Glow Scotland

October 31st, 2008

Aberdeen Mentors Sparkle

J Jelly

Comments: Comments Off Tags: Tags: collaborating, Glow, howto, mentors, searching
 : Categories Aberdeen City, Uncategorized

On 28/29 October, Martin Brown and I were working with a new wave of Glow Mentors in Aberdeen this week. Martin did the bulk of the sessions, mentoring me in my new role as Glow D.O., as well as mentoring the mentors! The new mentors are a great bunch and will make a real impact on Aberdeen’s uptake and use of Glow. They raised several points worth mentioning here for a wider audience to ponder…

Glow refinements –
Could a way be devised to search for Glow Groups by topic?
When we complete our profiles cn we also note down our interests. This should make it easier to connect users interested in the same subjects by searching Glow using the “area of interest” field. There are also areas of Glow where teachers can have a look to see who wants to get involved in collaboration. Mentors suggested the ability to search for existing Glow Groups by topic would be an additional refinement to the search facilities in Glow: that it would be very valuable. One for the developers!
Also could web-based companies be persuaded to have links which lead to embedding in Glow such as some do for MySpace and Facebook?

It’s not surprising this was suggested, since Glow’s existence is Scotland’s way of bringing learning into the digital world in which our learners live and feel at home. They are used to these links being generated by their favourite websites for their social network spaces – so why not for Glow too?

Working together –
What is the best way to share local authority projects nationally? If some good L.A. projects get off the ground, should url links be placed in the national Staffroom glow group with short descriptors? The idea would be that teachers who want to “see into” the glow group, would then click on the url and complete the request entry box with their details (email address very important as well as name, school etc) and what their interest is in the glow group.

The local ICT Support team have managed to get funding for cover for up to a week out of school to allow some mentors to develop Glow projects! When Glow is getting off the ground, this is such a great situation – being able to step back, reflect, develop, create and go back to school with a Glow Group to use with pupils both in the individual mentors’ own schools and across the city.

Some of the Glow Groups created over the two day training session would be very worthwhile to take further. From environmental sustainability to the opportunities in Curriculum for Excellence of studying the world of the black pudding , there was no lack of imagination or creativity in Aberdeen..
Click on each thumbnail to see more detail.

Glow how to -
One piece of information that may be useful regarding the mechanics of Glow came up a couple of times when the Mentors were helping us clear down the training school site which we had used for the two days (How I remember the sad looks on the mentors faces as they deleted their Glow Groups!):
If a sub-group is created, it needs to be deleted before the parent group can go. Both groups, however, can be deleted from the parent group in the following way: (Deleting a Sub Glow Group)

October 3rd, 2008

Glow for Aberdeen City Probationers

J Jelly

Comments: 11 Comments » Tags: Tags: , Aberdeen, Probationers
 : Categories Aberdeen City, Probationers

Today I made my first visit to Aberdeen City as a Glow Development Officer. I was delighted to have the chance to speak to the city’s current probationer teachers concerning Glow as part of their training day about ICT based resources. It was heartening that, when asked what they knew already about Glow, a perfect response was given about a national web-based learning community of teachers and pupils.
After a short presentation about changing learning styles and the resulting need for pedagogical change, using digital tools such as are second nature to today’s pupils, we had a tour of the growing list of activities and Glow Groups to be found on the National Site. We looked at the Glowing Games and the Consolarium, Jaye Richards’ research into the impact of Glow, Fiona Hyslop’s recent Glow Chat and much in between.
After this national perspective, Brian Murray, a Glow ASG Mentor and maths teacher at Hazlehead Academy gave an insight into his school’s site. Staff at his school recently got their logins to Glow and now are paper free – accessing the daily bulletin and attendance information via Glow. The role-based sites and the school site had all been prepared by the central ICT team and looked very stylish and inviting. Hazlehead and other Aberdeen schools on Glow at present, are initially concentrating on the use of Glow for information flow. Its learning and teaching potential will soon be realised too when pupils are brought on to Glow in the near future. The planned gap between staff and pupils’ access, is working to advantage in terms of staff confidence building. Staff see the potential of Glow and now actively want pupils to get logins. The other schools across the LA will follow a similar pattern – staff first, then pupils a couple of months later.
The probationers are looking forward to getting their Glow logins – and I’m certainly looking forward to working with Aberdeen City and seeing all the planning and hard work pay off!

July 9th, 2008

Education Service Managers (ESMs) and Glow

mbrown

Comments: 4 Comments » Tags: Tags: ACC, ESMs, QIOs
 : Categories Aberdeen City

The Glow team have been focused on Mentor Training for teachers but some Local Authorities have moved on and are also looking at ways to provide support for their Education Service Managers.
Quality Improvement Officers very quickly realise the potential of Glow to take forward school planning and a Curriculum for Excellence. I have two recent examples of this. Firstly, I was asked to show the Glow portal and demonstrate Glow Meet in action at an ESM meeting in Perth and Kinross. Stuart Oliphant joined the meeting via Glow Meet from Optima. At the meeting I was asked what evidence there was to assess the impact of Glow on teaching and learning. It is a tough question and one that ESMs will ultimately answer for themselves as they begin to measure the progress of Glow with CfE in schools. I left the meeting pondering the question of how QIOs can begin to measure enhanced learning with Glow.
Secondly, I was recently asked by Aberdeen City to deliver training on Glow for fourteen ESMs. It was a critical day because of the increased demand in Aberdeen for Glow to deliver cost benefits for education services. The training focused on Glow tools and Glow Groups. I enjoyed showing how to design and create a Glow Group for Education Service Managers. All the participants designed very purposeful and role specific Glow Groups and in the afternoon our Key Contact took time for consultation with these managers about how Aberdeen City can get the best from Glow. The idea of a QIOs National Glow Group was put forward and I suggested this may be a question for the Key Contacts Glow group discussion page but it is a good idea – QIOs are well placed to influence teaching and learning with Glow and to collect examples of emerging practice.
At the end of the day we took time to answer the question I had been previously asked in Perth and Kinross – how can we measure the impact of Glow? After a session discussing the criteria that may be needed for measuring this impact, they left with some good ideas, and more questions about HGIOs 3, CfE, Uptake and Usage and their role in taking Glow forward.

May 9th, 2008

Ops Training in Aberdeen City

rpitman

Comments: Comments Off Tags:  : Categories Aberdeen City

The importance of roles rather than a series of tasks – this was the main finding for participants on an operational training session run by Aberdeen City Council to investigate two key management roles within Glow.

A group of local authority staff, a management information systems representative and six school mentors were looking at accounts and service management (ASM) and site collection administrator (SCA) roles prior to specific mentor training.

ASM involves provisioning and management of user accounts and setting up policy and service choices. Delegates experienced this through hands-on sessions on management of access to the services of Glow Mail, Secure File Transfer, Video Streaming, Web Hosting and Glow Learn.

A similar interactive session outlined what was involved with SCA, including setting up the staff, pupil and establishment sites, tackling membership permissions and adding information to these sites. There was further experimentation creating top-level Glow Groups, adding membership and enhancing the Glow Group using available web parts. In Aberdeen City these roles will initially be centrally supported and then devolved to school level as appropriate.