Lead role for Learning and Teaching Scotland confirmed by Scottish Government

Following a review the Scottish Government have confirmed that Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS) will continue to play a key role in transforming education in Scotland. Their new core remit

builds on the organisation’s strong track record in delivering significant education reform, including its key role in Curriculum for Excellence and the implementation of Glow in all 32 local authorities.

core remit is:-

• Curriculum – to keep the curriculum 3 – 18 under review and provide advice and support, including quality assured resources, on the curriculum 3 – 18 to Ministers and the education system;


• Assessment – to provide advice and support to Ministers and the education system on assessment to support learning, with support from SQA as appropriate, and to work with SQA to ensure the availability of quality assured resources to support assessment;


• Glow and ICT in schools – to provide advice and support to Ministers and the education system on the use of ICT to support education, to establish and maintain technology standards for education, to ensure practitioners have easy online access to advice and support, including digital resources and to manage the provision of the national ICT infrastructure to support education, currently Glow, the LTS Online Service and the local authority Interconnect.

There are a number of other areas that LTS may work with other partners, perhaps leading on certain elements, to ensure effective provision, including research and intelligence gathering, professional development and the sharing of good practice. 

The project has worked with LTS on a number of information literacy related projects and it is good to see that LTS will continue to work with partners on "research and intelligence gathering, professional development and the sharing of good practice." The current project we are working with them on is very much based in these areas linked to the Curriculum for Excellence - ‘Real and Relevant – Information and Critical Literacy Skills for the 21st Century Learner’ (Early and First Level)

Libraries and Learning in the E-environment

Yesterday I attended a stimulating and interesting event at the ELISA Open Forum 2009 - Libraries & Learning in the E-environment in Edinburgh. The programme was packed but well paced with lots of interesting presentations, discussions and cross sector delegates from library and information services in Edinburgh.

The morning keynote speaker was Nora Mogey, Head of Learning Services, Information Services, University of Edinburgh on "All kinds of E-verything". Nora went through the alpahabet informing us of lots of useful tools / free stuff that she / the university are using. Examples included:

• V for Voice Thread - you can record your thoughts about multimedia images - pictures, presentations, documents for example a class could make a multimedia presentation.


• K - Kineo - described as lots of e-learning free stuff


• A - Audacity - lets you record things, simple to use you download the software and your recordings go onto a file which you can then use. Edinburgh University are encouraging staff to use it to give feedback to students.  


• X - eXams - Edinburgh University are offering students the option to use computers for exams (text based ones only not possible for maths or diagram based exams) instead of using pens to write out their exam answers. a third of students have chosen this option.


• W - Wordle - lets you produce a cloud / word tag.


• J - JING - lets you take pictures of your screen,  record videos off onscreen action, share instantly over the web, IM , email.


• H - Hot Potatoes - lets you construct quizzes, crosswords etc. for the web.

Nora stressed that eLearning is not about learning online, the focus is on learning (pedagogy).

Elspeth Scott, ICT and elearning Staff Tutor, Dundee City Council Education Development Service  - talked about "GLOW: the national learning arena for schools".  Elspeth is an experienced school librarian and GLOW mentor. In her introductory session Elspeth gave an overview of GLOW stressing that it was not about IT / ICT but about learning and that it was an opportunity for librarians both school and public. For those that wanted to know more this was followed up in the share and discussion section. Elspeth logged onto GLOW to show interested parties what Dundee had added and the various aspects of GLOW in response to questions asked. The latest news includes:

• all 32 local authorities have now signed up to GLOW with 25 of them starting to use GLOW


• there is a pilot for Parent's accessing GLOW to see their child's work on GLOW


• Teacher Training are in - they will be using GLOW next session


• there is a pilot with FE colleges - Dundee College


• local authorities can decided who they involve as partners for instances - their public libraries or other organisations that may be beneficial.

Nicola Osbourne is a Social Media Officer at EDINA who is also a student study social media who gave us "A Day in an E-Life: E-Ventures in Studying, Working and Living!"  This was a fascinating insight into her personal, work and student life which she says "all overlap" and through technology is "always on". She likes doing 5 things at once and said that her learning takes place through Skype and Second Life. It is not a life that I am familiar with or would want to emulate but it is the life of many young people and a life style that educators should be aware of.

Other presentations were:

• how Stevenson College are experimenting with e-technologies including Web 2.0 tools as their VLE is not being used


• Edinburgh City Libraries - Virtual Library a work in progress which includes their Capital Collections which gives online access to some amazing and unique prints, photographs, engravings and drawings held by the library. In addition to participating in the online Enquire service (formerly ask a librarian) there is Ask Scotland which is an email service for questions about Scotland. They are launching in the autumn a community information database - Your Edinburgh. 


• digital services for parliamentarians - Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe)


• Waverley Care - who offer information and advice about HIV and Hepatitis C. This was an interesting insight into the work of agencies like this who found that in order to provide the information they first had to help people with skill building and confidence resulting in offerring classes (with Adult Literacy educators and other agencies) e.g. in IT, literacy, confidence.

The day finished with Hamish Macleod from the MSc programme in E-learning at Edinburgh University who talked about the programme which has part time students from all over the world and his thoughts and experiences. He did make reference to pedagogical principles and talked about capitalising on 'teachable moments' when someone wants to know something they want to learn. The term wasn't knew to me as I had come across it in the book I'm currently reading about Practical Pedagogy for Library Instructors - which I will post another time. Now I need to get on with sending out the information I promised people yesterday.  

Hopefully the presentations will be made available through the ELISA website and next year's event will be just as successful. Well done to the ELISA committee and Wendy ball the ELISA Development Officer for a great day.

School librairan and GLOW

Recently came across a blog posting about a school librarian's thoughts and experiences about GLOW (Scotland's national intranet for education) entitled Get Glowing which makes interesting reading about the issues she is facing also her experience on an introductory presentation on GLOW to the staff at her school. Jen's other thoughts and activities also make for interesting reading including the Visible Thinking project she is involved in. Some great work going on here both in an information literacy sense, individually and collaboratively.

A case of watch this space, get the thought process working and share ideas and thoughts.

Scottish Learning Festival

Included in the the sesions I attended was the keynote speech by Fiona Hyslop MSP Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning in which she outlined the central role of learning in supporting the Scottish Government’s strategic objectives. Of particular interest was that of a mention of Information Literacy skills and Dundee Librarians creating a community of Information Literacy skills in her speach in reference to examples of joined up working and GLOW.

She spoke quite a bit about GLOW (a national digital network for Scottish Schools) and referred to it as a truely innovative service on a national basis, recognised by George Lucas who was calling on US Congress to do the same. (Laurie O'Donnell, director of learning and technology at Learning and Teaching Scotland, was named as one of the George Lucas Educational Foundation's "global six". Each year, the film-maker's foundation honours six educationalists who it believes are "reshaping education". O'Donnell was honoured for his use of information technology.)

With reference to the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) she said it was skills for learning, skills for life, beyond curricular into life and that there was still much to do: assessments; skills development; professional development for teachers.

In the afternoon I attended a thought provoking session by Ruth Sutton entitled "It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it…that’s what gets results" she talked about 'not the what but the how of teaching' and that there was 'not enough focus on the how' and that there was an 'enourmous gap between vision and reality'. She also talked about initiatives and spining or weaving plates and that from a personal perspective 'nothing that we identify as best practice is entirely new'.

With reference to research and practitioners - she talked about 'how do we get the water to the end of the furrow' which I though was a good analogy for getting research out into practice something which the library and information profession research community has looked at. On Assessments - Assesment for Learning (AfL) was more like Assessment for Teachers however teachers that support Assessment for Learning would not go back. Also there needed to be a move from 'plan for coverage to planning for learning'.

She talked a little about Limbic Learning (a new term for me) which is all about using the part of the brain which deals with emotion, experiences and habits - helps the telling into habits from knowing into doing. According to Sutton Limbic Learning is the key to challenge traditional approach to teachers' professional development. Returning to the how not the what she said that Curriculum for Excellence needs to be defined as the how not the what.

The afternoon's keynote Reforming the High School Curriculum: Tools for Raising Quality of Learning and Improving Equity, Richard Teese, Professor of Post Compulsory Education Training and Director of the Centre for Post Compulsory Education and Lifelong Learning, University of Melbourne. He sees CfE as far sighted and ambitious and that it will tax Scottish schools on two major fronts: how to raise the quality of learning of many students and how to ensure that all young people build well on a succesful experience of school. He says progress on both these fronts will require strong incentives. His keynote included identifying some of the key challenges for Scotland in the context of CfE.

My final session of the day was Real and Relevant - Information Literacy Skills for the 21st century Learner Louise Ballantyne, Development Officer, Literacy, Learning and Teaching Scotland. According to her biography 'Louise has a broad experience of teaching at different stages throughout the primary school. Most recently at LTS she has played a key role in the writing of Literacy and English outcomes for CfE, and has engaged with authorities across Scotland as to how to take the framework forward.' I was particulalry interested in hearing what Louise had to say about information literacy as the Seminar Description refered to 'the Curriculum for Excellence experiences and outcomes direct practitioners to help learners find and use information effectively, to use information ethically and with a critical eye.' Whilst what Louise was saying with reference to information literacy was not new to school librarians and those professionals involved in information literacy it was interesting and good to hear a teacher talk about information literacy. Once finished her material will I understand be available on the CfE website. I also understand that one of the school librarian GLOW mentors approached her about the material being included in GLOW. I hope to meet up with her at a later date and discuss as the seminar describes 'one of the more challenging areas of Curriculum for Excellence.' This is the part I like about attending events sharing information with other people.