Glow Boy - GIO

Phew! Well it’s over!

We have just undergone two days of “Operational Training”. At this a group including Glow Mentors and IT staff, Admin staff, an ICT Coordinator, a Librarian and a Technician, were introduced to the roles involved in setting up and administering the Glow sites mentioned above. Decisions have to be made in each school as to who will take on such responsibilities. How much can be done from the centre and how much should be devolved to schools.

Two roles are central to the administration of Glow, the Accounts and Service Manager (ASM) and the Site Collection Administrator (SCA). As the name suggest the ASM’s role can be split into two. Setting up and approving accounts will be demanding, in preparation for the start of a new session but the workload should reduce for the rest of the session, adding and removing users as required. The services part of role involves initial selection of the services to be made available and the access rights, different types of users will have, to services such as Glow Chat, Glow Meet, and Glow Mail etc. Day to day administration will be concerned with authorising and managing Web hosting requests, video streaming of clips and Secure File Transfer amongst other things.

The SCA’s initial duties will centre on setting up sites. Day to day administration would involve information distribution and site management duties including Glow Groups.

Whereas the ASM role could be carried out centrally and this would be major task for one person; the SCA role must be implemented in each establishment. Note that both of these are “role based” and it is perfectly reasonable to delegate each of these to more than one person. In particular the SCA role lends itself to being carried out by a number of people, each bearing responsibility for specific areas, possibly with different access rights.

It will be up to each establishment to identify the skills and personnel available to them in order to carry out these duties. Staffing levels may be such that, in small establishments, assistance is necessarily sought from their secondary school to help carryout these tasks.

I don’t claim to be the worlds most prolific blogger. My philosophy is “If I’ve owt t’ say, I’ll let thee know, ‘t otherwise I’ll keep mi gob shut” (apologies to practicing Tykes, it’s 40 year since I left the West Riding) but just recently there were three blog related incidents that caused me some concern.

The first I was responsible for, which allegedly cause some project managers near fatal panic attacks, merely with the wielding of simple piece of phraseology. I must remember to be careful where I’m pointing my phrases in the future, one can never tell how they might be interpreted. The upside of this incident was that I reasserted the old adage that ” laughter is the best form of medicine”.

However, following the second “blog incident”, laughter was far from my mind. I had been drawn to read the guineapigmum blog and was transfixed by an outpouring of humor, a kind of “quiet rage”, someone hurting and crying out but with undeniable inner strength. A place filled with light and hope! I instantly felt empathy and had some understanding of her situation – as much as anyone else can that hasn’t been through a similar ordeal – but I was left feeling inadequate and useless, unable to respond to someone in a such a position. Could offer no words. Nevertheless I will keep up to date with her blog.

The third “blog incident” arose from a link I was sent, to a blog by Mrs W. I read these outpourings as well and was also transfixed. However, there, any similarity ended.

• No humor!
• Plenty of rage!
• Not quiet!
• Not inwardly directed!
• Very offensive!
• Someone hurting and lashing out!
• A place filled with darkness and despair!

I won’t be going back there!

Glow mentors seem to have been left languishing wondering what is happening with the Glow project in East Lothian.

I can tell you now, following a 3 ¹/₂ hour meeting yesterday afternoon, that a great deal is happening behind the scenes. The infamous “RPRB” checklist was given a sever ticking off I can tell you!

Mentors will be playing a central role in the “roll out” process. Furthermore, even prior to the roll out, I want to seek their opinions on several key issues relating to the actual nature of that process.

I see mentors taking on specialist roles, as experts in particular areas, even in the early stages of roll out. What might these specialist roles be? Two such instances spring to mind, the end-user training of personnel in key roles, as an Account and Services Manager (ASM) and as a Site Collection Administrator (SCA) for each establishment (LA, Cluster Group, School). The ASM has responsibility for setting up and maintaining user accounts within an establishment. The ASM is also responsible for managing which services will be made available, services such as Email, Chat, Glow Meet etc. The SCA , on the other hand, has responsibility for the structure of the establishment site and the distribution of information within it.

The two roles can appear at different levels within the establishment hierarchy. Hence there will be a need to train a potentially large number of personnel carrying out these roles. I envisage the mentors playing a crucial role in this training.

Two sessions of training are planned to enable this.

The first, the “Operational Training” - a two day session, will address the ASM and SCA roles. It is intended that the attendees will come from a wide range of backgrounds, including several mentors, and that their opinions will be sought, after the training, as to the best options for progressing this aspect of the roll out.

The second, two day session - “Mentor Training”, will be aimed solely at mentors and will provide an in-depth view of Glow and its use in the Learning and Teaching process.

There will be more …

Now that I am in post, GIO, I though I would resume blogging but with a different slant on things. No metaphors [PS] :?)

It has not always been obvious to those of us away from the centre of things, what actually was going on with Glow. Particularly, as a mentor, things seem to have gone deadly quiet on the Glowing front. However, now that I am in post as Glow Implementation Officer in EL, I can see that progress hadn’t come to a halt. There were a few issues to be resolved not just within EL but also within the Glow project as a whole, all of which resulted in a bit of “Slippage” as they say.

Glow Rollout

There is a group of four LA’s - Dundee, East Dunbartonshire, Renfrewshire and South Lanarkshire who began the Glow roll-out at the beginning of this session. We, in East Lothian, are in a second group rolling out Glow and it is hoped that we will be able to gain some benefit from their experience.

We are rolling

The rollout process started for East Lothian on the 2/10/07 with the Kick-off meeting where we met our Project Team from RM/LTS. Here the rollout plan was revealed, I knew there’d be one somewhere :). All we have to do now is complete the Rollout Planning Review Board (RPRB) checklist and Bob’s your uncle. This has to be approved before any further progress can be made.

If all goes well, and it should do, there will be a series of milestones to reach over the coming months, including various operational and mentor training sessions. We hope that by next summer a pilot rollout will be underway.

Watch this space…