Fizzics

I blogged somewhere else about how busy we all were within Scottish Education at the end of September and I realised that I have slipped into November without finishing what I wanted to say about some aspects of Glow that I find worrying.

What struck me about the Scottish Learning Festival was the mutual back-slapping over Glow (Glow is the intranet for Scottish schools that is currently being rolled out across the country). There were plenty of seminars and workshops spread across the two day agenda at the Festival but there was little substance to the events. For example, I booked my place at one of the workshops on the Glow virtual learning environment because it seemed to me like the perfect opportunity to learn more about the VLE element of Glow that was restricted to only a few authorities in the 3 week trial we had back in June. I suspect that many other Glow mentors also felt a need to attend these workshops as we had little knowledge of the VLE within Glow other than what had been publicised in the blogs of others who had participated in the VLE trial.

I learned at the workshop that the VLE (called Glow Learn) offers teachers the chance to prepare lessons in advance and upload them on to Glow. We can search Glow to see if other teachers in Scotland have uploaded similar work and incorporate their ideas into our own lessons. Similarly, if we allow sharing, our own lessons become available for others to use in their classroom. So far so good. The problem comes with setting of task for pupils, marking their submissions (pupils can upload their assignments to Glow for their teachers to mark and provide comments in a personal secure area) and storing of results. It would also appear that if a pupils at your school is added to your class, then you as a teacher can see their progress in all subjects throughout the school. I did not pick this up incorrectly because I asked the presenter to clarify this very point, another member of the audience at my session also asked for this to be confirmed. This is a serious flaw as it opens up to all teaching staff the kind of information that should only be available to Guidance staff in the school.

Glow Learn uses the same style of navigation to get around the system. It is unfortunate that most screenshots show Glow in the default garish colour scheme

as it can be toned down by going into the preferences section and selecting a more subtle look.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to alter the navigation to make movement around Glow more intuitive. It is the navigation aspect that attracts most of my criticism. Given the difficulty that many classroom teachers have with entering data into a spreadsheet and attaching it to an email, I fail to see how we will be in a position to go live with a national intranet for schools when the majority of the users will struggle to get much further than logging in to the network.

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