There are lots of exciting developments happening in education in Scotland. You will all by now, I am sure, have heard a little about A Curriculum for Excellence and the exciting possibilities that this new curriculum brings for children in our schools.
Another equally ambitious project in Scottish education is GLOW, the learning platform for the Scottish Schools Digital Network.

Over the past few years, all schools in Argyll and Bute have been enabled to receive an increased bandwidth that allows the children to participate in lots of exciting on-line learning opportunities. The internet is a wonderful place with many valuable aspects but it is also easy to get lost and waste time wandering around looking for suitable resources or can put our children in vulnerable and dangerous positions with those that mean to cause our children harm.
To help with these difficulties, all of Scotland’s schools have now got access to GLOW which is a schools’ intranet. This means that only those people with a username and password in schools are allowed access.
Each child and teacher in every school has a unique log-in and password that only the child and the teacher know. No one out with GLOW can access this intranet.

This session at Kilmartin P.S. we are beginning to teach the children how to log onto GLOW and how to navigate around this huge community. We are explaining to the children that entering GLOW is a bit like going to Braehead shopping centre. There are many places you can visit for many different reasons. We cannot possibly visit everywhere on our first visit or make use of all of the features so we have been starting by visiting Purple Mash which is an area that allows children to play educational games or do pieces of writing.

The children in P.6/7 have now moved onto the 2nd stage that we have planned which is creating their own GLOW blog. A blog is a personalised space where each child can write about their learning, their hobbies, their projects and do homework tasks.

P.6/7 have now started carrying out homework tasks on their blog and this brings huge potential benefits for them.

1. Using technology will hopefully raise their motivation.

2. They can ask for online teacher support from either Mrs. Johnson or Mrs. Blair

3. They can’t lose the piece of paper that the task is on because the task is written out on Mrs Johnson’s blog

4. They can’t leave their task at home because they post it onto their blog when it is completed.

5. Teachers can give immediate feedback on the task by using the comments button on their bog

6. Parents can read each blog post and also comment

7. Teachers can see who has logged on and started their task and who have not yet done so!

It is hoped that other schools in mid Argyll will come on board with the class blog project. There is a training night for teachers on Thursday 20th January where Mrs. Johnson and Mr Helbert (HT Furnace P.S.) will be training any teachers who want to participate.

Mrs. Blair attended an Internet Safety training course earlier on this session. It is hoped that by teaching the children how to use the internet safely in every computer lesson at school, that we will be helping to protect the children when they access the internet from home.

Mrs. Blair will be teaching the P.6/7 children about internet safety in the summer term and if any parents also wish a workshop then we would also be happy to organise one.

If you have any questions about this new way of learning, please use the comment button to get in touch with me.

These are exciting times and we must make sure that we are preparing the children for the future.