tessawatson.com

After a ‘giant’ of a working week where both blog and sleep have been sacrificed, I have finally found the time to catch up on the latest news. Thursday was the last day of the ‘Phase 2’ trial of the Glow portal. Glow should return sometime in June for ‘Phase 3′.

Rather than rewrite Neil’s post, you can view it here. Like Neil, I am really excited at the immense potential Glow has. Neil mentioned the creation of webpages. I am very pleased to say that I was also briefly able to experience these. One star pupil in my Intermediate 1 class created three personalised pages in his own Glow account. Though there was not a huge amount of time to experiment with this particular aspect of Glow, I was able to experience how the portal could be adapted to the individual user.

Dave Rawson, Elizabeth Cowan, Karen Robertson and I will provide summary feedback of the ‘Phase 2’ trial (to RM and LTScotland) in due course. In the meantime I can positively say that all the tools in Glow work and work well via remote access. Tools such as ‘Chat’ and ‘Video Conferencing’ have a huge potential. There are still issues surrounding current firewalls and despite a huge effort in East Lothian, during lunchtimes and after school, we were unable to get to the bottom of these during the ‘Phase 2’ trial. This sadly meant that I was unable to use the ‘Chat’ tool with classes. We are all exceptionally keen to rectify this prior to the ‘Phase 3’ trial.

So, ‘Phase 3’. What would I like to see? As Neil mentioned (I am acting as a big Kid here), I would also like to see more themes. Just now there are 6, ‘Theme 6′ being my favourite. There is also an argument for/against emoticons. I have a post in the making regarding these and the use of ‘text’ language that I experienced on discussion boards during ‘Phase 2’. (See my last sentence)

I would like to thank Elizabeth, Karen and Dave for their ongoing support in East Lothian and also everyone who joined me on the portal throughout the ‘Phase 2’ trial of Glow (too many to mention individually). We certainly have tested Glow’s usability!

Bring on ‘Phase 3’!!!

C U ol L8R!