eastlothianGlow

This week increasing numbers of staff from schools around East Lothian have been requesting access to Glow and starting to explore.

The furthest ahead, such as Moira Gilbert at Musselburgh’s Burgh Primary have started to develop their school’s Glow pages, such as the staff Home Page and the student home pages. That’s meant starting to introduce some of the administration concepts, such as the Site Collection Administrator role. That had been a bit of a worry: we were concerned that it might have been a bit off-putting. By taking it one step at a time, though, and introducing only those steps needed to solve the current problem, it has gone surprisingly well. It has been surprising how limiting the default access rights for staff are turning out to be, and we may be looking to find ways to loosen things off a bit to make it easier for staff to contribute.

This exploration is starting to produce good, solid ideas to get real benefits in school. One idea was  to add a simple, editable, text Web Part to the school’s Staff Home Page to provide an electronic version of the ubiquitous staffroom whiteboard which can be updated by any member of staff. Potential benefits identified included:

• Improved planning, by enabling staff to check notices from home while making plans.
• Better inter-school collaboration, by making staff home pages visible to neighbouring school staff.
• Time saving in school, by being able to check notices from your classroom, and not having to trail to the staffroom.

This is also providing good practice for staff in starting to get used to using and configuring Web Parts.

To enable sharing of these early experiences and discussion of new ideas we’ve now arranged a series of drop-in sessions, to take place in Prestonpans Education Centre, next to Prestonpans Primary School. They’ll take place for 6 weeks, beginning 27th October, from 4pm to 5.30pm. The idea is to cover edubuzz blogs as well as Glow, in particular to help people integrate the two environments.

• We have been busy issuing Glow Usernames and Passwords for staff and some pupils within schools this week.
• Primary and Secondary staff can request a Username and Password to access the portal from David Gilmour.
• Ideas are beginning to emerge about how to use Glow for teaching between schools using its conferencing tool ‘Glow Meet’.
• This is also raising the possibility of involving children unable to be in school to participate in lessons.
• We are starting to meet with school staff to plan ideas for Glow in their schools.
• School librarians and East Lothian Library Service Staff are already working to develop an Authority level Glow group.
• If you look on the edubuzz home page you will find a 5-minute screencast video that will take you on a five minute tour of Glow.

• Around 50% of the mentors have come forward with potential projects, and names of other interested staff.

• Secondary staff accounts have been checked for potential duplicates with accounts already created elsewhere, and these staff contacted by email to confirm.

• The remaining secondary staff accounts have been finally approved, so we can now start issuing their passwords.

• A knowledgeable secondary pupil (Euan Doidge at Preston Lodge) has also been engaged to test out his student account, and identify any snags.

• Primary school staff and pupils account data is being sent from Phoenix to Glow to get ready to create all these accounts.

• We’ll be starting to issue passwords today, FRiday 26th Sep 2008, to interested secondary staff.

• Meetings are now being arranged with Secondary HTs to find out their preferences for Glow deployment in their schools.

• We have provided a talk to Scottish Learning Festival on lessons learned from edubuzz, to help inform Glow deployment elsewhere.

Today we’ve completed the final approval step for secondary staff Glow logins.

This means that:

• the data that’s come over from Phoenix has been checked
• there are one or two staff we need to check, as they may have accounts from elsewhere that need transferred
• all the rest of the 500 or so accounts are now being activated, and will be ready to go in 24 hours.

We’ve also approved the first student account, and those of a few admin staff who have already been showing an interest.

If you’re a secondary staff member and would like to start exploring Glow, please contact David Gilmour or Elizabeth Cowan.

This is just a quick update to let you know where we’ve got to, and current plans.

We’re ready to start issuing Glow logins to secondary staff and students. The machinery which enables the export of data from Phoenix to create new users in Glow has been tested and is working. It has been used to create accounts for staff and students at all the secondary schools. These are now all sitting waiting for us to pull the lever which generates passwords for the accounts. Once we do that, we’ll be able to print out spreadsheets of passwords, get the scissors out, and issue them. The process is currently continuing with primaries.

Some Glow Groups are starting to appear. An East Lothian level Group has been created, for example, for Phoenix users and another for Probationers.

We need some manageable groups to get started with. I’d like to issue login info to some smallish groups so that I can come and see what happens first hand when the account owners first try logging in and using Glow. Some likely gotchas we know about. For example, new passwords will probably be pre-expired, insist on being changed immediately, but not provide any clues as to what is an acceptable password! The aim is to identify all the issues that arise and learn from them so that we don’t waste time elsewhere.

Can you suggest any groups we should start with? Ideally we want people who are comfortable enough with ICT that they won’t be too fazed if there are teething troubles. We’d like to keep the focus on educational benefits, so it would be great if the groups could be people with particular projects in mind that they think Glow might enable, or help support. An examples might be using a Glow Group as a shared communication space to support a school, inter-school or EL-wide project.

A number of East Lothian staff and schools have been expressing an interest in Glow. There are some with Glow in their development plans, for example.

There’s a “Glow Lounge” at the Scottish Learning Festival. If you’re at the SLF, this offers a “Teachmeet-style” opportunity to drop in and see what people have been up to with Glow elsewhere. For some reason it’s not mentioned on the SLF site, as far as I can see. Google found me another Glow Lounge, though: “an exceptionally funky venue in Clapham” http://www.theglowlounge.com/

Robert Jones is well known across East Lothian, especially with mathematics colleagues, for his blog Jonesieboy. He sees Glow supporting teachers’ sharing of resources, particularly for the Interactive Whiteboard, but is keen to see how we support teachers in using Glow, which, after all, contains tools which are already out there for the taking.

Malcolm is the last of our Preston Lodge staff to introduce himself. He, like Iain, sees the efficiencies in not reinventing the wheel but, with his interests in photography and the arts, also sees Glow as a means of introducing more creativity to learning.

Iain Stuart is Principle Teacher of Science Development in Prestonlodge, the same school as Eilidh who we met last week. He sees Glow’s importance in stopping us having to reinvent the wheel within Scotland - and hopefully beyond. Will Glow bring us this kind of coherence and get us into everything we need?

As we get warmed up for the new term and the imminent Glow Mentor activities, we felt it was time to meet more of the Glow Mentors. So far, we’ve already met Tess, who was able to fill us in on the Glow Portal trials. To get us started with some more regular introductions this term it’s time to catch up with Eilidh Proudfoot from Prestonlodge and her aspirations for Glow.

Our two secondary trialists of the Glow Portal have been blogging heavily in the past month about their experiences, from the trials Tess seemed to be having getting some elements of the resource sharing underway to the huge success of a sharing and peer evaluation session on the portal. Tess’s blog will continue to be a great place to go for information as the portal is refined.

David (or Glowboy, apparently has also been busy accompanying some superb lessons using Glow as a means of formative assessment in the primary school, as well as a means of providing that all important audience for our kids’ work. His notes on some of the drawbacks in the portal during a lesson (especially the password issue which Renfrewshire have also found a problem) offer an idea, though, on what kind of environment our kids will have access to.

He’s even let his Advanced Higher Computing Studies students have a look in - maybe they’ll be designing the next phase

There has been a great deal of interest in some of the social media reporting of Glow developments in East Lothian. I was invited down to RM’s Executive Board to talk about the impact of what we are doing and how it might shape future Glows. Robert is also trying to see where the future lies as the RM techies get the portal ready for April’s launch.

Other classroom developments in Argyll and Bute, for example, should help us learn from outside the Authority, too, and see where Glow might be used to further some good practice already going on. South Lanarkshire is enjoying the portal’s widgets, and seeing how personalisable it can be. Communication on what can and cannot be offered remains a vital element which can never been underestimated. Finally, if you want to get to know some other Glowers not in East Lothian, Aberdeen’s GlowBlog seems a great place to get to know some other mentors.

–Ewan