My secondment to the Scottish Government to work on Glow has ended, I’ll be returning to my substantive post on Monday.
Thanks to all who tweeted nice messages last week. I hope to post some more on the whole experience but for now some blog thoughts.
Back in July I posted Glow Blogs 558 days in doing a bit of self assessment on progress on Glow Blogs. I’d didn’t score myself too highly and hoped to do better on the following fronts:
- The improved e-portfolio system out of the door
- A few new themes and the odd plugin added
- Upgrade WordPress if appropriate
- Make cast iron the expectations for continual improvement
You can see the progress we have reported on the Releases page on Glow Blog Help.
1 e-Portfolios, here we nailed it I think. Before summer we had hope to release the plugin early in October but by September we announced a bit of a delay. As it turned out we released the 1.0 version of the plugin on the 10 of November. so I think full marks on number 1 as far as the first phase of the e-portfolios goes, two more phases in the works.
In my opinion the plugin is great, we have taken a 108 step setup down to 2 clicks, 2 fields and a popup button. We have gone from 60 themes in need of maintenance to one plugin. The creation of a profile from posts is to my mind elegant. In an earlier post I’ve given a brief account of how the development process worked. This shows what a great team I have been lucky enough to work with.
2 In August we had a release that added five themes, a couple of plugins some fixes and a couple of additions. Along with the e-portfolio release we added the ability to embed sway content to a Glow Blog by pasting in the URL. This later was developed by our developer Stephen Harris in short order. Stephen’s work in general has saved a deal of time in testing rounds. The tester team have sent back few bugs for fixing.
Themes and plugins have been a feature quite a few folk have asked about. I am not much of a theme user myself so am interested in getting suggestions of themes for evaluation.
The retiral of the Suffusion theme disappointed asome users, a lot of sites still are using it. I’de be very keen for these folk to identify a theme that would be a suitable replacement.
3 We are now at WordPress 4.1.8 so have made small updates. We have fallen a bit behind our aim of staying within a point of the main release but I expect that an upgrade will happen in the new year. WordPress 4.2 did not bring much of interest to glow users, the 4.3 and upcoming 4.4 versions will be solid improvements.
4 This is the trickiest one! There are conflicts in developing at a national scale between budget. The added requirements of working in the Government (procurement, security, data protection) all add to time and cost. I think we have managed to show steady progress since the switch over in October 2014. I believe this demonstrates that it can be done. Anecdotally the Glow Blogs service has been well received.
I had hoped that before the end of my secondment that we would have some process for getting things on a to-do list would be in place and visible. I think the need for this is well understood but not formally up and running. We have a backlog of ideas for future development.
The backlog consists of work left over from previous phases and feature requests from users.
On these points I think I’ve moved from what I though of a generous C to perhaps scraping a B. I also said:
More important I hope I see an increase in the use of blogs by pupils that actively impacts their learning.
This one is a bit harder to judge, there are certainly new blogs created all the time. Through the bootcamp, twitter and just poking around I’ve seen some nice posts. I feel quite positive that Glow Blogs lower the entry for classes to start blogging. There no need to get permission, set up accounts ect, so the benefits should follow.
There is has been a lot of good feedback and commentary on twitter. For example:
Some great new reflective posts from MA education students & staff at @dundeeuni on UoDEdushare #uodedu #glowblogs https://t.co/VgIl0pBMBd
— Derek P Robertson (@derekrobertson) October 1, 2015
&
P6 and P7 pupils learned how to create blogs on Glow during STEM focus day. Thanks for teaching us @RosJLee pic.twitter.com/qW1nmyd4Fo — WestKilbridePS (@WestKilbridePS) November 11, 2015
I’ve also been providing some help and support. A lot via email and twitter. I’ve been building the Glow Blog Help blog.
Any answers I give get added to the help. I can answer the same question with a URL. Although it lacks a bit of polish on the grammar front, and there a few typos, I do believe the help has been a worthwhile activity.
Personally I am a lot happier with the position of Glow Blogs than I was in July.
The featured image on this post is mine, obscurely chosen, I found it searching flickr for evaluate. sub_0037 on Flickr
@johnjohnston Our children love using Glow Blogs. I’m sure this will be a springboard to blogs with a wider audience. Thanks for your help.