All posts by Pam McDowall

Professional Learning Needs Consultation

Next session, the Digital Learning Team’s mission is to weave digital tools naturally through every area of the curriculum, making it an effortless and creative part of every school day.

To help your establishment, department or cluster achieve this, we are planning to introduce five key collegiate sessions, plus a bespoke session for our ELCCs. These 1.5 hour sessions are designed to be booked as part of your collegiate calendars, allowing for dedicated, collaborative time to support your digital goals. Our approach is device-agnostic, ensuring every establishment can participate and thrive, regardless of the technology you have in your classrooms.

While our collegiate sessions focus on team growth, we know that individual inspiration is just as important. That’s why these will be offered alongside our Spotlight Sessions, which will be run in collaboration with our Digital Partners. These are standalone opportunities where individuals can sign up to explore specific interests and develop their own unique professional learning journeys, which, in turn, can feed into your improvement journey.

We want to ensure our new Collegiate Sessions and Spotlight Sessions truly meet the needs of your staff and learners.

Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts on this new approach. Your feedback will directly shape our final catalogue for the upcoming session.

Let’s transform to innovate, together.

https://forms.gle/BjUTghP22QnLUw3w9

AI Tools in Glow

Ahead of our AI Tools showcase this week, I though it would be helpful to share again our AI Staff Toolkit for Gemini and Notebook LM. Here you will find the playlist to watch again all our sessions so far, alongside lots of guides and ideas of how you as an educator can make use of these fantastic tools to support learning and teaching. We regularly update our Staff Toolkits so make sure you check back regularly for more useful hints!

AI Champion Educators – March 2026

 

Below is a recording of the 6th session of our AI Champion Educators with Martin Coutts and Susan Sey from Education Scotland. This looks at the latest Gemini and Notebook LM updates. Martin also shared a playlist of Google Gemini hints and tips.

We hope you are enjoying our Watch Again opportunities from this fantastic series!

https://youtu.be/fONsKUG8qCg

Read&Write for iPad – 9 March, Course ID: 93970

Join us for an engaging virtual session showcasing how Read&Write for iPad can support inclusion and accessibility across the curriculum. You’ll see how the combination of our dedicated writing app and our specialist keyboard helps learners build confidence in reading and writing – anytime, anywhere. We will explore how Read&Write supports a wide range of needs including literacy challenges and EAL.

We’ll look at key features like text-to-speech, word prediction, dictionaries, and translation, demonstrating how they can be embedded into everyday classroom activities to boost independence and engagement.

Ideal for schools using iPads in learning environments, this session will leave you with actionable ideas to help every learner thrive.

Sign up via CPD Manager, Course ID: 93970.

Sector Needs Engagement

 

As we begin to look forward to next session, an important part of this work is capturing staff needs. This year, we have asked staff to complete surveys, used Professional Learning sessions discussion to capture thoughts, along-side school/ELCC visits. To make sure this feedback is accurate, we would like to invite staff to come along to a face-to-face meeting to discuss the needs of their establishment alongside their own needs. We have some suggestions around what that could look like based on the current feedback and want to make sure we are hitting the right notes for your sector.

We have identified 2 dates for these sessions:

  • Tuesday 3 March from 4.00 – 5.00 pm for Early Years practitioners and Primary Staff
  • Wednesday 4 March from 4.00 – 5.00 pm for Secondary staff

If you are able to attend the relevant session on the above dates please complete this form by 25 February.

Once I have identified numbers of attendees, I will confirm the venue.

Sector Needs Engagement – Fill in form

Thank-you in advance for your support with ensuring that our Digital Learning Strategy aligns with your needs.