All posts by John

I am a teacher, currently working in Banton Primary for North Lanarkshire Council. I also act as Product Owner/provide support for Glow Blogs. I like Blogs.

Week 1 Glow Meet Notes

The recordings of yesterday’s Glow Meets are now online:

2pm Pupils Meet

4:15pm Staff Meet

You need your Glow username and password to view them. Hopefully these will help if you did not make the meeting. It is easy enough to follow the bootcamp without using the meets, as I hope all necessary instructions are in the weekly blog posts.

The posts for some early birds are starting to appear here on the bootcamp blog. Please visit them and leave a comment. This can be a good way to model writing online for pupils if you are starting blogging.

In the staff meet I did not really discuss any classroom organisation. It may be worth mentioning that I have found share writing a good way to start, this lets you set standards and model the writing you are looking for.

In the pupil meet we had a lot of response to discussion points, which I’ll add below, these may help in starting discussion in your own classrooms.
Continue reading Week 1 Glow Meet Notes

Blogging Bootcamp Week 1

Glow Meet

There will be 2 Glow Meets on Tuesday 1st September:
https://meet.glowscotland.org.uk/bootcamp

2pm and 4:15pm

I will open the ‘Room’ on Monday at 10am for a short while if you need to test Glow Meet.

The Main tasks for Week 1:

  1. Create a Blog, make it Public
  2. Discuss why you would blog
  3. Make a First Post
    • Categorise that post bootcamp
    • email John a link to the post: gw09johnstonjohn4@glowmail.org.uk

Before We start.

Writing in public needs a bit of thought.

  • Only a Glow user who has a teacher or non-teaching staff Glow account can make a blog public.
  • Users should consider the consequences of publishing to a public blog.
  • Publishing publicly can give pupils a real audience for their work, make tasks more authentic but they need to be aware of internet safety and data protection issues.

Creating a Blog

The following steps take you through blogging with the Glow Blog’s WordPress solution. They are also outlined in this week’s documentation:

Creating a blog .
Privacy Settings you need to make your blog public to participate in the Bootcamp.
Adding Users, Setting Roles
Creating a Post

 

 

Discussion

What is a blog, Why are you blogging?

It is worth thinking a wee bit about what you already know about blogs, and what you think you will get out of blogging. We will have a discussion about this and you are encouraged to blog about this as part of week 1.

If you write a blog post you can look back later and see if your ideas change.

Other areas for discussion:

  1. What do you post online already?
  2. Why use a Blog for learning?
  3. What do you want it to look like? How do you want to appear to others, what information do you want to share…which leads to:
  4. Keeping Safe

Keeping Safe

Here are some rules to think about and discuss, do you think they are good ones? Why?

  1. Do only use first names
  2. Don’t post photographs of people (unless you have the teacher’s permission)
  3. Don’t post personal information – such as your home phone number or home address
  4. Don’t share your Password with anyone
  5. Do tell your parents or teacher if you come across anything that makes you feel uncomfortable
  6. Do obey the ‘Grandmother rule’ – anything you put on the internet could be read by your grandmother so only write things you could say to the nicest of grannies
  7. Don’t post anything that could hurt anyone
  8. Don’t make arrangements to meet anyone over the internet!!
  9. Do enjoy using your Blog: the most important rule

Challenges

Try and make two blog posts this week. Categorise them both ‘bootcamp’. Send John the URL (web address) to the first one.

We would suggest that if you are working in a class that you make these first posts as shared writing. This will allow you to start to to set expectations about content, style ect. We also suggest that you should regularly refer to/talk about e-safety when you publish anything to the internet.

  1. Introduce yourselves, who you are, where you are from, some interesting things about yourselves. categorise as bootcamp.
  2. post what you are going to be blogging about? categorise as bootcamp.

* Did we mention that you should categorise your blog post as bootcamp and send the link to the post to John ?gw09johnstonjohn4@glowmail.org.uk*

Visit the bootcamp blog, visit other participants posts. Leave comments on each others blogs.

Extras

You may want to make your blog look nice, here is how to add a header image:

Here is the Glow Help blog post: Custom Header Image | Glow Blog Help
Downloads: Adding a Header MS docx |  Adding a Header PDF

Presentations from the Glow Meet;

Categorising Your Posts as Bootcamp

When you take part in the bootcamp we want you to categorise your posts bootcamp.

We will use this to bring your posts on your blog onto this one. This will allow participants to easily visit each  others blog post.

You need to tell us the first time you do this.  You do this by emailing us the link to the first blog post you categorise. After that you just add the category bootcamp to the posts you want to send to the bootcamp and it happens automatically.

Adding the Category for the First Time:

categorise-bootcamp

 

  1. After writing your post, on the right had side of the editor, click +Add New Category
  2. Type in the name of the category, in this case bootcamp
  3. Click the Add New Category Button
  4. The Category will bee added to the category list, it will be checked.
  5. email the link to this first post to gw09johnstonjohn4@glowmail.org.uk

Subsequent posts

The Category bootcamp will appear in the list, all you need to do is tick it before publishing the post.

 

Blogging Bootcamp 2 – Get Set!

Hopefully we are all ready to start the bootcamp next week.

Still plenty of time to Signup for Blogging Bootcamp #2

The only thing you need to do in preparation is make sure your Glow logon works.

There will be a blog post on Monday 31 August outlining week 1 activities. I’ll also email them to you.

The schedule page gives a rough outline of the 5 weeks activities.

We will have 2 glow meets to kick off the bootcamp on Tuesday 1st September.
One at 2pm, one at 4:15 pm
these should last for 30-45 minutes.
The content will largely be the same but the first one will be slanted towards pupils the later to teachers.
the meet will be at:
https://meet.glowscotland.org.uk/bootcamp

This will only be open at the specific times.

If you want to test Glow Meet in your establishment drop me an email with a few possible times and we can try it out.

We will try and provide enough help and support materials for you to take part in the bootcamp without joining the meets. We will try to supply all the information in multiple formats, different folk seem to learn in different ways.

Safety Considerations

You will be posting material to the internet, it will be viewable by anyone with an internet connection. make sure you are aware of school policy around this.
We will be discussing Internet safety as part of the bootcamp, but teachers should be aware of the issues and their responsibilities.

I’ll be joined in running the bootcamp by Chrissie Lamont, you can get in touch with either of us with any questions and we will try our best to answer them.

Featured image on this post: Image from page 48 of “Athletics and football” (1894) | Flickr – Photo Sharing!

Welcome to Blogging Bootcamp

The bootcamp will take you through creating a blog, adding features and a range of blogging activities. Classes will have the opportunity to link up with other glow blogs and the world wide blogging community.

It will run from Week beginning 31 August for 5 weeks.

Each week there will be ‘technical’ tips, blogging challenges and discussion points that can be carried out in your classroom and on your blog.

What you need: A Class, somewhere to blog (glow for example). No technical knowledge needed.

While most of the technical support will be aimed at glow users the bootcamp is open to any classroom.

Some of the information will be ‘old hat’ if you are already blogging, the challenges will hopefully still give you something to blog about and provide an opportunity to network with other classes.

Sign up for more information

Image: Welcome message. | Flickr – Photo Sharing! – Public domain