Mrs Baty – West Lothian Digital Learning Team

Meet the Masters: Introducing our latest Promethean Certified Trainers

We are thrilled to introduce our latest cohort of Promethean Certified Trainers, who are excited to share their knowledge and new expertise of the Promethean panels and the ActivInspire software with their schools and clusters.

This technology can significantly enhance learner engagement, ensuring that learners benefit from more interactive and dynamic educational experiences.

Key takeaways and most impactful learning experiences identified by the participants included:

Promethean tools available on the panels and online (such as spinner, annotate and timer)
ActivInspire tools, tips and hints (such as the use of templates, interactive manipulatives, reveal sliders and overlays)
Laptop and Online tools to boost engagement and collaboration (such as MS Whiteboard, floating keyboard, split screen functionality and MS Accessibility Tools)
Features to enhance productivity (such as importing and annotating PDF’s, exporting lessons as JPEGs or PDFs to share and ability to use the board separately from the laptop)

Congratulations all, we are excited to see how you take this new knowledge forward in your schools.

P7s dive into Adobe Express at Pumpherston and Uphall Station Community Primary School

I can really see the potential for using this in class, it’s engaging all my learners in different ways.
P7 Teacher

Our Digital Pedagogy Officers were supporting at Pumpherston and Uphall Station Community Primary School this week, team teaching in P7.

The aims for the session were to:

Foster collaboration through digital tools and platforms
Enhance engagement using digital tools to present learning and information
Build confidence in using Adobe Express for creativity

The highlights of the session included:

Learners engaged and enthusiastic about using Adobe Express, and excited to discuss how else they can use it in the future to enhance learning.
Learners found the interface and usability easy to navigate, building confidence with ALL learners. Usually shy learners were excited to share their learning and the Adobe Express tools with their peers and teachers.
Learners were confidently exploring tools on their own, working out how to add animations to still images, and including buttons and links to their webpages.
Learners were excited to share their creations through Teams, and enjoyed exploring each others creations, providing feedback and next steps as ‘comments’ and ‘reactions’.

Webpage example 1

Webpage Example 2

Sparking Imagination with Adobe Express

This week, the Digital Learning Team worked with Seafield Primary in creatively enhancing learning and teaching using Adobe Express, following on from our staff input last week.

Some of the highlights from the day include:

Learners actively supporting each other to share tools, tips and ideas, such as removing backgrounds from images, or adding outlines to text to enhance the visibility.
Learners working collaboratively to create projects with real-life purposes. One fab example of this was some P7 pupils recording nursery rhymes, adding animations, sharing the video as a QR code and then creating a bright, attention-grabbing infographic to share the QR code.
Learners able to confidently articulate the purpose of learning and able to discuss the benefits of using Adobe Express.
Learners able to draw upon their previous knowledge and learning, to share detailed information, demonstrating their depth of understanding.

One class explored the video, animation and graphic features to share learning. They identified some key features of a successful and informative poster as needing bright, bold colours, large text, short statements, related images and animations or eye-catching features.

“I like making videos in Adobe Express, because it’s fun and interesting. It’s quicker to use, and more fun than PowerPoint, because there’s more things to learn, it’s newer, you can draw and add animations.”
P7 pupil

“I like when we could add my voice to my character”
P4 Pupil

Adobe Express is accessible through the tile on your school Glow launchpad.

Click here for more information.

Enhancing Digital Skills at Seafield PS

This afternoon, one of our Digital Pedagogy Officers held a training session with the staff at Seafield Primary, specifically focusing on the Microsoft Learning Accelerators, Microsoft Accessibility Tools, and Adobe Express, to build engagement and support all learners.

Adobe Express offers great opportunities for collaboration, feedback, engagement and creativity. Today, staff explored a number of features, but particularly enjoyed the ‘Animate Your Voice’ function, producing some cute results.

Staff explored how to use or further embed the use of the Microsoft Learning Accelerators and Accessibility tools, to support ALL learners.

The tools we looked at today included:

Reflect
Reading Progress & Reading Coach
Search Progress
Immersive Reader
Dictate
Accessibility within Microsoft Edge

It was great having an in person session. I really liked that it was informative but also informal so we could ask questions specifically relating to our own class or our own level of knowledge. Thanks! 😊Class Teacher

It was great to learn more about Adobe Express and I have now added all pupils in the class with lots of thoughts on how we can use this in the near future.

P6/7 Teacher

We are looking forward to seeing how these tools are used across the school in the near future. Good luck Seafield, and thanks for a great session today.