My Glow: Kirsteen Maclean
Kirsteen Maclean tells us how Bernera Primary School in Lewis has used Glow both in the classroom and to link up with other schools.
I am a teaching headteacher at Bernera Primary School in Lewis, which is the smallest school on the largest island of the Western Isles. We’re a very small school – we have 18 pupils and two teachers, divided into English or Gaelic streams. There are 40 schools in my local authority, with 15 Glow Mentors between them.
Glow - the story so far
I had my Glow Mentor training in January 2008. The Glow team gave us the skills and showed us what to do. I’m a very hands-on person so I decided not to wait until access to the Glow portal was rolled out to all the schools in our local authority. Instead, I went straight back to school and started setting up Glow Groups on my temporary Glow Mentor account to teach colleagues what I had learned. I wanted to get the school community on as quickly as possible and give them the experience they needed to make a start. I set up my school group within my mentor group, and added lots of mini groups for children and staff to practise on.
My first step was to experiment with Glow to see how it would work for lessons. I chose the Judaism topic in religious education and for the next few weeks all of the lessons – worksheets, photos, videos and more – were uploaded into the Judaism Glow Group. At the same time, we taught children some of the basic key skills, such as how to resize and upload photos, how to hold a discussion, upload documents and generally, just about the functionality of Glow. We encouraged them all, from P1 to P7, to give it a go.
When I told the pupils I was going to a Glow conference in April they all went into Glow Discuss and added comments to a discussion I had set up. I was intrigued and delighted to see that they had not only posted their own comments but had also looked at other pupils’ work and posted comments relating to that. One little boy had gone from post to post making comments like ‘I like what you’ve done here’ or ‘I like the way you’ve described this’! I have children who are really encouraging of one another and the older ones really nurture the younger ones. To actually see that in action was so encouraging.
So far, our experience with Glow has been very positive. My authority is rolling Glow out gradually across all the schools and my school got access to the live portal shortly before the Easter holidays. As a mentor, I was keen to get our neighbouring school working on this too so I spent some time with them at a twilight session talking through the benefits of Glow and showing them the live portal and how it would work. I was surprised to find that, two hours later, we were still talking about all the possibilities! It all boils down to making Glow activities relevant and meaningful not just for pupils but also for staff, so that it can be powered forward. For the time being, we’re dipping our toe in the water, taking a drip-feed approach with a little at a time rather than flooding people with knowledge.
What's next?
In mid-June we’re taking the senior pupils to Stirling and Glasgow for a week. We hope to have Glow Meets through our laptops at lunchtime back to Bernera, upload photos and have discussions. There are many more events throughout the term at which we plan to tuck our laptops under our arms and use Glow to communicate with the school.
Throughout the term we’ll continue to see where Glow takes us. The next steps will be Glow Learn, Glow Chat and Glow Mail. At the moment we’re still looking at all the new things we can do through Glow. We have given the children cards with their details and they just love being able to access it at school and at home. In addition, it has really upped the pace in the classroom in terms of how much can be taught in a lesson.
Lighting up learning
Being a remote school on a separate island connected to Lewis by a small bridge, one of the best things for us will be using Glow Meet to link with other schools. Last year, we had two brothers from an Edinburgh family with us for a month, and Glow Meet would have provided a really powerful way of keeping in touch with the boys’ school in Edinburgh. We’re open to making new links. From the staff’s point of view, we’re fed up of reinventing the wheel and are looking forward to sharing different experiences and ideas with other schools.