My Glow: Caroline Gibson
Caroline Gibson tell us how Glow Groups enabled pupils at Castlefield Primary, East Kilbride, to develop their understanding of global citizenship.
I am a P7 teacher at Castlefield Primary School in East Kilbride, within the South Lanarkshire local authority. We have one class per stage plus a nursery, totalling about 230 children.
Glow - the story so far
Initially on signing up as a Glow Mentor, I felt anxious about how my own skills could apply to this new initiative, so we started off gently. My first step was to work through all the components of Glow with my own class. I established the Glow site for the school, which included setting up the school page, pupil page and a Glow Group for the class. Available within the class page are lesson plans, RSS feeds to other websites, a page viewer for the class blog and a number of web links.
What's next?
Having set myself on a firm footing with Glow in my own classroom, I went on to raise awareness among the rest of the staff, arranging sessions during which everyone could explore the functionalities.
We have found the Glow Groups in particular to be a great way of engaging pupils with global citizenship, a benefit we discovered when we established an African rich-task Glow Group. Within this group we embedded videos on global warming and set up an African photo gallery to encourage discussion. We also uploaded information documents and provided web links to sites on Malawi where the pupils could discover more. We saved the lesson plans within the Glow Group and this term I plan to expand on this work with a new project on the tropical rainforest.
We are keen to continue to share ideas and best practice with other schools in our local authority and beyond. This kind of collaboration offers pupils the opportunity to experience environments they would otherwise miss out on, in our case large schools or schools in rural settings.
First of all, we are looking to establish a link with Auldhouse Primary School in East Kilbride. Once that is established, we plan to widen the net further and connect up with a teacher in Malawi to expand on the African Glow Group. The pupils and I are keen to find out what school is like for pupils there.
Another exciting development for us was the arrival of our new webcam, which will enable us to arrange a Glow Meet. We will also soon be discovering Glow Chat, and in the term ahead I’ll start looking at components of Glow such as the calendar, ‘what’s on’ and email.
Lighting up learning
The great thing about Glow is that it offers more autonomy and choice for teachers - you can use topics in ways you might not have considered before. It has provided our pupils with a wider learning experience, encouraged the sharing of information and developed their understanding of global citizenship. Pupils will have no problems when it comes to engaging with Glow - they are so used to chatting to one another on Bebo and MSN there will be no stopping them once they get logged on.