Today Morag is talking to a group of NLC Head Teachers about e-Portfolios.
I am blogging about it. blogging is easy, I would expect a longer and better piece of writing by a primary 6!
I spent the morning at St Mary’s Primary working with primary 6-7 using GarageBand to make music.
The music files were uploaded to the NLC GarageBand glow group where you can hear them all (Glow loging required).
Att he end of the morning we took 15 minutes to make this short movie about working with GarageBand.
Karen-Ann from RM and Katie from LTS are leading a very keen (Saturday) group of North Lanarkshirethorugh some advanced glow features including Blogs & e-portfolios as part of the NLC Glow Projects. For myself, as a primary person, it is really interesting to see how secondaries are using glow already and how they plan to take it forward. It will be worth watching the NLC Glow Projects blog to see how things shape up.
I am spending the day watching Karen-Ann McSwiggan and Sarah Burton of the Glow National Team enthuse a group of NLC secondary teachers about using glow. They have set a cracking pace covering lots of ideas for using old and new features of glow mixed with time for practical tasks on glow. This is just one of two days of the second tier of targeted support NLC secondaries are receiving. The Third tier will involed support from the National glow team in the schools involved.
the official blog post for the day is 2nd Day 1 Session of Tier 2 Training – Thurs 17th Feb
This morning I was in Sikeside Primary introducing the Primary sixes and sevens to blogging.
We created a couple of blogs: Sikeside Sixes and Sikeside Sevens I then worked with the classes in turn covering resizing images and posting text and images to the blogs. The children were well prepared with photos and notes about recent events in school.
There are now quite a number of glow blogs in North Lanarkshire and it is interesting to see the variety of ways pupils and teachers are blogging.
NL teachers can get in touch if they want a wee hand starting to blog.
On Friday last week I helped Mr Nisbet deliver Glow Buster training at St Patrick’s primary in Kilsyth.
Glow Busters are groups of 10 primary 6 pupils who get 2 half days of fairly in depth training in glow. The plan being that these children can help get other pupils logged onto glow and act as experts in the school. The pupils worked really hard but seem to enjoy the morning. We covered, navigation round glow and some of the external resources, using the Text Editor and picture libraries. The children are taught one of the latter two and then teach and are taught by a partner. The next visit will cover Internet Safety, IPR, some image editing and glow blogging on the Glow buster’s Blog. Clicking on the image above will play a 30 second movie created on my iPhone with ReelDirector.
On Thursday afternoon I was at St Dominic’s Primary working with the p7s and St Dominic’s Glow mentor Ms. Sweeney . They have a great space in the open area of the school with a suite of iMacs. The afternoon was made more interesting by some robust Road Safety singing from the infants in the hall next door. The children have spaces as their topic this term so we used the Space page in the NLC classroom glow group. This links out to several Purple Mass activities, for a bit of fun we used the Alien Profile Creator. The children were able to create amusing profiles for their aliens, save them as PNG files and upload them to the glow group.
One wee glitch was one pupil attempts to save their work failed. They could name the file, but the standard file dialog box did not open. I’ve seen this on several occasions with PurpleMass activities. A quick screenshot saved the work.
Glow blogs provide an easy way to post to the web. You can post text, audio & video. The only limit is the upload file size which is limited to 5mbs. This is fine for audio but you need to keep video short and small. There is a way around this. You can have a podcast set up on the NLC Podcast server where is is very easy to post audio and video file of up to 50mb. Here is a screencast showing how easy it is: Uploading a podcast even easier than using a glow blog.
Once it is there is is simple to post this to your blog:
These instructions are for Safari (tested on v5)
Here are some pictures of the process. click the first thumbnail and then on the left to move on.
and here is an example movie, this one shows how to create a header for your blog using Keynote.
I just copied link from RSS feed in Safari and paste it into visual editor.
This post is a quick demo of tagging & categorising.
Tags and categories can be used to organise your posts on a blog, say, for e-portfolios.
