Category: Curricular Areas

Commonwealth in rhyme – creating and editing audio recordings to share online

Malcolm Wilson, ICT Curriculum Development Officer in the Curriculum Support team of Service and School Improvement, Falkirk Council Education Services, supported pupils from the Grangemouth High School cluster to create and edit audio recordings which they shared online as part of a national Digital Commonwealth project. Creating, editing and using an online tool to share recordings provided one set of skills learned across a series of themes in this project.

Working with Dugald MacGilp (of Young Reporters for the Environment, part of the Keep Scotland Beautiful Charity) and Steve Duffy of Grangemouth High School the pupils were set the task of creating an audio recording of a piece of writing in rhyme which represented a Commonwealth country of their choice. Some groups of pupils chose to find a representative poem from a Commonwealth country of their choice, while some did some research about their chosen Commonwealth country and their Commonwealth athletes (in the lead up to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow) before creating a piece of writing, poem or rap.

Click here for Jamaica Rap which one group of pupils pupils created, edited in Audacity (including adding backing sounds) and uploaded to AudioBoo, free online podcasting host.

Click here for Swaziland Rap which another group of pupils created, edited in Audacity (including adding backing sounds) and uploaded to AudioBoo.

Audacity is free downloadable software which works like a word-processor except it is used to edit  audio recordings. With a simple click on a record button in the screen, and with a connected headset/microphone a redording can quickly be made of any audio. Once recorded there are simple cut/copy and paste icons just as in a word-processor to remove unwanted noise or move elements and reuse in a different sequence. It can also be used to have multiple tracks so that once the spoken word (for example) is recorded you can play it back and also record a new track at the same time (such as to add a beat sound). Once you are finished editing the audio you can go to File – export – and save as an mp3 file which is then ready to be shared with others for playing back. Click here for more information about where to download the Audacity software and how to use it.

AudioBoo is one of a number of free online tools which can be used to either upload previously recorded mp3 files or to record straight from microphone. The resulting AudioBoo recording can then be shared with others and played straight from the page where it is stored.

Sharing Classroom Chick Egg Hatching

Malcolm Wilson, ICT Curriculum Development Officer in the Curriculum Support team of  Service and School Improvement, Falkirk Council Education Services, has provided advice on request to various schools when they are taking part in a chick egg hatching project as part of science, and health & wellbeing elements of the curriculum.

So that pupils can enjoy watching the activities of the egg hatching and of the chicks, and share that with their parents and carers, at times outwith normal classroom times, often schools want to find ways to share live video of the eggs and chicks.

At its simplest a school could use a class blog, or the school website or the class, school (or specially set up project) Twitter account to share periodic photographs with short descriptive text of the activity happening. Recorded video could also be similarly shared.

However schools most frequently want to be sharing what’s happening at times outwith the normal school day.

So this is where live streaming of video via a webcam connected to a PC can provide the answer.

St Patrick’s Primary school in Denny is one recent example of a Falkirk primary school which set up live video streaming of the chick egg hatching process. Click here to see recorded excerpts from the live stream of the chick egg hatching project at St Patrick’s Primary School.

Do you want to set up live video streaming for a chick egg hatching project in your school?

Click here for a description of the process for setting up live video streaming for a chick egg hatching project.

Bo’ness Primary Schools work on Kinneil Museum Project

Yvonne McBlain, Curriculum Support teacher with Falkirk Council Education Services has helped to co-ordinate partnership work between Bo’ness primary schools and Falkirk Community Trust. The Trust has appointed Hanneke Scott van Wel and Lindsay Lennie to take forward their Kinneil Museum Engagement for the Future Project. On March 25th, Lindsay and Hanneke began working with primary 5, 6 and 7 pupils from each Bo’ness primary school to explore their links with their local heritage. The learning experience involved studying a range of old maps of Bo’ness and opened pupils’ eyes to the many changes which have taken place in their landscape over the last 400 years!

Observations from Kinneil PS p6/5 pupils included:

 “We’ve found out that Bo’ness was called something different long ago.”

“We can find Kinneil School in this one (map) and can’t in the other one.”

“They(person who made the map)  haven’t got the two potteries and they don’t have the gas works…we found a football ground but they didn’t have it.”

The pupils had brought in a picture or object from home and were asked to consider whether it connected to the places they had identified on the maps. One group said: “We found the town hall ‘cos that’s where the Fair takes place.”

Hanneke and Lindsay will ensure that each class taking part in the project has these learning experiences to prepare them for a whole cluster working day on 20th May in Bo’ness Town Hall. On that day each class from each school, will contribute/pool their expertise on their specialist aspect of Bo’ness history, and use this to co-create a historical timeline of their town. This process and its end product will form the pupils’ contribution to the wider community consultation taking place in order to ensure that the new museum displays reflect a true picture of the interests and experiences of the community they are designed for.

Spelling Bee

Yvonne Manning , Principal Librarian, Service and School Improvement Team of Falkirk Council Education Service attended Larbert High School’s first Spelling Bee. It was an excellent event with pupils from S2 who overcame their nerves to stand on the stage in front of their peers and pupils from Kinnaird PS and Stenhousemuir PS to show their excellence in spelling. Award winning author Nicola Morgan, Larbert High School’s Patron of Reading, was there and her main message to us was that reading  for enjoyment helps the brain to perform better! Nicola also presented  prizes to the pupils.

Raising the Bar in Physical Education

Morag Simpson and Morag Young PE Lead Officers for Falkirk Council Curriculum Support Team organised a hugely successful Raising the Bar Event for Physical Education on the inservice day on Thursday 13th February.

The day provided the opportunity for delegates to expereince  a combination of  practical workshops and presentations from both Education Scotland and HMIE. Feedback from all sessions has been extremely positive with the opportunity for Q & A sessions being greatly appreciated by all.

Morag Simpson and Morag Young are hoping to provide the same opportunity at the next inservice day on the 2nd May 2014.

Here are some examples of feedback given:

“Excellent day, informative and very useful”

” A very interesting day with lots of fun ideas and activities”

” Great having notes and resource links”

“Excellent resources to support teaching”

Braes Cluster Day of Dance

Morag Simpson and  Morag Young, PE Lead Officers and Marian Boyle, Support Officer for Health and Wellbeing,  all within Falkirk Council Curriculum Support Team organised and delivered a Day of  Sottish Dance for the Braes Cluster. Avonbridge Primary kindly agreed to host the event with Wallacestone Primary and Sheildhill Primary also attending. The day was a great success with lots of fun had by all and some fantastic dancing on display. The pupils from all schools worked well together, helping each other through the dances.

A huge thank you to Avonbridge for hosting and to all participants for performing so well on the day.

The Thinking Reader – Active Literacy

Sharon Wallace, Curriculum Support Officer, School and Service Improvement team led a CPD session on The Thinking Reader approach to active reading. 54 colleagues attended the session.

Kristina McGinley, Hallglen PS, Aimee Roan, Carron Primary School, Anita Cowan, St. Mary’s RCPS and Alison Marshall, Drumbowie PS all shared good practice in this area. Kristina had observed Sharon teaching using this approach, whilst the other three ladies had attended the course in November. All four teachers explained how using this approach to reading had led to noticeable increased attainment in reading skills.

Colleagues then participated in a Thinking Reader lesson before considering how they could use it in their own establishments. They all engaged in professional dialogue considering how this approach could be used to develop the six reading comprehension skills across a range of texts from a range of genres.

Schools Library Service also contributed to the session by providing a wide range of resources which support this reading approach.

All resources produced so far for the Thinking Reader can be found on the Active Literacy Resource section on GLOW.

RED Book Award

 

Yvonne Manning , Principal Librarian, Service and School Improvement Team of Falkirk Council Education Service led the 8th RED Book Award ceremony on the 29th January  2014 in the Falkirk Town Hall.

 The shortlist this year was Mortal Chaos by Matt Dickinson, Torn by David Massey, Mister Creecher by Chris Priestley and Slated by Teri Terry.

This year there was an international dimension to the Book Award with young people from Nairobi (International School of Kenya and Mathare North Library) shadowing the award. It was very successful and they have renamed their book group The RED Book Club!

250 pupils from  the secondary schools in Falkirk Council participated in the Book Award reading, enjoying and debating the shortlisted books. Along with the Kenyan young people, they voted in December for their favourite book and planned a creative interpretation of one of the books to be performed at the award ceremony.

The Award ceremony had a wonderful atmosphere thanks to the energy and enthusiasm of the young people. The performances showcased the creativity and  confidence of the young people. We particularly enjoyed the performances from Nairobi sent to us electronically. At the ceremony the radio broadcast team from St Mungo’s High School recorded interviews, pupil journalists from Graeme and Larbert High Schools wrote a news report which will appear in The Falkirk Council News, a film team from Braes High School filmed the event and a pupil from Falkirk High School, interested in photography, shadowed the council photographer.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Feedback from the some of the authors:

“Thank you so much for everything this week. I had the best time at the RED book awards. I think having the colour red as part of things added such a fun element to the day. I really enjoyed myself, and was amazed at how good the presentations by the schools were. ” Teri Terry

“Could I just say a big thank you, on behalf of David and myself, for the hospitality shown to us during our time in Falkirk. We enjoyed our visit to Scotland so much and are looking forward to returning when we have more time. Some of our favourite moments were seeing the children act out parts of the shortlisted books – especially Torn of course!” David Massey

And the winner of RED 8 is Slated by Teri Terry

Do you want to start using the new Glow 365 with your class?

Malcolm Wilson, ICT Curriculum Development Officer in the Curriculum Support team of the Service and School Improvement, Falkirk Council Education Services, has been working on making the new Glow ready for use by staff and pupils in Falkirk. And some staff and pupils have already begun using the new version of Glow.

What’s in the new version of Glow?

This new version of Glow is based on Microsoft Sharepoint 2013 (which provides a highly configurable environment in which to share and collaborate) and Microsoft Office 365. Office 365 provides each pupil and member of staff with Outlook email (with a massive 50GB of storage and individual messages able to be up to 25MB in size), calendar, Lync video-conferencing (only available to staff), cloud storage (with enormous 1TB per user) and online Word, Powerpoint, Excel and OneNote – all of which can be edited online (with multiple collaborators, if shared with others, able to work on the same document at the same time).

Do you want a class site set up for you?

School sites have been set up for all Falkirk establishments. Now class sites are being set up on request by staff. So if you’d like to have your class site set up for you in this new Glow environment then get in touch with Malcolm Wilson.

How to give your pupils access

When a class site is requested to be set up the class site will be set up with automatic access for staff, and with the requesting member of staff as main administrator who will receive access requests. Pupils can be provided with the link and click on the prompt to simply request access. The staff member then approves the pupil requests. This gives the staff member the facility to vary the rights of pupils to have reader-only access or editor rights so the pupils can also add content or contribute to discussions – the choice is up to the member of staff depending on the purpose of the class site.

Here’s how a staff member can grant their pupils acces to their class site:

  1. To accept pupils who have requested access to the Glow site for your class, first go to your class site.
  2. Then click on the cog in the top-right corner.
  3. Then site settings – access request and invitations.
  4. Click on the three little dots beside a pupil name.
  5. Choose “Your class name Member” access rights (if you wish them to be able to contribute to all parts of your class site) and click approve. If, however, you only wish them to be able to read most content and only contribute to the discussions part of the page then instead choose “your class name Visitors (Read)” from the dropdown. Then click “approve”

How to customise your class site

The class site will also be set up with a layout which the staff member can customise to their needs and preferences – 

Here is how a staff member can customise the look and feel of the class Glow site:

  1. On the class site go to the cog in the top-right
  2. Click on “change the look”
  3. Try out whichever you wish (each theme choice also lets you further change the font and the colour scheme). Note that the Oslo or Seattle layout choices determine side or top navigation.
  4. Select the one you wish and make the change

And now you can start using it with your class – just drag and drop one or multiple documents into document folders, set tasks, and provide feedback.

If you want to get started using this with your class just get in touch with Malcolm Wilson

How do I get usernames and passwords for my pupils?

If you need to give your pupils Glow usernames and passwords for the first time, or to reset passwords if needed, then here’s the steps to follow:

To give pupils their usernames you first log into Glow with your staff account.

  1. Along the top-left of the tiled apps Launchpad click on “Management Console”
  2. Down the left-hand menu click on “Groups”
  3. From the dropdown list choose “Year group, Registration Group or Teaching Group” as appropriate
  4. Click on the “Actions” button at the right-hand side of the group. Select “change members password”
  5. In the password boxes enter something like red 1234 (that’s red space 1234 – note that provided you ensure you have ticked the box to prompt a user to change their password on logging in then when the pupil logs in they will then be prompted to created a password of their own choice).
  6. Take a note of the usernames and share these and the password with the pupils.

Here’s a link to a video showing how to reset passwords for a whole class:

http://connect.glowscotland.org.uk/2014/09/30/changing-passwords-for-a-whole-class/

Here is a link to help guides to managing Glow accounts:

http://connect.glowscotland.org.uk/tag/accessing-glow-rm-unify/

Glow Connect is a dedicated Glow support site which provides examples of how Glow is being used by learners and teachers, as well as guides to undertaking specific tasks, and answers to frequently asked questions:

http://connect.glowscotland.org.uk/

Guides for Falkirk staff on making use of Glow can be found on the Falkirk Glow support site here (Glow username and password is required for access): http://tinyurl.com/l5zmeqw

Microsoft Outlook 365 Email for every pupil

As part of the new Glow 365 every member of staff and pupil gets a Microsoft Outlook cloud email account. This has 50GB of storage per user and can send attachments up to 25MB per message. To access it just log into Glow and click on the “Outlook” tile.

Email addresses for staff and pupils in school follow the pattern of the user’s Glow username followed by @glow.sch.uk

So, for example, a user with the username gw07smithrobert would have the email address gw07smithrobert@glow.sch.uk

This can be set up to work on a mobile device – for step by step guidance for specific mobile phone or other devices simply first log into Glow, click on the Outlook tile then at the top-right corner click on the cog – options – “Connect your mobile phone or device to your account.” You’ll also get the specific required server details for your account by clicking on “Settings for POP or IMAP access” at the foot of the page once you’ve clicked on the cog, then options.

For