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Today I, along with eleven other colleagues, attended the first day of East Lothian’s Operational Training of the Glow portal. The training was run by Jamie Kirkwood, Stephen Forsyth and Paul Rooney from RM’s technical team and Martin Brown from Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS). As I mentioned in my last post, we were learning about the roles and responsibilities of the Accounts Services Manager (ASM) and the Site Collection Administrator (SCA). These roles form part of the more technical side of Glow, hence only a small number of people were in attendance today. During the session, we covered a lot of the points mentioned in my last post so I thought I would share some of my experience.

The ASM has overall control of the portal and its privileges within the authority. However an ASM has the power to create other ASMs accounts. This therefore shares the responsibility with more than one person. Each ASM will have their own account. For example (and I say example as this is something that requires discussion at a number of levels) an ASM at Council level could then create ASM accounts for particular individuals within each school within an authority etc.

A good part of the day was spent watching the portal in action and taking in a lot of relevant information. The rest of the time was spent hands-on. For this we worked in pairs. My partner for the day was my friend and fellow Glow Mentor Brian Cunningham (Brian is also a technician at Musselburgh Grammar School). Here are one or two of the tasks we were involved in.

Manual Account Creation:
As an ASM we had to create an account manually. Accounts are usually generated using CSV files. We were instructed to fill in the required fields using the details of our chosen fictitious character. Brian and I gave our character the name John; John Connell.

Above you can see a Screen-shot.

Account Creation Using CSV Files:
We also looked at creating accounts using CSV files. This was relatively easy. The portal is a lot more intuitive than I found it to be during the Phase Trials. Using CSV files and MIS data is something that I am keen to become more familiar with. I think I will suggest a twilight session involving relevant staff to my team.

Privileges:
During the latter part of the day we had a go at altering privileges. Brian would be the ASM giving and taking away privileges and I would be the member of staff accessing (or being denied) the various parts i.e. The ‘Glow Members Search’ facility.

Easy To Use:
One thing Brian and I noted was how easy the instruction guide/manual was to follow (maybe LTS and RM could give some advice to a certain Mobile phone company who would have been as well writing their guidebook in Greek!).

Tomorrow (Wednesday):
Tomorrow we will carry on with the training. In addition to the technical staff, our RM Educationalist Paul Smyth will be joining us. I would like to thank Martin Brown from Learning Teaching Scotland for his time today. You can follow his weblog here.

There was a lot to take in so I am off to do a bit of homework and prep for tomorrow!

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