Glow Scotland

The Glow Team is asking for your help in implementing an ambitious programme to build an overall picture of how practitioners are using Glow across Scotland and the benefits that are being achieved as a result. We are keen to receive input from those new to Glow or who are using Glow in a relatively simple way to provide a useful outcome as well as those with more experience. We want to represent as many different aspects of Glow usage as possible so we’d like to hear about anything you have done. Some examples might be:

• I have eliminated some paperwork or costs by using Glow to disseminate information on-line
• I have shared materials, ideas, thoughts or practice with my colleagues using Glow
• I have found that my class are more motivated when we use Glow for class work
• I set tasks for learners to complete within Glow
• I allow pupils to post their work in a Glow group which then provides a rich record of work
• My class have joined a national Glow Meet event which provided a focus for our topic work

The list is endless….if you’ve done it; we want you to tell us about it. It doesn’t have to be particularly innovative or best practice; we simply want you to share how you are using it.

We recognise that your time is extremely valuable, so we’ve created an on-line questionnaire within Glow which will take less than ten minutes for most people to complete and the displayed results will be anonymous.  Once we have sufficient responses, the plan is to publish the results within the Glow community and so you should bear in mind that your comments may be viewed by colleagues,  head teachers, school management teams, pupils, and in some authorities, parents.

We would very much appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to share your experiences of using Glow with us. There are three ways to access the questionnaire.

The survey can be found here.

Or ….you can access from www.glowhelp.me/experiences

Or ….Log in to Glow, go to National Site, National Groups, Glowing Potential, Glow Groups, Benefits Management and Realisation, Sharing Glow Experiences.

If you are interested in further discussion of the benefits of using Glow, there is a dedicated Glow Group for Benefits Management and Realisation here.

Today a small group of folk drawn from Aberdeen City, Angus, Midlothian, RM and Learning & Teaching Scotland got together for a workshop with a consultant to look into the area of Benefits Realisation. Part of the day was spent thinking about the original high level strategic benefits that the rollout of Glow would bring for users and administrators across the country, but the majority of the day was spent investigating how these high level benefits could be articulated in a much more meaningful, practical way for schools and local authorities to make use of.

Early on in the proceedings, it became clear why so often in many projects the area of Benefits Realisation gets placed in the ‘too hard’ tray, and only returned to at the end of the project. Tragically, this would be all too late in the process for many projects to provide any meaningful benchmarking or comparative data. With a project the scale and scope of Glow, production of benefits realisation documentation will be of great value to those tasked with measuring the progress of the project, and investigating how Glow has directly impacted on teaching and learning.

The challenge we face is in producing documentation out of the high level strategic benefits originally scoped at the outset of the project, that provides meaningful guidance for schools, local authorities and national agencies to work with. Not an easy task, but with the benefit (if you’ll pardon the pun!) of Glow, a task that we can make collaborative so that many can contribute?

Early in 2009, we’ll set up a Glow group inside Glowing Potential at the national level of Glow that will look at benefits realisation. In this group, we’ll put the documentation up for all to see as we’re working on it. That way, those with access to Glow can discuss it’s development in the Glow group and help shape it into a framework document for realising benefits that’s of value to us all.

Imagecredit: Trays Modern by JeffK (altered AB)