This week I was fortunate enough to be asked to attend and present at the ICT Summit held at the Stirling Management Centre. The summit was held to discuss the 5 objectives set by Michael Russell, MSP when he made the announcement about the future of glow.

The 5 objectives were

1) To change the culture of the use of ICT

 2) To improve confidence in the use of ICT for learners, teachers, school leaders and parents

 3) To promote new behaviours for teaching 

4) To deepen parental engagement

 5) To strengthen position on hardware and associated infrastructure

 Richard Nealsson gives a very good overview of the whole event in his blog post.

 I was asked to present on the 3^rd Objective – To promote new behaviours for teaching.  Below is the transcript of my presentation and the full length version of the video I showed.

Using new technologies to demonstrate / reflect on learning

We have been using Glow for just over a year.  It has totally transformed teaching and learning in my classroom.  It has enabled me to embed ICT throughout all areas of the curriculum and is not seen as a separate add on subject.

Now when planning work instead of thinking, what piece of written work or worksheet can I use to evidence children’s learning and understanding, I think what piece of technology or web tool can I use.

 Glow has given us the space to house all our digital evidence as most of the tools we use can be embedded either into a glow group or a glow blog.  Over the past year we have been developing our use of glow blogs.

Each pupil has their own individual eportfolio which can be used as a learning journal.  In these eportfolios they can embed videos, slideshows and other web tools as evidence of their learning.  They can also use it as a place to reflect on their learning and share wider achievements.

 This year we have also started a class blog in order to share our learning with parents and other schools.  So far we have had over 300 visits to our site and comments from as far away as Florida.  The pupils are highly motivated by these comments.  You can visit our blog by googling Wellwood Primary Blog.

 These (see photo below) are just a few of the web tools we have used this year.  For example we created vokis, which are animated avatars, to record our burns poems.  We used I can animate to create digital still animations for our Myths and Legends topic.

The level of writing within the class is still high as although the final outcome of these activities is a digital one, often they require researching or script writing.  There are still a very large percentage of teaching staff who don’t realise all these resources are available and often free to use.  Levels of pupil engagement and their ability to work cooperatively have greatly improved.

We’ve achieved a lot in a year but we only have a ratio of 2 pupils to 1 computer, imagine what we could achieve with 1:1.

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