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.

I said earlier that I was taking part in the latest national pilot of GLOW, the national intranet being developed for all scottish schools. The pilot finished at the end of term and I didn’t have a chance to complete my evaluation form before going on holiday. I submitted my feedback this week and have attached a copy here.

Glow is getting a lot of attention just now but I am afraid that I am not keen on having the current version as shown in the pilot released nationally. For one thing, functionality such as navigation gives me (a glow mentor) a headache and I dread the prospect of helping my school (and probably my entire cluster) find their way around the system as it stands.

Components such web parts and Glow mail are not sufficiently intuitive and fail to behave consistantly across different browsers and operating systems. If you read the attachment, you’ll also find that I tried hard to be helpful in reporting bugs and was less than impressed with the quality of feedback issued by the helpdesk.

Sorry to be so negative when others are “glowing” in their praise but I really don’t want to see this launched nationally until it has been made a lot simpler for the average classroom teacher.

Glow feedback

The 3rd pilot phase of Glow is has just completed its first week. The pilot period will run until Thursday 28th June. As Glow mentor for my school, I am taking part in the testing of two new components – Glow Mail and Glow Messenger. There is also a third new component, Glow Learn, which is a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). I’ve not seen Glow Learn yet as the pilot for this component is being conducted in a small group of local authorities rather than opening it up to national testing.

Glow Mail is a web-based service not unlike the webmail facility your home internet service provider might provide for you. A few teething problems have been publicised on the Glow feedback forum, page errors and the like, and there are a couple of changes necessary in the terminology to make the interface more intuitive. On the whole, it seems like a winner though. I am unclear whether the plan is for this service to supercede each school’s own First Class mail server once Glow is switched on nationally. Our own server provides a generous mail storage limit and already allows for a basic chat/messaging function, although I accept that this might not be the case in all schools right now.

This talk of messaging brings me on to the second component being piloted right now, Glow Messenger. This is essentially a clone of Windows Live Messenger, designed to operate within your browser window, removing the need for a standalone application and all the internet security issues this would entail. I have one big gripe about this component – it only works if you turn off your pop-up blocking software.

I’m finding the testing of the Messenger component quite difficult. Around the country, there are approximately 600 mentors participating in the pilot right now. I can only chat to one of them on messenger if I know their newly-assigned Glow Mail address and we happen to be online at the same time. I have asked the people running the pilot if they would adjust the functionality to allow me to search for people who are online at the same time as me – how else am I going to find someone to chat with? My request was refused, “you can only see a person’s online status once they are in your contact list” – not the best of starts. Add to that the fact that the 30 people I have added to my contact list are listed as “status unknown”, rather than “offline” and you might see why I am beginning to feel that the messenger pilot is a waste of time.

New components apart, how does the rest of Glow shape up? Well, it’s currently structured with a clear heirarchy of

• my Glow – your own personally customisable Glow page(s)
• School area – news feeds, events & other information about your school
• Local Authority – information at local authority level
• National – does what it says on the tin

The default entry is to a staff page. I am unsure who populates the staff page with information but I would dearly like to change the way it is presented, this is simply from a cosmetic perspective though.

You may customise your own page, although I think that the complexity of selecting the desired functions is well beyond the IT skills of a classroom teacher right now. This is what worries me. As a Glow mentor, I feel I am expected to assist my colleagues in the transition period when Glow is introduced. With such complex navigation around the Glow network, I am either going to drown in requests for help during my non-teaching periods or I will have to take a step back and hope that the local authority can provide sufficient inset sessions to close the knowledge gap.

Perhaps I am being a bit mean. There are almost another 2 weeks of the pilot remaining and it is possible that the programmers at RM will fix the bugs before time is up. Let’s see how they get on.

I’d just passed the interview for a permanent position at my school after the summer holidays when I was asked if I would take on the role of Glow mentor for the school.

I went to my first meeting for Highland Glow mentors last week. We met at the Spa Pavillion in Strathpeffer and heard about the imminent phase 3 trial of Glow.