A team of seven staff from Dundee attended the first national training session for Glow Learn in Stirling on Monday and Tuesday this week. Glow Learn is the Virtual Learning Environment component of the portal whcih allows the creation, delivery and monitoring and marking of courses.
On the first day, we saw how straightforward it was to build a course both by using existing file based resources and by creating tests for assessment. Courses could include documents, presentations, video or audio files or weblinks – the only limit is the imagination of the teacher and the class. Courses can then be assigned to pupils using the groups brought across from SEEMIS or on an individual basis. Courses can be shared across an establishment, and also at local authority or national level. Tuesday focused on looking at the assessment, monitoring and tracking facilities incorporated into Glow Learn and how those could be used to support learning.
Glow Learn is powerful tool, but its real potential comes when it is linked with Glow Groups to create Learning Spaces which allow the functions of the VLE to be used alongside the collaboration, communication and discussion tools of the portal.
Another group from Dundee will be attending the second training course on 11th and 12th December. There will then be at least one trained Glow Learn person in each secondary school as well as Staff Tutors available to support the development of Glow Learn in Dundee.
E. Scott