never mind the optics

I had a tweet from Drew Burrett asking if I had experienced any difficulties with Glow Meet since the most recent Java update from Apple.

I hadn’t but then it’s been a while since I used Glow Meet.  So I logged in to Glow and, sure enough, it gave an error about halfway through the start-up process.  I did some digging and found Glow was not the only site experiencing problems with the Java update.

Unfortunately, Snow Leopard would not allow me to install java 1.5 for Leopard and I was to be left without a working Glow Meet until I found this site with instructions on how to reinstall the older version of Java that works with Glow Meet.

You need to run these commands from the terminal but I have tested the process and it does indeed fix the problem and allow Glow Meet to run once more.

It’s not often that I am able to take part in the fantastic CPD opportunities that “the powers that be” in the deep south organise for teachers. Fortunately, it’s the October holidays up here so I was able to spend Tuesday afternoon in a flashmeeting listening to Greg Whitby speak with a group of teachers at LTS.

So who is Greg Whitby?

• He is the Executive Director of Schools and leads a system of approximately 80 Catholic schools serving the Catholic community of greater Western Sydney.
• In 2007, he was named the most innovative educator in Australia by the Bulletin Magazine in its annual SMART 100 awards.
• He was awarded an ACEL Presidential Citation for his contribution to Australian education.

Billed as Gregmeet, the event was a chance for the Scottish education community to hear his thoughts on where learning & teaching has to be in the 21st century.

His main points were;

• lack of relevance has resulted in most young people disengaging from education
• realising that the idea of personalised learning represents learners having a deeper & continuous learning rather than an individual education programme
• de-privatising of teacher practice: teachers can’t (and shouldn’t) work in isolation
• the power of technology to release us from the education timetable that is essentially set in stone at the time of our conception

Greg got his final point across with an equation

who learns what with who where & when

= anywhere, anytime, anything, any device  - time table

and suggested that the Scottish education establishment is moving in this direction with the rolling out of Glow across the 32 local authorities.

His point is valid.  Why is it that we still create a situation where learning can only take place in a classroom, with a teacher, during the day? In moving to an informal, anytime learning environment, pupils can learn when they are ready to do so.  Greg calls this “just in time” learning.

I found myself agreeing with his view that the laptop has lost its original impact in the classroom.  So often, technology in the home is far ahead of the facilities we can provide in schools.  Greg advocates switching to more flexible technology in the form of mobile phones, pointing out their accessibility, flexibility and cost advantages.  While this is a move that is actively resisted in many schools, Greg’s message is that we must learn from research and this shows that handheld devices bring enormous educational benefits.

Greg didn’t use slides but there is a video of the event’s flashmeeting here. Alternatively, I have attached the audio to this post so you can listen using the flash player below.

image of Greg by torres21

 

 Standard Podcast [1:34:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (94)

Physics teachers from across the Highlands got together for a CPD day last Saturday.  The event was hosted by Nick Forwood, our local Physics Teacher Network coordinator, at Fortrose Academy.

After a keynote from Tom Balanowski, the SQA Principal Assessor for Advanced Higher Physics, we were able to choose up to three workshops from the list on the right, plus an additional option of learning how to configure the free telescope for schools supplied by The Society for Popular Astronomy.

I presented a session on using blogs, wikis and iTunes in the Physics classroom.  It was a demonstration of the resources I have built into my classroom blog, with an update on how using iTunes to push homework exercises and videos homework solutions out to pupils’ home computers had been received.

I also took the chance to show off some of the work that had been produced during the Building Glow Communities event for Science teachers earlier in the week.  I was surprised to find that questions were asked about my use of Voicethread and Animoto in the classroom.  People who are working on developing their CfE outcomes were interested in the opportunities these tools presented in terms of genuine pupil-focused creativity, digital evidence of their experiences and the chance to produce something other than powerpoint slides.

I was delighted to share my experience of using these sites with them and gave examples of how I had used them in my classroom.  The enthusiasm with which they were considering non-traditional activities shows that Curriculum for Excellence really is going to change the way our pupils experience science in the years ahead.

I know that it’s only a matter of minutes since I posted about the Glow groups I started to create after returning from the Building Glow Communities event but I need to show you all something.  As I started to work on my groups, I realised that I had an obvious source of resources in my classroom blog.  I tried to use an XML web part to bring the RSS feed into Glow but it just didn’t look right, see screenshot below.

The text is all bunched up together and the layout does not let you easily identify the beginning and end of individual entries.  This is a shame because I thought I could pull in homework activities and their solutions in the same way that they are published to iTunes.

Luckily, there’s a very helpful Glow genius called Fraser who came to my rescue.  He has a black belt in XSL and was able to write some code that will allow anyone with a Wordpress blog to import their RSS feed into Glow.  This is a major breakthrough for my personal plan for using Glow with pupils and I am sure that there will be many blogging teachers around Scotland who will be eager to take advantage of this solution.

As a before & after activity, take a look at the structure that has been given to my blog feed in the following screenshots.

Notice how the embedded video player now sits neatly amongst the text. There are also clearly recognisable download links, making the feed much more useful.

I use my classroom blog to feed four different podcasts; Advanced Higher, Higher, Intermediate 2 and Standard Grade Physics.  Wordpress category feeds keep the posts in the correct podcast and Fraser has set up the code so I can feed any combination of Wordpress categories into Glow, essentially replicating the podcasting process I have been using.

This is a seriously useful piece of code to have for your Glow group.

I went down to Stirling Management Centre recently for the Building Glow Communities workshop for science teachers.  My experience of Glow is very limited and I have to admit to being less than impressed with my encounters to date, e.g. here & here.  There were two factors that influenced my decision to apply for a place at the event.  I wanted to learn about Glow and I wasn’t sure when or if local training would delivered.

There was a very broad range of Glow experience among the attendees, ranging from beginners like myself to teachers who use Glow daily in their classroom.  Over the 2 days, we learned about Glow Groups and how to use web parts to introduce content.  We worked in small groups to produce shared Glow groups on a range of diverse topics to support delivery of the science curriculum, including Advanced Higher Physics, Science transition from level 2 to level 3, Famous Scientists & The X-tra terrestrial Factor.

I’m particularly proud of the group my own team produced to support the outcome on considering the potential for life on other planets.  We created activities to…

consider the environmental factors affecting alien physiology
	build a model of the solar system
explore the Martian surface
	Find out about NASA’s mission to find habitable planets

The group building sessions were broken up by short introductions to new web parts & techniques, information about intellectual property rights, demonstrations on how to create content such as a Voki or Wordle and embed it in your group to make the group pages more visually appealing.

It was a great CPD opportunity and I’ve already started work on my own Glow groups for use in school when pupil logins are rolled out.

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.