Laurie O’Donnell

I spent last week in the States with my friend and colleague Andy Pendry, LTS Glow Technology Adviser . The purpose of our visit was to:
•    Help develop our thinking on how we might evolve Glow over the next few years (Glow v2)
•    Explore trends in the use of technology for learning
•    Get a better understanding of how the educational landscape is changing in the US (and how that change is being managed and supported).
•    Take the opportunity to the visit the George Lucas Educational Foundation and follow-up the recent recognition of Glow as a world leading educational programme.

Our itinerary took us to New York, San Francisco and Seattle for:
•    Extended briefings and discussions with some of the major US IT corporations: CISCO, Apple, Google and Microsoft
•    Shorter meetings with HP, Oracle Foundation and IEARN USA
•    A visit to Mercer Island School District
•    A series of meetings with the George Lucas Educational Foundation (including a visit to Skywalker Ranch)

We also managed to have spend an evening at a High School football match and catch a little bit of the tennis at Flushing Meadow between flights.

So a really busy time but a fantastic opportunity to escape from the day job to reflect on how we are doing and spend some time thinking about what we need to do to secure the future of Scottish education.

Over the next few days I want to capture some of my initial thoughts about the visit through a short series of posts.