mentioned any names or supplied any links

The Challenges

• Glow training was done in 2007, but the accounts were not issued until 2009 so much of the information from the training was forgotten in the interim
• Initially there was confusion when many people forgot their user names/passwords
• There was some uncertainty about reporting and help desk procedures. 
• Two development officers have been seconded to help out with these problems (23 schools each), but the available funding for this will soon run out.
• There is at least one mentor in every school, but the grant from LTS that supported this has been lost.
•  They learned that it was not enough to ‘bolt’ Glow on to Improvement plans, but schools now need justify the use of how Glow can link to CfE. This requires CPD.
• Mentors are learning that they need to delegate tasks. One person can’t support all staff.

The Successes

• Some schools are beginning to post information on to Glow Groups, so encouraging less need for paper to be used.
• Because staff need to log on to Glow to access information, they are less likely to forget their username and password!
• Even in larger schools there may not be many users – but those who are using Glow are producing quite impressive stuff
•  Three transition projects were described:

Transition Project (1) – S1 read poems to the P7′s in Glow Meet and there was a question and answer session. The  teacher then provided a session on how to write poetry.

Transition Project (2) – Various depts in a large High School initiated Glow p7/S1 transition activites. For example the maths dept set monthly puzzles for the P7′s. This gave the teachers valuable insight into the levels that the P7′s were working at. The P.E. dept had a huge amount of questions asked. This gave them an insight as to how the P7′s were feeling. The English Dept. gave the P7′s the task of writing a hallowe’en story. The feeder primary school children held back until the last minute to post their stories because they didn’t want their ideas to be ‘hijacked’

Transition Project (3) - Primary 7 pupils chatted to High School prefects on Glow. Different types of questions began to be asked as the ‘question and answer’ sessions progressed. At the start of the session, the questions were very trivial, but as the P7′s got more used to asking questions on Glow, the began to ask more relevant questions. For example, questions such as, ‘How do I get around  the one-way system at high school?’ became the norm.

The Future

• CPD events are planned so that they cater for both basic and advanced Glow users
• School-wide challenges will be set from the centre so that staff and pupils are given a real reason to use Glow
• Training will be open to ALL interested parties – not just Glow mentors

 The second highlight of my experience of a MIICE conference was when Ruth Cunningham, who is nearly at the end of a postgraduate diploma to become a primary teacher, gave an awesome presentation…. I hope I’ll be able to share it on here very soon

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 10:23 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.