Katrina Owens at Craighead was drawing attention to ‘animoto’. Well worth a look at! This link talks about using ‘animoto’ on glow. It was an interesting follow up to a ’sharing practice’ course at Stirling Management Centre. Follow the link to find out more.
http://thegordonschools.typepad.co.uk/asu/2008/04/what-is-glow-vi.html
A number of folk are finding ‘Flickr’ useful for storing and accessing images to use on Glow sites.
Provided you are following the terms of copyright, then copy the ‘url’ for the image and paste it into the advanced images web part.
South Lanarkshire Mentors are working at launching all pupils and staff on glow this term. A simple proforma for passwords has been suggested. If you want to know more about this seek advice from your school mentor. Straight away folk can get benefits by using their school sites and as they build their personal sites. Don’t be afraid to comment with first impressions!
One of the clubs in a school which will find glow really useful will be the magazine club. It is easy to add a page for this to a general school clubs group and then add web parts or create and add the web parts needed for it, as you need them. The parts which go well in this are the documents, picture library, text editor, discussion and web links. The great thing about a group for clubs and adding pages is that as a club rises and wains a club can easily be added or removed and the membership is secure.
I observed one of the ‘early adopter’ schools in South Lanarkshire using ‘chat’ for work on a topic again today. The trick is to get the moderator on first! Not always as easy as it sounds! The users are becoming more accustomed to it now and we are beginning to move away from the monosyllabic chat room some are used to using at home. It will take quite a bit of thinking and ‘follow my leader’ work to hone the chat into the work being done and to focus it usefully there. The process of learning this skill will be an important life skill and a great way of sharing knowledge.
A quick way into your e-mails is to store the url onto ‘web links’ in ‘my glow’ and then open the link in a ‘new page’ by holding down the ’shift’ key as you select. Obvious to many but very useful!
Into term 2 of the glow roll out in South Lanarkshire. So far all has been going well. There is a great expectation through awareness raising of ‘glow’ and now that folk have got their hands on it the sites are going up. It will be interesting to see the initial evaluations but my view shows that pupils have taken to it well and the potential of the groups and of the discussions tools are enormous. Even if the discussion tool alone is used, it helps people to hone in on the core issues of what they really know and of what is really important.
A tip from the glow Mentors training -
If you want to ‘change other users profile’ in the ‘glow settings’ part of ‘my glow’ you may need to ‘modify’ the web part ‘glow settings’. Navigate to ‘miscellaneous’ and tick the box to allow you to change other users profiles.
In Service Day at Muiredge Primary and a very interesting presention on MP4 players and their use in schools. They have fantastic potential for learning and teaching across the curriculum. Teachers saw potential for teaching phonics, number work and for helping to develop reading skills. As an assessment tool an MP4 player could be used to deliver reports and information from different groups bringing together a variety of ingathered information. Interviewing an ‘expert’ witness was another possible use. The MP4 player we saw today had been designed especially for education. More information about it can be had at http://www.do-be.co.uk/index.html
Primary 5 in High Blantyre Primary were producing some very attractive repeating patterns using the following programme. Try it!
My go program.gop
blakwide.bmp
redwide.bmp
bluewide.bmp
yelowide.bmp
R2[ ]
forward2
right135
forward2
right 110
forward2
right135
[ ]
