Prestonpans Awayday

I attended the East Lothian GLOW mentors meeting in Prestonpans yesterday.

There was a presentation by Learning and Teaching Scotland about how the GLOW project is progressing and we were given some idea of the timescales regarding when GLOW will be made available and also given some idea as to when our training as mentors would begin.

The dates will not be set in stone and I guess with such an ambitious project such as GLOW it must be expected that the timelines will slip to the right a little.

It is hoped that GLOW mentors will be able to access the portal in November for about a month to enable us to familiarise ourselves with all its components.It should then reappear in January with more tools and applications to be assessed and “played” with.

Our training as mentors will take place in the Stirling Management centre and will last approx 2.5 days and will cover subjects such as sharing practice, a curriculum for excellence workshops and the theory of co coaching. It is expected that training for the 600 or so GLOW mentors will take place from May next year.

Don Ledingham then gave a talk about his vision including East Lothian Schools, learning and teaching and the future. Having reads Dons Blog, posted comments, and written in this blog about a topic he had blogged about I was interested in hearing what he had to say, rather than reading it in print. I liked what I heard. At no time did I feel like I was being patronised and I genuinely believe Dons philosophy with regard to community, management attitudes and the future will be a great asset to East Lothian Council.

We worked in groups after lunch and continued to shape the strategies which will affect how GLOW is handled within East Lothian, and the feeling of excitement amongst the GLOW mentors was almost palpable.

We are using wiki’s to put together our ideas and I will blog more about how things are going when we get things firmed up.

I got the bus home with Ewan McIntosh, after a couple of pints of Gothenburg porter, and we blethered about all kinds of stuff and the possibility of doing a couple of projects in the science department of Musselburgh Grammar School utilising multimedia technology.

All in all it was an excellent day, many thanks to Karen Robertson for organising it.

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