Tag: glow

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A while back I posted about a system for Simplifying the glow logon I was developing. Hopefully some folk in North Lanarkshire will be using this next term.

Yesterday I was thinking about another way to improve the glow logon screen again along the lines suggested by Sean Farrell – logging into glow at TeachMeet SLF 2010

This is a very simple way to ‘improve’ the glow logon, works in Safari and Firefox and is ready now. It works by using a JavaScript bookmarklet which can be added to your browsers bookmark bar, clicking it on the glow logon page results in:

  1. The font size of the username & password fields is increased.
  2. If you hover the mouse over the password field it will show you what you have typed into the field.

Here is a wee video showing how to add the bookmarklet to a browser and using it on the logon screen.

If you would like the bookmarklet you can get it from http://glo.li/hecNqX.

Or just drag this link to your bookmarks: Big Log On

It should be easy enough to make this work in Internet explorer too.

At the moment the bookmarklet just loads this simple script.

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Glow has added wikis to it list of features.

What is a wiki? (from wikipedia):

A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopaedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis.

Examples of wikis edited by pupils( not glow ones):

  1. australiatopic
  2. A Broken World
  3. Year 7 Mathex
  4. Sandaig Primary Wiki

Background on using wikis, blog posts by Neil Winton (Perth Acedemy):

  1. SLF08 – Wikis Part 1
  2. SLF08 – Wikis Part 2

Example of wikis used by teachers to share resources ( not glow ones):

Sample Glow Wiki with information on wikis which you are free to edit (glow logon required)

Wiki category of Glow Help blog

The Glow folk have started a Scotland Schools Wiki

“Over time we hope that this wiki will build into a ‘Domesday Book’ of schools in Scotland in the 21st century.”

Any glow user can add pages for their school and edit pages

Nice things about wikis:

  • collaboration
  • tracking of edits you can see you did what
  • easy to roll back to previous version is someone makes a mistake.

Best thing about glow wikis: Much easier than glow pages to edit, think a Text Editor that works.

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NB. posted in annoyance!

A while ago I took the time to fill in the survey on the Glow Futures home page, and had a quick look at the forums. Like most other folk in education I am quite busy but intended to add my 2 pence worth. I’ve revisited the site a few times but quite often it loads slowly or just show me a blank page.

Today as I am on holiday I though I’d take the time to add something to the debate. After a frustration half hour I though it worth posting my experience here, as I doubt many folk will have the patience to read about it on the forum if their experience is anything like mine.

On the forum I again found I have to frequently refresh the page after looking at a blank one while browsing the forum. This is quite off putting. I did find a topic that I though I could add to: How can Glow become more appealing?. As I went through the process of posting my post changed to become a log of the process I had to go through to post to the forum (too much recursion?). Here is what I posted:

Alex Duff said:

What needs to change in Glow so that it becomes more appealing to more teachers?

Usability.

Although this forum is not in glow it feels glow like to me:

  1. Arrive on forum page (often need to refresh to see anything)
  2. Click login
  3. Taken to a login page which advises I login via glow
  4. Click glow login button
  5. shibboleth page appears
  6. redirect to glow
  7. login
  8. shibboleth page appears
  9. redirected to my profile
  10. click forum
  11. Read a post & click quote to reply
  12. quote doesn’t appear
  13. Switch browsers and repeat steps 1 to 11

I’ve forgotten what I was going to type.

Admittedly this is a worst case picture, but not unlike the number of clicks needed to do something in glow.

Trying to explain to primary 3 that they need to click and hold the back button to skip past shibboleth so that they can add their purple mash creation to the glow group that they started from is not always easy.

Just resized the text field I am typing in, now can’t scroll field have to use arrow keys to go back up and check what I typed.

On the blog issue I am happy enough with wordpress, I don’t think you can run tumbler on your own server so it could not be part of glow. But everyone will have their favourite blog platform, mine is posterous:-)

This session most of my day to day work has involved glow, I’ve been creating content in glow, training staff and worked in classrooms with glow in demonstration lessons and team teaching. I still love the idea of glow, the conceit (in a good way) of having a national intranet providing a fantastic toolkit for teaching and learning is wonderful indeed. I am quite familiar with a lot of the glow groups tools and have been able to bend them to my needs fairly successfully, I’ve seen teachers create great learning opportunities with glow but…

A lot of folk I talk to have experience with glow similar to mine with the forum, things are hard to use, this will put off the less technophile. If I’d not had a bit of time on my hands I’d have given up on contributing to the future of glow on the forum. As it was due to my difficulty with the usability of the forum my contribution is pretty inarticulate and fragmentary. I wonder how many valuable contributors have been put off?

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  • I listened to EDUtalkr online panel discussions about Scottish education: #1 Glow the day after the live discussion, it really deserves a blog entry to itself, but I don’t have the time. The audio is not great but the discussion is interesting, lots of agreement and shared ground from folk I didn’t necessarily expect to agree. If you are a scottish educator, interested in glow, and have not listened to it I suggest you do.
  • I’ve started collecting html5 links on delicious, troutcolor’s html5 Bookmark, some very interesting stuff going on that suggests that long term lack of flash might not hold apple back.
  • At work I’ve been updating the webpages that support Apple RTC courses.
  • Heard my first cuckoo here
  • Yesterday I went for a wee walk in Glen Douglas, not good weather for photos but I’ve mapped some: Glen Douglas 24.04.10

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A while ago (2 years, time flies!) I blogged some GarageBand plans for making simple music in class. I used it a lot at Sandaig, resulting in the Sandaig jukebox.

I’ve been using the technique again in developing some glow ict groups in North Lanarkshire.

This has given me the chance to work with some pupils again and to improve my instructions. Yesterday I decided to try and screencast the procedure and the result is show above. The process let me work a bit more with ScreenFlow, which is a lovely screencast editor. I am still working on my presentation skills which results in a few odd pauses and repetitions, but I though the movie worth publishing.

It also gave me a opportunity to test our Apple Wiki Server to publish the screencast: Simple Music with GarageBand. The Apple Wiki server provides one of the easiest to use podcast publishers I have seen, although configuring and theming the wikis and blog is a bit tricky. I was lucky to have one of the North Lanarkshire network guys set up the server and get me started. I am looking forward to finding a school or two who would be interested in some podcasting.

Some of the experience in themeing the wiki helped me in setting up some glow groups, I found some interesting ways to get glow to do what I want and hope to get the chance to talk about this for 7 minutes at TeachmeetSLF09 on Glow Hacking on Wednesday night.

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My blogging seems to have hit a all time low. I think this is mainly because I used to blog about my classroom practice (with some iPhone, web tech and the odd AppleScript thrown in). I was never one for educational theory I am afraid. I now don’t have a classroom to practise in and blog about.

My more technical posts have never been popular (judging by comments) and fall between absolute beginner and competent so don’t have that wide an audience;-)

Anyway I am going to start a wee Glow post and see what happens.

Glow 2blogpost

I’ve blogged about glow before but never had the chance to use it in the classroom. Over the last few weeks I’ve watched North Lanarkshire teachers and pupils start to use glow in practise and have been involved in helping with some of the training.

So far I’ve seen glow have a remarkable effect on some teaching and learning in the first schools to get on board. Teachers have been setting work on glow, children posting work and commenting on other pupils work, locally and further afield. Classes have joined and contributed to National groups and in one case I know off a teacher created a national group within about a week of joining glow. There seems to be a real appetite for getting children involved in all sorts of online collaborating.

One of the favourite activities seem to be the use of Marratech video conferencing through Glow Meet. This is a little ironic as North Lanarkshire has run its own Marratech server for several years. Although this has been used for many projects I think there has been a significant increase in video conferencing in the first couple of months of glow.

I am beginning to think that the most important aspect glow is the way that online collaboration and communication receive promotion and support. There is top down encouragement that is being met by great enthusiasm, almost as if folk have been waiting for the tools unaware that they were already available.

Watching folk take their first steps in glow also highlights some problems with glow and perhaps some pointers for Glow 2.

GUI

Glow Password Change

I’ve watch a fair number of people click the cancel button to start all over again by accident. There are a number of similar examples.
The editing of pages in glow is quite a laborious process compared to many web 2 applications there are many examples of slicker interfaces. Compare adding an rss feed to glow and to, say netvibes. Editing information in glow usually seems to involved lots or page reloads and then some scrolling.

Organisation

Groups are hierarchical and difficult to find, interesting groups may be buried inside others. The ability to search group descriptions and the tagging of groups would help this. Some sort of way of filtering and organising groups is needed.
Recently I found a group discussion in glow asking for suggestions for glow 2. I posted a couple of comments but there is very little discussion on the board, perhaps because folk cannot find it?

Data Exchange

One of the strengths of Web 2 applications is the way many of them allow syndication and distribution of data, I can have flickr update in my blog, recent posts from blogs listed in a wiki and so on. At the moment RSS in glow relies on 3rd party scripts or widgets. The is no way, as far as I know, of getting information out of glow in an automatic way. It is hard t ofollow the work of groups you are interested in and no simple ways to share what a group are doing.
Some of this is due to the overriding concern for security but glow does allow for public facing html webpages so the idea of some of glow being open to the public is not beyond the pale.

Wish List

It would be good if Glow 2 was in some way modular, allowing users and groups to add popular and useful open source components, making them private or open to the world. So a group could have a wordpress blog, a phpBB discussion forum, a choice of cms, wikis VLEs etc. etc. Adding the ability for glow to update and add modules would also make Glow a work in progress, in perpetual Beta, rather than a fixed toolset.
I don’t think this is to far fetched, at the moment glow will allow secure access to lots of external content. If this could be expand to give users a choice of the tools it could be wonderful it would help with some of my GUI and data exchange wishes too.

2 Stars & a Wish

We, in Scotland, have an amazing opportunity in Glow which could be even better.

Basic 5 Point Gold Star Beveled The vision of a national collaboration and communication space for education..

Basic 5 Point Gold Star BeveledThe promotion and support of this collaboration and communication..

BubblesWhen the dust settles we have the best tools for the job, and tools that we can swap at will as better ones come along..

I’d be interested to know what other users have on their glow 2 wishlist? Or if you know where the best place to discuss this would be?

Top image http://www.wordle.net/ with this post’s text.

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wallace monument

I spent Thursday and Friday at the Stirling Management Centre learning about Glow Learn. This is just my first reaction to the training, my own opinion which will probably change once I’ve had a chance to discuss and think a bit more.

Back in Glasgow I had been a Glow mentor but as the Glow roll out hadn’t started before I left my experience limited to a couple of pilots when I spent a fair bit of time testing glow. I’ve never used glow in a teaching situation and it now feels peculiar that I will not be doing so.

In North Lanarkshire we have just started rolling out glow accounts to mentors and only had our mentor training a couple of weeks ago so it is a bit of a jump going straight into glow learn. The in-school mentors will have a wee while longer before they get to the Learn training but it might have been better if we could have had a bit of time to embed glow before getting into learn, unfortunately this is not possible.

Most of the time over the two days was spent in a mix of instruction and practical activity. The group I was in was lead by Karen-Ann MacAlpine, Ian Hoffman, Lorna Murray all of RM Glow Team, Lorna is the RM contact for North Lanarkshire. The pacing and delivery of the material was excellent, lots of time to practice and chat and ask questions.

Pictures from Glow Learn Training are on the New North Lanarkshire Glow Blog which is being developed by the Glow Development officers.

Glow Learn is a VLE (virtual learning environment) within glow. I’ve never taught with a vle and have only come across them by accessing a Moodle course or two. Glow learn allows teachers to gather objective and learning resources together into courses, present them to pupils and follow those pupils tracks recording and assessing their progress.

Glow learn also allows the organising an sharing of resources and courses with other glow users. It allows teacher to search for courses and resources and use these.

Finally it allows the courses created to be added to a Glow group in a learning space sitting along site discussion boards and other resources.

The practical job of all of this organisation, sharing and presentation is necessarily complex. Even after two days I was struggling to hold a consistent overview of how all the bits fitted together in my head.

The learn section allows you to collect resources of several types, files, links and tests. You can make your own or search for them in resources that are available above you in the hierarchy, that is, resources at the national level or your school level are available to you. Resources (and courses) created can pushed up the hierarchy to make the available for more users. The organisation of this becomes interesting when you start to think about who has permission to edit resources and how that will effect other users. Various safeguards are in place to prevent other teachers changing courses.

Once you have created some resources and added them to a course you can add students/pupils and assign them work. Glow learn is flexible enough to allow work by pupils to be a quiz/test answered online or submission of any sort of file. I like the idea of allowing pupils to answer or record their learning in different ways.

It seems that glow learn is adaptable enough to use in different ways, you could just create the resources and use that as a whole class teaching tool, or you could have a class access differentiated resources and complete assignments online.

Back in glow itself glow learn resources can be presented through a learning space which in this case is a specialised web-part that can be added to a glow page. Although this looks like a good idea it also adds to a teachers workload as pupils need to be added to both the course in glow learn and the learning space.

GLOW learn has loads of potential to widen the curriculum subjects offered in many schools - especially at advanced higher

Good Things About Glow Learn:

  • Potential of Creating Courses for reuse.
  • Sharing and using other courses.
  • Collaborative building of courses and schemes of work.
  • Widen range of children’s work & Choices.
  • Combine with other resources in Glow, discussions, video conferences etc.

Possible Drawbacks

  • Fairly steep learning curve.
  • Some of Glow’s GUI is confusing, I think learn is better than glow itself in this respect.

The advantages that glow learn has over other online tools such as blogs and wiki are the potential for sharing of resources with other Scottish teachers, the archiving and tracking of pupil learning over the pupils whole career. This will depend on the willingness of Local Authorities and teachers to share and on their skill in describing and tagging their resources.

It is early days for glow learn and I understand that it is still in development,the team spoke about the fact that they did not know how the VLE was going to be used and how it would develop in practise. This could be a very positive thing if glow learn will be actively developed to accommodate the users.

As some of us come late to the glow party there are already signs of glow 2, I noticed this tweet from Laurie O’Donnell:

“@JConnell @jayerichards Just like Glow 1 the plan for Glow 2 is go public with a draft spec and seek suggestions to make it better.”

Although I made a fair number of suggestions for the improvement of glow one during the pilot I am only now figuring out what could be the best thing about glow 2.0, keep it in beta.

Instead of designing a spec which is fixed in stone I hope glow 2 like most of the Web 2.0 applications we now use will be in perpetual beta. Think about how much the google services have changed in the last few years, look at posterous adding features as users suggest them, keeping ease of use at the top of the agenda. The definition of Perpetual beta at Wikipedia would be a good starting place for glow 2.

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Wu wei – No action
Originally uploaded by ????

I’ve been a fan of posterous since it started and have been amazed how the service has added features as quickly as they have been suggested. A couple of days ago the announced public group sites with post by moderation. This allow you to open up a blog to posts by anyone, but you get to moderate the posts.

I imagine you could use a group posterous for a inter school poetry blog (for example) between schools allowing children to concentrate on their writing and the evaluation of their partners.
Or a a zero setup class blog if your pupils have separate email addresses.

Posterous of course is blogging by email, with zero setup. Posterous takes just about any sort of media and deals with it in a sensible way. Posterous also sends you posts to other places (twitter, flickr, blogs etc) automatically if you want.

Garry Tan one of posterous’ cofounders had set up a public blog Posterous Recipes for Recipes and I though I’d give it a spin. All I needed to do was to drag a couple of photos from iPhoto onto the mail icon on my Mac’s dock, up popped a mail window with the photos attached, I put in the address post@recipes.posterous.com and clicked send, it was that simple. No resizing of photos, posterous presents them beautifully without out me having to think about them.

Posting my recipe, Posterous recognised my email and linked my recipe to my own posterous. And as I posted to post@ rather than posterous@ it picked up my settings and tweeted for me and posted the photos to flickr too!

Although the main way of accessing Posterous is via email, the web interface if beautiful for example, commenting in posterous is a very sweet, no opening the post in a new window, just an ajax reveal of the comment box: simple and clean without confusion.

The guys at posterous are incredibly responsive, I’ve mailed and tweeted them a few time and always had replies within hours, give the time difference this is really impressive. They are improving posterous almost all of the time; on one occasion in response to a blog post elsewhere, taking suggestions, acting on them and reporting all in the comments!

The fact posterous deals with blogging sorts of media without the user having to think. This echoes a Chinese philosophical phrase act without doing; ? ? ?; wei wu wei (wei wu wei: “action without action” or “effortless doing”).

This reminds me of When the technology gets boring, then things get interesting socially, a quote I saw in a comment on Ewan‘s blog, originally from Clay Shirky. Elsewhere (I think) Ewan talked about email as an example of this. With posterous you can use email, a tech you can use without thought, so that you can concentrate on what you are posting, the teach not the tech (Ewan again). Or for pupils the learning not the ict skills.

Last week I had some Glow training, I am starting to get quite excited about the possibilities of pupils using Glow. The potential is there, but the tech needs to become less obvious. Posting video to glow involves using a browser, then an ftp client, and then back to a browser. Coincidentally the previous night I was testing a flip video camera and popped the result onto posterous by simply dragging the file onto my mail app, filling in the to address and hitting send.

The Flip camera and posterous are both effortless technology, in education both could help by lowering the bar so that learners can concentrate on the learning and not get caught up in the tech. Glow has incredible ambition and potential I hope it becomes an effortless tool in the same way posterous and the flip camera are.