Connected Blog

After a week of research findings about how young people use the net here on Connected Live, Jaye Richards from Cathkin High School presents us with more questions (and a few answers, too) about the potential for improving attainment by using Scotland’s national intranet, Glow.

The improvement in attainment has been significant, and you don’t have to read between the lines to see the potential for a second development the architects of Glow maybe hadn’t considered: Glow helps those teachers with less experience help their learners excel particularly more.

This research study tracked four S3 classes working through the same modules as part of the standard grade Biology course. Results were tested using summative instruments of assessment comprising topic-specific questions from past standard grade Biology papers, and an end of year exam. One class, after two modules taught without it, studied one module using ICT timetabled for one of three lessons each week over one school term, with a mixture of independent and collaborative learning tasks reinforcing the learning objectives for that week, delivered using the GLOW virtual learning environment.

Results for this class with the same pupils and the same teacher showed a mean increase of 32.27% for the GLOW vs. non-GLOW modules. The attainment of this class on the non-GLOW modules was consistent and significantly below the best of the four classes. However, on the GLOW module, it was better by 14.69% than the mean of the other three classes. Further examination of the results showed that the weaker students benefited at least as much as their more able classmates.

John Connell, one of Glow’s fathers (or is it uncles?) and now working for Cisco, has lifted the main questions that remain for us to answer in a superb sumary of Jaye’s extensive research. Likewise, I’d encourage those both implementing or deciding how to imlpement Glow to read the paper and make their own suggestions as to how those questions could be answered, here on Connected Live or on John’s blog.

It’s not as odd as it sounds, but innovations in spaghetti sauce (and Pepsi, and mustard) might hold clues as to how Glow, the Curriculum for Excellence and other ‘national’ initiatives can prove successful on the most niche of local levels.

At Learning and Teaching Scotland I’ve been leading some monthly Inspiration Sessions, today being the second one. Last month’s debates were based on Sir Ken Robinson’s Do Schools Kill Creativity?, and from it came some key points for development in the way staff might approach certain challenges. More on those later, I hope, but for the first session we kept the results on our staff forum to see what would happen. 10 times the number of views than normal is what happened; people have seen where they can move things forward for themselves. You can see some of the links we discussed on delicious.

This month, I was curious to see how the niche would be catered for in Glow and the Curriculum for Excellence, especially having recently presented a fair bit on how the social web has capitalised on small passionate communities. The basis was Gladwell’s talk on how marketers in the past forty years have discovered the niche’s power, in much the same way as Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail describes. As some of my colleagues noted, most of the ‘big deals’ in Scottish education these past few years have been “national initiatives” or “national programmes”, leaving LTS and Local Authority staff to impress the importance of local contexts and connections. It’s what Gladwell calls the “platonic dish” approach to policy: this is the right way to do it, there is no other, versus a more user-centred approach, where we empower the user to do what they want, versus an “ask the user what they want” approach, with the complication that the user doesn’t always know what they want. Gladwell puts all these three arguments forward and leaves you buzzing, recognising elements of each in every project you’ve ever done, and not entirely sure where you want to go next.

View a high quality version of the Malcolm Gladwell talk here.

It was with this meeting of minds that we had a good hour of debate, and a set of tangible actions for our teams to undertake, to help make a dent in the concept of encouraging and celebrating small, passionate groups of participation on Glow, exhibiting, if you like, what the Curriculum is all about. Some of the interesting points to come out:

• Making the many ways ‘into’ Glow explicit: with a mentor, through an online module, with a product guide, going to an event, keeping an eye on the Glow blog watch…
• Making variety more visible: showcasing interesting groups or practice. There are some technical questions about how we do this, as it’s hard to see “into” a group created at a local level, harder still to promote it to a national.
• Reinforcing the messages about localising practice through Area Advisers’ work, and with HMIe finding local good practice and innovation, reporting on it during their work.
• Every single launch event should have a “this is what Glow can do in this context”. There might even be some double-branding to drive the point home.
• We’re going to start infiltration of each other’s meetings far more often, using Glow groups of other parts of our organisation to ‘listen in’ on discussions and spot opportunities for collaboration. This will be further aided if anyone can put a date into the whole-staff diary without having to go through a colleague first.
• The calendar is useful as it currently stands on our intranet homepage, but we also need a YouTube-esque Today, Tomorrow, This Month, This Year, to alert us in good time to events happening in the near future. We will also work on an option to have it to text message via Twitter, simply by splicing in a feed from our intranet events.
• Finally, recording of presentations, while happening far more often than ever before, needs to be done as standard, with sharing on Slideshare of visuals. They might not be of use to more than a score or two of people, but the cost is almost non-existent and potential impact huge.

There are some further ideas for developing these in the delicious links I’ve been pulling together on the theme of niches. But the parting shot was an interesting take on what might be called LTS’s Extra Special Range (extending the food and supermarket metaphors to breaking point here!). We all tend to work for our customers – as Don Ledingham has put it before, his customers could be students, parents, teachers, lots of different groups depending on the product or outcome and scenario. One of our colleagues, with experience in the retail sector, talked about the customer’s customer, the theory that we are producing things not for the person who is buying the shopping but for the person for whom the good or service is intended. It raises interesting ideas again on the kind of metrics we used to guage success in Glow or of the new Curriculum. It will almost certainly not be on hits, and may not even be on ‘active users’, whatever they might look like.

However, the big question should be: “What has the impact been on a student’s education?” There are new metrics, involving our development officers, Local Authority QIOs, teachers, parents and students even evaluating the impact of the various programmes, pedagogies and tehcniques that have been employed. How, though, can that be filtered through in a meaningful way, so that those charged with trying to make things better still can do so with reliable evidence? Ideas on the virtual postcard? (or just use the comments below). 

When it comes to explaining GLOW to other teachers, we are in danger of missing something really important… We’d better get on board with it really soon or the parents are going to want to know why.

I’ve been involved in a couple of really interesting conversations recently that have made me realise that the ‘tipping point’ for Glow may be closer than we think. A friend recently turned round and asked me just what Glow was. After a brief explanation, I began to realise that, not only did he already have an idea what it was, he could also see its relevance and potential. How do I know that? Simply because what he really wanted to know was why his kids were being denied access to the resource. In short, he knew what it was and he wanted his kids using it…

I think this is something we lose sight of all too easily. We see Glow with the same eyes that see every other ‘big new thing’ in education… and sometimes people forget that education is not just for the educators… it’s actually for the pupils. And they have parents who have a vested interest in making sure their children have the best opportunities possible.

As more and more people do have access to the resources and facilities offered by Scotland’s National Schools Intranet, those who aren’t on board yet will find themselves at a potential disadvantage. Maybe it won’t be of the ‘moving to a Glowing Authority’ level yet, but I wonder how long parents will be happy at knowing their authority has yet to sign up…

Adam kicks off a roundup of a superb event in Aberdeenshire to get its teachers (and students) motivated through new technologies, including some interesting world-breaking uses of Glow. Tim Rylands, one of the keynote presenters, gives his own take and some of the background of his long-term involvement with the Authority. Martin provides more coverage (and cheesy pics) of what seems to have been a first class event.

Connected Live brings you extra content on top of what you can read in your paper edition of Connected magazine. Here, read exclusively all the questions and answers on Scotland’s national intranet Glow with LTS’s Director of Learning and Technology Laurie O’Donnell that didn’t make it to the magazine:

“Glow’s most important advocates are our teachers and learners”
Few educationalists doubt the power of Glow to transform learning and teaching, but when will it be in every classroom and how has the money been spent? Laurie O’Donnell, LTS’s Director of Learning and Technology, answers your questions:

You have been quoted as saying that Glow is the most ambitious education ICT project in the world. How are we doing so far?
We are putting in place the world’s first national schools intranet, and that’s a very ambitious programme. Glow is an attempt to provide a level playing field, so that whether you are living on a remote island or a big city, you will have the same access to high-quality ICT resources. It’s about equality of access, creating a national service that’s available to big, small, rural, urban – that’s really important.

I think every country in the world will connect schools like this – we’re just the first. Scotland has a long and proud record of building a high-achieving and high-equity education system. Part of that national tradition is to innovate and change. We were one of the first to have a curriculum that was not based on the Classics, and among the first to base education around universal literacy. Glow sits within that. It’s not about having a backward education system that need updated; it’s about innovating part of a system that’s already built on very strong foundations. It’s not a solution technology – it’s an enabling technology.

We are still in the foothills of realising the benefits of ICT in schools and this is supported by the findings of the 2006 HMIE ICT report. Our curriculum, assessment, CPD and infrastructure will continue to change as we seek to engage our children and young people in learning and give them the means to make a good life for themselves in an increasingly globalised economy.

Glow is just another step along the road of continuous improvement for Scottish education – a journey that has always tried to make use of the best available technology, from the slate to the pencil through the blackboard and the overhead projector, and of course in terms of ICT, from the stand-alone computer of the 1980s to the web-enabled device connecting to Glow anytime and anywhere of today.

One indicator of how we are doing is the level of international interest in Glow from across the world. Recent visits to schools in Singapore, USA, England, Wales and Northern Ireland suggest to me that education systems are all facing the same challenges. One of these challenges relates to how we make sophisticated ICT services available to schools. We expect cost-effective, sustainable and scalable services on the one hand (i.e. providing best value to the public purse) and on the other hand they need to be able to support personalised learning as well as collaborative learning, enable and facilitate the sharing of resources and the development of communities of practice, and much more (i.e. systems that are fit for purpose in the context of 21st century education).

I expect other countries to follow in Scotland’s steps as they attempt to connect their teachers and learners to bring their schools into the 21st century – or should that be to bring the 21st century into their schools!

The best part of £40m of taxpayers’ money has already been committed to this project. What do you think the return on investment will be for the country as a whole?
The return on investment has three dimensions. First of all it’s about economies of scale, secondly it’s about releasing teacher time from routine tasks, and thirdly it’s about investment in the future of our young people.

The numbers are big with Glow not only in terms of cost but also coverage: all 32 local authorities; 3,000 schools; 750,000 learners; 53,000 teachers; all trainee teachers and their lecturers; all local authority education staff; SQA; HMIE; LTS and others. Over time we also want to work with local authorities to provide access to parents, but that may be a few years down the line.

When you take that into account, £40m doesn’t seem as much. That’s not to say that I’m not conscious that it’s £40m of taxpayers’ money that could have been spent on health or other key areas, but you have to have a sense of scale.

We have gone through a rigorous European procurement process which generated fierce competition for the Glow contract and we have been able to secure excellent value to the public purse because we a talking about a country rather than a school, cluster of schools or local authority. The five-year £37.5m Glow Intranet contract with RM divides into two parts – roughly half to develop and integrate the systems with the other half to provide Glow as a service.

So, firstly there’s a sense of scale. Secondly, there are the savings. In the short-term, if every teacher saves even an hour a week by being able to access support, advice and high-quality resources through Glow, then it very quickly starts to pay for itself. If you assume a teacher is paid roughly £20 an hour and only half of Scottish teachers save an hour a week you generate £500k of ‘savings’ every week through Glow. If every teacher saves an hour a week then it’s £1m a week – or the total investment in Glow every year. These ‘savings’ are not cashable, i.e. the Government does not make savings on teachers’ salaries, but rather teachers are released from routine tasks to spend more time on teaching and supporting learning.

Thirdly, and in the longer-term, it is about the overall quality of Scottish education as it continues to innovate and develop. Scotland has many natural resources but our most important resource is our people and Glow is an investment in the future of our young people. What do our schools look like in the 21st century? I think it’s unimaginable to have a school now without technology, just as it would be for a bank, hospital or workplace.

Glow provides a trusted and safe resource to bring the benefits of social networking. It uses the power of technology in a learning context, making it much safer. That’s why the investment was agreed and that’s why it remained even after the change of administration.

In the same way that other countries are interested in the Glow model for education, there is considerable interest from elsewhere in the public sector in Scotland and it may be that another aspect of the return on investment for the country is in the development of Glow as a prototype for a wider public sector shared online service.

Local authorities need to put a lot of work into preparing for Glow. What would you say is its strongest selling point from their point of view?
The strongest selling point of Glow is that it’s a national system that will be able to connect teachers and learners across 3,000 schools and beyond. If you’re a maths teacher in Argyll & Bute you can communicate with other teachers in your school but now also extend that to other areas. It creates an opportunity for national collaboration. Every single resource created in the classroom should be able to be saved and communicated through Glow. The best lessons can be saved and re-used. You will of course adapt that resource, but it’s wonderful to have. It extends sharing between departments and schools to the whole country. The days of teachers, departments, schools and even local authorities reinventing the wheel should be numbered. Glow provides the structures to support collaboration and sharing across Scotland.

Teachers have been hearing a lot about Glow over the last 18 months, but many are asking “Why is Glow not in my classroom yet?” How would you respond to this question?
The job of making Glow available to local authorities has been completed on time, to budget and as specified. However, implementing Glow at a local authority level is not a trivial task. Each local authority has to have detailed plans that cover everything from local technical support to staff training and development. It is important that local authorities are given the time to implement Glow when they are ready and to be able to do the job well. Our hope is that Glow will be available to every teacher and every learner in local authority primary and secondary schools by early in 2009 and we will do everything we can to support the local authorities to get Glow into their classrooms.

One of the challenges is in how we promote Glow. The people who really need to sell it are the teachers and learners, they’re the advocates. But at the same time we have £40m investment and we need to justify it. I believe it’s my duty to make sure people are aware of the opportunities that that money brings. However at the end of the day Glow is a voluntary programme, so it’s important to strike a balance.

If teachers want to see ‘Glow in action’, where would they go to see examples of how it’s being used in and across schools and local authorities right now?
The first schools to use Glow are in East Dunbartonshire, with schools in Dundee, Renfrewshire and South Lanarkshire following quickly behind. We hope to capture the best of Glow online at www.glowscotland.org.uk  LTS also managed an email bulletin Glowing, which you can sign-up to online. Of course, Connected will continue to cover Glow, as it has since Glow was just an idea back in 2001.

Schools from outside of Scotland can also use Glow – how does this work?
Glow can accommodate international guests. The route to accessing Glow is through the Glow customer agreement through local authorities, the SQA, HMIE and other bodies. All of these users can invite guests – be they one-off visitors or partner schools abroad – and limit what they can access. For example, a teacher doing a project with a school overseas can sign in the guest school, chat over the web, hold a video conference and much more. At the end, the visitor account is closed. It’s very flexible but someone has to ‘own’ the guest, and make sure that person behaves properly, without destroying the innovative use of technology. There are of course other social network tools available but they are not designed for education, and Glow offers a safe forum.

We know there are already plans in place for Glow 2. How do you see Glow and Glow 2 driving forward transformational change in Scottish education over the next 5 to 10 years?
We have started to call what happens after the current Glow contract comes to an end Glow 2 and our work in preparing the ground for this is also progressing well. We started thinking about Glow 2 in 2001, when we first started to develop Glow 1! We knew that Glow 1 would take years, but we would only do that once. By the time Glow 2 comes out the schools will have a common infrastructure, so the hard part is over. The question is what to do once that’s established.

The biggest change is the personalised curriculum. You see it in health and other sectors too – your services meet your profile, you’re not just a number in a big queue. I have started to call this development of a more personalised curriculum ‘My Curriculum for Excellence’. Glow 2 will have the aspiration of personalised learning in the context of Curriculum for Excellence at its heart.

When I was a teacher I had a pupil who loved buses, and I look back and think that we could have personalised his curriculum more. Key to learning is motivation. A big review by the OECD showed that there are two groups of pupils. One group wants to go to university and so the pupils are motivated to pass their exams, even in the subjects they don’t like, whilst the other half wants to leave school and get a job, so perhaps they won’t stick in as much. Motivation is about tapping in to what most interests each pupil, finding that enthusiasm and building the structure around them.

However any meaningful level of personalisation is simply not practical without sophisticated technologies, extensive libraries of digital resources and online access to teachers and learners that extend beyond the classroom or the school or for that matter the country. It allows us to open many of the doors.

I am often asked what Glow 2 will look like. My short answer is probably more like a computer game than the current version of Glow – something like a cross between the online game SecondLife (let’s call it SecondSchool) and an interactive game for the Nintendo Wii. You move between the physical world of the classroom and the digital world full of people and resources there to support your learning. It’s a move to a more active, interactive and engaging use of technology.

There has been a big change in the past decade from young people being passive consumers of new media to the producers, actors and designers. That change will move technology to another level. The world outside of education has changed and that will ripple through learning and teaching.

One thing for sure is that technologies change much quicker than education and having a job in the space where the two meet continues to be both a challenge and a delight.

Find out how East Lothian is getting on with its implementation of Glow. This week: Mentor Training.

Andrew Brown has had more time to play with the Asus EeePC, on which we gave a video tour last month. He’s started to find a few challenges for using this in a classroom setting.

Two days in to the new year, and already my mind is reeling at the eduthinking going on. In particular, some diagrams from two different sources may help clarify some of the issues that I believe education faces this year.

The first post of the 2008 from David Warlick has him thinking about the differences between ‘School 1.0′ and ‘School 2.0′, the ‘traditional’ way we’ve been doing things versus the new ways which are possible thanks to fast, connecting web technologies. Warlick says that:

I’ve been trying to reconcile some ideas about teaching and learning that I’d formulated a few years ago, with some of the shifts that have been happening since…

As part of this process, and in an attempt to bring clarity, he’s created the following diagram.

For me, the interest lies in the easy way we can recognise the changes that he notes on the ‘School 2.0′ side of the page. What he highlights is the quantity and diversity of information that is available to us today and, importantly, the realisation that though the future may be unpredictable we have moved to an information rich era where the means of accessing this information is easier and cheaper than at any other time in human history.

This suggests that we need to re-think our approach to teaching and to school, but there is always the problem of making teachers appreciate just how big the changes are… until now!

Enter Alec Couros – Stage Left

Sometimes all it takes is a diagram to bring clarity to the process… and on page 182 of Alec Couros’ Doctoral thesis I found two which effectively illustrate my life before and after beginning blogging. More importantly, they are a graphic representation of the difference between School1.0 and School2.0 because Couros clearly understands the difference between what he calls “The Teacher Network” and “The Networked Teacher”:

(Diagrams from EXAMINING THE OPEN MOVEMENT: POSSIBILITIES AND IMPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION (pdf. p182, doc, p.172) – Reproduced under a Creative Commons License – Alec Couros, Dec 2006)

If you already know what connected learning can do for you, then you’ll recognise the diagrams. I hadn’t appreciated just how much of a connected learner/teacher I was until I recognised all the links in the second diagram. And here’s why I believe this is important for Scottish Education in particular…

2007 saw the live launch of Glow, 2008 sees it being rolled out to even more Scottish educators and learners. What I think Couros has made me realise is that Glow is going to require the teachers to move from being in a network to being networked. As a Glow mentor, I will be in a position where I will need to explain the importance of Glow and also the pedagogical shift it represents because, if Glow is to thrive, we will need educators to adopt and embrace the Social tools built into it. It will not be enough for teachers to simply say “Aye, we’ve got Glow in the school…” though I’m sure that is something we will hear all too often. No, what is needed are teachers with the will to learn and adopt and participate in the truly global wall-less world of education that Glow represents, and which so many of us have been participating in for the past few years.

I think and hope that, as (the) Glow spreads across Scotland, we will begin to hear from more and more Scottish Networked Teachers. I think that’s a suitably optimistic start to a New Year which promises so much. So what are you all optimistic about this year?

Tess Watson over in East Lothian spent yesterday playing with her new PSPs, but also managed to experiment with colleague Ollie Bray with using Glow on the portable gaming console. Another great excuse reason to get PSPing in your classrooms! Ollie explains a bit more about what the PSP project involves.

As I’ve mentioned before I post a set of interesting links onto LTS’s Masterclass community every week or so. Masterclass is still looking for new members. I thought that the links I just posted there give a fair flavour of what is going on in some of the educational blogosphere and that I might share them here too:

• Ian from Islay is in Monaco, Different world – Same issues, to consult on the introduction of effective ICT. He notices I was not familiar with the International Baccalaureate curriculum but my research has shown a great similarity in ethos with the Curruculum for Excellence (ACfE).
• Two Whizzy points to Text Jumble a fridge magnet thing. I remember playing with the same sort of thing a few years back: Their There and They’re.
• Dave Warlick sends My Apologies to teachers. Dave thinks teachers need:Time to plan, collaborate, research, assess and adapt, build, and innovate (I tell them 3 to 4 hours a day — everyday).
• Jim Wenzloff writes Boring Spreadsheets? and points to a free online spreadsheet tool: Online Spreadsheets – EditGrid
• Ollie Bray writes ACE in Action at MGS
• Ben Rimes mentions Sesame Street on your iPod!
• Gordon McKinlay starts to Get to Grips with GLOW Groups – Early Adopters Discussion
• Two Whizzy again, Christmas whiteboard resources: A Christmas present From iBoard
• Lots of folk point to Blogs in Plain English. Nive video from common craft.
• Some of my children’s work Christmas At Sandaig, quick flash animation using Geoff Dellow’s templates. See the Teachers sharing their work with Flash blog for more details and links to free flash resources for teaching.