My recent work in using Glow in the initial stages in Aberdeen City has prompted me to dig out this old blog and write a post.
I am working on a P7-S1 Transition Grow Group with a colleague from our asg Secondary school. While working together last week, he wanted to put some video on a website of his own and link to that whereas I would have preferred to put the video on Teacher Tube and get the embed code.
In fact there were everal things that my colleague was doing that I did not fully understand. But I realised that it did not matter!
He could work on his bits at his own level and I could work at mine! And this is the message that I think is important for Glow Mentors to get across to the many teachers who may be worried about Glow.
While the concept of Glow is no problem to all the technophiles out there, the majority of teachers are not yet working with web2 tools. I think the message needs to be that people can work at their own level and develop from there. When I started my class blog a couple of years ago, I posted only text. I then wanted to put pictures and later started to embed code etc. But I worked and learned at my own pace!
I have seen too much criticism of others recently and do not think that this is helpful to encouraging others to start something that they may not be that comfortable with.
Inspirational blogs like that of Ewan McIntosh and Nik Peachey and many others will always be helpful and show people what they could aspire to, but let's try to have a culture of help and encouragement, rather than criticism.
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- Mrs Campbell-Morgan
- Aberdeen, United Kingdom
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4 comments:
Perhaps if you go back and re-read my post, you will see that it's about local authority top-down management and corporate branding on GLOW, and actually nothing to do with discouraging teachers from working with GLOW. In fact, it encourages individual teachers to be creative and subversive even in their use of these tools ( which are not web 2.0, unfortunately).
As Prof. Heppell put it, it's all about the death of education, but the dawn of learning. We will never achieve this whilst initiatives such as GLOW remain firmly in the hands of restrictive corporate branding. This was the thrust of my post, and I think that if you actuall go through my posts on GLOW you will notice that this is one of the common themes I try to develop.
Your denigration of this is actually quite unhelpful... or have I too read you wrong ?
Jaye
Jaye
I know that you have done excellent work with Glow and your pupils and that we need people like you to lead the way.
But I was merely trying to point out that most teachers are not yet at your comfort level of working either with web 2 or indeed Glow tools.
In my opinion and experience, encouragement is the best way to help less confident teachers and I do believe that is what the ICT team and mentors in Aberdeen City are trying to achieve.
Hopefully the corporate branding that you talk about is not happening in any authority in Scotland as I fully agree with you that this would indeed restrict creativity.
As a teacher who has been interested in ICT for many years, I have always tried to be gently supportive of those who do not share my passion.
It was with those people in mind that I wrote this post as I hope that Glow tools will help to bring them on board.
...and of course, you are right, because whatever one's views on the merits or otherwise of different Local Authority team approaches, the important thing here is helping as many teachers as possible to realise the potential benefits GLOW can bring to classroom practice and our childrens' learning. I think experienced colleagues such as yourself being gently supportive, as you put it, is exactly what is needed at the moment with ICT and GLOW, not to mention ACfE. I'm pleased to see teachers all over Scotland so enthusiastic about GLOW and I'm sure you will benefit from a supportive and helpful central team who also realise this.
Just in case you're interested, I'm about to start a P7/S1 transition project across our ASG using GLOW and games-based learning. We have a GLOW group set up- if you want to have a look, just send an access request...
The address is...
https://portal.glowscotland.org.uk/establishments/slcathkinhighschool/Cathkin%20Brain-Boosters/default.aspx
Jaye
Thanks Jaye
I certainly will request access. I think the sharing of ideas is one of the potential strengths of Glow and will help sell it. I'm interested the games-based learning!
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