Category: Community Posts

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Problem Solving at Neilston Primary School, East Renfrewshire

Problem Solving Challenges and Tutorials

At Neilston Primary, we are creating instructional videos to set daily problem solving questions for our primary six and primary seven pupils. 

Using existing resources, we prepare a PowerPoint to set the question and a separate PowerPoint explaining the solution. Principal Teacher, Andrew Howie, then uses online recording tool – Loom, to video himself explaining the problems and the solutions. Loom places a recording of Mr Howie in a small circle directly on top of the PowerPoint image, allowing him to be seen and not just heard and as these videos are relatively short, it is easy to record in one take meaning no editing is required. 

We then post the videos on to Google Classroom and Twitter. These post are scheduled (using TweetDeck for Twitter) to appear at the correct time – 9am for the problem, and 3pm for the solution. By posting the videos on Twitter we have also found younger pupils engage with them and share their answers. 

Moving ahead, we hope to record and schedule a whole week’s worth of posts in advance. This will help streamline the process, and we also hope this means the videos can be shared in advance with other schools in the authority who may find them useful. 

The videos can be viewed on Twitter @neilston_madras 

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Pupil and Parental Engagement at St Mark’s Primary School, East Renfrewshire

Increasing Pupil and Parental Engagement at St Mark’s with Twitter

 

In St. Mark’s, we have been working hard to increase parental engagement and maintain relationships with our families during school closure. Twitter has been a great tool for us to celebrate the achievements of our pupils and stay connected to our families.

Teachers have shared examples of good work that has been submitted on Google Classroom and we have tweeted them from our school account to celebrate their success. Mr Hutcheson used examples of tweets from parents in his virtual assembly to highlight the excellent work that was taking place at home to all pupils.

PE, STEM and art challenges set by teachers on Google Classroom have been some of our most popular tweets, the creativity and enthusiasm of our pupils has been exceptional. We have also set a variety of challenges for our pupils and families and have observed a noticeable increase in engagement with these over time. The most recent Getty Museum Challenge has been fantastic and has again highlighted how creative our pupils and staff are:

Feedback from parents/carers regarding the use of Twitter to stay connected with our learners has been extremely positive and, in some cases, has helped to increase engagement with Google Classroom. Sharing examples of their learning in this way has helped to motivate pupils to attempt more activities and has had a positive impact on their confidence and enthusiasm for learning. 

 

 

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30 Days of Creativity

Glasgow Education Services CREATE was set up in 2016 to raise the profile of expressive arts and creativity as a means to raise attainment and achievement across the curriculum. Our focus is on supporting schools to think differently and creatively in order to equip children and young people with the knowledge, skills and attributes they need to thrive in our interconnected, digital and ever-changing world.

 

30 Days of Creativity is a partnership between Glasgow CREATE, Glasgow City Council’s digital learning project; ‘Connected Learning,’ and Apple. This project encourages children and young people to use technology as a platform not simply to consume digital content, but also to promote creativity in learning.

 

Apple launched a ‘30 Days of Creativity’ challenge worldwide a number of weeks ago and have now partnered with us to deliver a short creative challenge each day for 30 days which is fun for children, young people and their families to complete. New challenges go live at 1pm each day on the Glasgow CREATE Youtube channel, https://bit.ly/2YA4seP, where you will find video demonstrations for all our challenges so far.

The project was launched on 4 May and will run until 18 Jun, however, the challenges can be done in any order or revisited at any time.

 

We have seen a tremendous uptake so far from children, young people, families and teachers across Glasgow who are taking this opportunity to develop their digital literacy and creativity skills!

 

You can see what others have been doing during Glasgow’s 30 Days of Creativity by searching on Twitter for #CreativityForKids #GetGlasgowCreating and #GCCKeepsSafeKeepLearning.

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Digital Registers at Mearns Primary, East Renfrewshire

Digital Registers at Mearns Primary

Our class teachers set a question on the assignment tab asking if the pupil is present or not. This allows the SMT team to easily see who has engaged with the learning that day and who has not. 

They followed this guide made up by one of our teachers:

Members of SMT take this information and complete this Google Sheet for each classroom. 

 

This form is set up to provide an overview of the school statistics and percentages of pupils completing the digital registers. We then use this information to contact pupils who have not been engaging and see if there is any reason for this and if we can provide support. 

 

 

Google Forms for Hub Provision 

We have been using Google Forms to allow parents & carers to communicate what pupils require provision in the hub and for which days they require this. We use that information to populate a Google Sheet which we use for our daily register. It provides our office staff with the information they require for FileMaker. 

Similar to the digital registers, our hub daily register generates statistics which we use for our records. 

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Team MIEE Scotland share remote learning stories

The Microsoft Innovative Educator Experts from across Scotland have shared examples of how they are using Office365 within Glow in their settings.

These examples come from across the breadth and depth of the curriculum, from all over the country.

Remote Learning Stories O365 Glow

If you wish to know more about the MIEE programme in Scotland, please contact Sarah Clark @sfm36 on twitter

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Remote Learning in Glasgow

To date 81% of teachers and 41% of pupils now have 1:1 managed iPads through our Connected Learning Programme. The deployment has now restarted remotely firstly to teachers which will be followed by remote pupil deployment. All iPads are managed to ensure safe usage by pupils at home.

In response to the imminent closure of schools GCC created a remote learning site for teachers to access teacher, pupil and parent support materials for the main platforms used successfully in schools to engage with pupils, parents and each other: Seesaw, Showbie and Teams.

In addition we have been hosting webinars each week by teachers for teachers: Apple teacher Mondays 3.00 – 4.00 and Coffee – Break Learning 10.30 – 11.00 Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

To date we have over 1100 teachers signed up for the webinars with between 150 and 250 teachers tuning in each day. All webinars are recorded for watching at a suitable time. The Remote Learning support materials and webinars can be accessed at:

https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/gc/remotelearningglasgow/ 

Twitter @DL_for_All    

#DigiLearnGla   #GCCkeepsafekeeplearning 

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Photography Competition at Hillview primary School, East Renfrewshire

 

Photography Competition 

During this period of closure it is more important than ever to have families involved. Our photography competition invites all our stakeholders to enter and be part of something creative.

The final exhibition will be online but we hope to host it in a virtual art gallery using artsteps.com and allow our visitors to take a virtual tour where they will be able to admire and comment on our entries.

It isn’t quite the same as being in the gym hall but being in the same ‘virtual’ room is a step in the right direction! Creativity and connection are both good for mental health, which is a priority at this time. 

Twitter https://twitter.com/HillviewERC  

 

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Online Learning at St John’s Primary School, East Renfrewshire

Online Learning at St John’s Primary School 


St John’s, in Barrhead, have created their very own free-to-use website for teachers, parents and pupils to support learning from home during isolation periods of the Covid-19 outbreak. 

https://sites.google.com/view/homelearningsite

 

The purpose of the site is to support pupils and families by offering a wide variety of: 

  • Daily Challenges
  • Activity Ideas
  • Useful Websites
  • Useful Apps
  • ‘How to…’ videos
  • COVID-19 Support Resources for Children
  • YouTube links to support learning
  • Articles
  • Google Drive Resources
  • Discussion Groups 

There are a wide range of resources available across a number of different curricular areas in line with Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence. It is live and dynamic and is updated regularly. 

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History Teachers Connecting Through Teams

Scottish Association of Teachers of History (SATH) on Microsoft Teams by Rebecca Hay

If you are a Scottish History teacher get in touch with the SATH team:
twitter – @SATHinfo 

We got the Team set up in early February, so it’s a very new ‘baby’ of ours. Great timing as it turns out, as it meant that the resource was essentially there for teachers when the lockdown started.  

 

We have over 500 members, with an average of 100+ active every day. The discussion has been varied and interesting – today for example, an NQT put up a really interesting professional inquiry about virtual learning and it’s been interesting to hear others experiences.

Lots of people have been sharing resources they’ve discovered online, ideas that have worked, or asking for help and advice. Some teachers have worked collaboratively on developing materials (e.g. the ‘Meanwhile Elsewhere’ resource for BGE). From the Advanced Higher channel a little sub team of those who teach Germany has formed, and we’ve had virtual meetings to chat about our practice and share ideas. 

Probably the greatest help has been the huge amount of materials available in Files – 46GB of materials has been shared by teachers, and what a wonderful resource this has been to everyone, not just in the current situation, but for normal times too.  

 

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A Selfie in Isolation! North West Community Campus, Dumfries and Galloway

A Selfie in Isolation

by Jamie McKie, Primary Teacher from North West Community Campus in Dumfries and Galloway.

A Selfie in Isolation, an activity shared by Nicola Orr (@MrsOrrCPS) on Twitter has been used many times by teachers across the country.  Her resources can her found here.

Due to everyone being in lockdown, we’re experiencing home-schooling, coming together as a community and a whole bunch of emotions too! The children gave themselves something to look back on by taking a ‘selfie in isolation’. This could be completed as a family, with a pet or on your own – completely their choice!

To complete this activity, the children had to download the template and then insert appropriate sized text boxes to include information underneath the sub-headings and upload a selfie in the middle. The pupils were encouraged to be creative with font, size and colour. The result and engagement from learners towards this task was very positive and rewarding, I’m sure you’ll agree.