Tag: glowscotland

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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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At the Scottish Learning Festival on Thursday I was asked to do a wee turn in the Glowing Lounge talking about glow. As my Authority have not started to roll out glow yet, my experience of glow has been limited. One area I have worked on, as a Masterclass facilitator, is the National ICT group where I’ve been working on a page giving information on Web 2 technologies.

I started by giving a very quick overview of a few websites and explained using ScotEduBlogs.org.uk and a netvibes page SLF2008 the idea that these services are mashable.

The SLF2008 page may be useful for find information about the festival as it gathers:

  • Links tagged slf2008 on delicious
  • A blog search for the tag SLF2008
  • Twitter tweets tagged SLF2008
  • Flickr photos tagged slf08 (at this time more than tagged slf2008)
  • My blog post about SLF2008
  • A youtube movie

I explained I wanted to do the same sort of thing on glow, to be able to pull in information using RSS (I used grazr for producing rss widgets) and embed-able widgets. At first I used a text editor webpart in glow, but was frustrated when that part strips out javascript rendering and multi-video youtube players ended up playing a random video.

I found that the xml webpart was a much better option the only problem is that in Safari and firefox on a mac the xml editor is somewhat small. I discovered, live in front of my audience, that IE on a pc has a bigger popup field which is easier to work with.
However by that time I had discovered a better solution, if you put all the code and script you like in a text document and upload that to glow you can use the url to that file to put in the xml field. It is a lot easier working with this that in a field on a web browser. Another advantages is that if you keep a local copy of your text file you can change it and re-upload to automatically update your page, much easier than going through the webpart editing again.

You can also if you like and know how, add style sheet information and other html. For those that can, it is better to wrap all your html in a div and refer to that, as you can find your styles taking over the glow page’s own. It is probably best to only use the body of a webpage if you are using an html editor to get the bits you want embedded organised, I somehow managed to remove the glow sidebar from a page while testing it.

As an aside I had an interesting discussion with a member of the audience as I finished, she said she would not be happy embedding youtube for her pupils on glow as they could follow the link back to youtube and find unsuitable material. I explained that I was using a youtube custom player to show web 2 related videos to staff. you can see the custom player if you are interested in my selection and not in glow. I explained that if i wanted t oshow pupils youtube videos I would do so via Edublogs.tv a service that will allow you to upload your own movies or copy them across from youtube, these can then be embedded in glow for your class.

As I said there may be easier ways to do this, and when I get my glow mentor training I should find out, but this is a pretty practical way to get some Web 2 content into glow.

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End of School Year

Straight from school on friday to the pub, for a bit to eat, a few Guinness and to talk a fair bit of nonsense.
Steam was let off the world put to rights and a few farewells said.
The way staffing in schools goes at the moment you spend a lot of time saying goodbye.

The next day I got down playing with phpFlickr here, increasing my admiration for both flickr‘s api and phpFlickr. It is a great pity that flickr is not available in many schools (it is worth repeating this frequently I think).
I finally bit the bullet and bought a pro account on flickr, nice seeing the old photos reappear safe and sound and the badge on my other blog is refilled.

Progress

Due to rain, I’ve spent a bit of time today tidying my desk at home and planning the geeky bit of my holidays.

A few weeks ago Carol Fuller (Sandaig’s fairy blogmother) invited me onto facebook, which I hope to explore and blog about. Through it I’ve discovered mojungle a mobloging sort of application which seems nice. I’ve also found that flickr is getting on better with my phone so I hope to try some moblogging experiments perhaps combined with the aforementioned phpFlickr. I’ve embedded my flickr tagged moblog and mojungle on my moblog.

I didn’t use the third glow pilot as much as I did the second, but I need to blog a bit about glow I think.

I am also going to spend a bit of time with SuperCard and update some of my projects.

Other than that I hope to get down to the beach, climb a few wee hills and resurrect my tai chi practise all once the rain stops.

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Since the start of the holidays I’ve spent quite a few hours in Glow trying out some tools. I gave a brief account a few days ago and said I was not sure if blogging about glow was permitted, since then I’ve seen a good few posts tagged glowscotland so I guess this will be ok. Glow is also down at the moment so I might as well gather my thoughts.(That was Saturday, this is Wednesday Thursday, glow resurfaced after the weekend)

(star)The concept of having the tools free and safe for all in Scottish education is wonderful.
(star) The guides are clear.
(wish) I wish the software would work in the quick and simple way that many web tools do.
Read on past the more for more details…

Web Hosting

modify_shared_page.jpg

This first thing I tried was the Web hosting facility. This allows glow users to have a website which is either internal viewable only by glow members that you give permission to, or to be viewable to the world at large.
To get some webspace you first add the Web hosting part to your own glow page (My Glow). To do this you open a Modify shared Page section on the page. Browse the Web parts available and then add a Web Hosting – Web site management part to your page. This is a wee bit clunky if you are used to Ajax driven web 2.0 style pages, but it doesn’t take too long. Once you have a Web Hosting – Web site management part on your page you need to click the Request a Web Site link in that part.
This takes you to a page where you choose the size of your site, decide if it is going to be public or not and if not which glow members will be able to see it. I choose a public site and named it ‘john johnston testing…’ which was not a good idea.
you then need to wait until the request is granted, this seems to happen on the next working day. My first site did not work due to the spaces and periods in the title which become part of the url. Unfortunately spaces and periods were not listed as problematic chars, I also wasted time by not checking until I had uploaded pages to the site. I set up another site and then set it up
To set up a site on glow you need to create the web pages, images etc and upload them via your browser.

glow_web_manage.jpg

The process for uploading files is pretty primitive as you can see from the screenshot above (although the final page will look better once it has a stylesheet.).
I uploaded a file without trouble but I would not like to have to set up a site with several pages and images.

The Webhosting Quick Start Guide was clear and easy to follow but the actual process was a bit too clumsy.
A user with the know how to create a website would be better served by uploading it in a more standard way.
A user without the know how would be better using something like Google Page Creator.
I realised later that I had set the permissions for the page I made to be internal to glow, so I went back into the management and set it to public. The url for the site changed and I cannot open the new or the old page. This might be due to the fact that this is a pilot and we are not supposed to connect to the public at large.

Video Streaming

I was very interested in this, at Sandaig Television we have run into a few bandwidth problems. Glow allows you to upload streaming video and then make that public. I am hoping to use that to show the children’s video on the school blogs via reference movies.
Again the Quick Start guide was simple and easy to follow.
again you need to add a webpart to your glow page to list your videos. except it doesn’t actually list your videos just provides a link to the page that does. What is interesting is that you do not upload your video through glow but with an ftp application. So I did. It looks like the video is then moved swiftly to another location as your ftp folder is always empty.
After uploading a video you can edit the clip information through a page linked from the list of videos:

edit_video_clip.jpg

This was pretty straightforward although as you can see from the screenshot I got a bit muddled setting a target audience, I choose teachers then decided to add my own (test) submitting the form gave an error. There is a url for the clip you upload to share. Unfortunately the first video I uploaded gave a 404 not found error, I tried again and then headed for the feedback discussions where got some extra information on how to set my video to work for streaming I followed this but it still did not work (this time a -5408:timedout error). I’ve posted feedback and emailed support so I guess I’ll hear more after the holidays.

Overall the video streaming looks like a great idea, the instructions are clear if not completely straightforward but the process suffers badly when compared to uploading video to youtube

Glow Chat

I’ve not used this yet except to join an empty chat room, once set up it looks like a fairly standard java inside your browser chat with moderation.

Glow Meet

This is the best tool I have tried so far and I’ve only tried it for an hour or so. Hopefully we are going to have a wee bloggers meet later on today. Tessa has covered this tool well in her blog: Glow ?Chat? And ?Video-Conferencing? and is instrumental in setting up the meet this afternoon.
Again the Quick start guides are clear and easy to follow, I had no trouble setting up a glow group and a meet. Again you need to do all the rather clunky add webpart stuff.
While this is not video conferencing as I know it (full screen tv, moving camera) I is a great tool set with a lot of possibilities for teaching and learning.
update: I’ve now spent a couple of hours inside a Marratech conference with some familiar folk from various Scots Edu blogs. (Mr W covered the meet).
Nearly all of the tool we tried worked well, and it became clear that this would be a powerful tool for leading an online presentation allowing others to put in their 2 pence worth. After there was 8 or so folk in the room the various webcam feeds slowed down quite a bit, I wonder if these will be much use in practise. (It might be an idea to turn this on and then off which will give others in the chat a still of each participant and see who is talking). Again audio feed was clear most of the time if everybody keeps their headphones plugged in and avoids feedback. I do not know if this will be set up so that a moderator can turn users audio up in the final version of glow, but that might be handy. We should have another chat early next week to learn a bit more about the tools.

Discussion Forums

These should be one of the most potently useful parts of glow. The ability to set up discussions for groups and to connect to others interested in the same area.
Setting up a discussion in a group is easy, click on the discussions tab and then on New Discussion. You can also alter some of the feature of a discussion, but I have not seem I have taken part in a few of the feedback forums and in one test forum set up for a purpose Educational Shareware, there are quite a few test discussions going on but by using the feedback ones and the shareware group, I hope it gave me a feel for the real thing.
Unfortunately I have found navigating the discussions very clunky. lots of scrolling and clicking, neither of the two views let you read and respond with out a lot of clicking.
It is hard to follow discussions that you have started and taken part in, as there is not ‘my discussions’ or even a search. There is no recent discussions list either so to see if a discussion has be updated you need to dig down into the various threads. The date on the threads is not the date that the last addition to the tread or sub thread was made.
I really hope that this can be improved on by the time the portal goes live.

Conclusions

The concept of glow is wonderful. In my opinion at the moment the workings and interface needs some work.

  • FTP to upload video not websites, one file upload could be better handled in the browser than multiple files with multiple destinations. I’d swap that one around.
  • The overall navigation is quite complex, I frequently get lost and bob back and forward. The fact that you cannot record were you have posted to in discussions is a problem, as is the fact you cannot search or see recent discussion.
  • Setting various things up is difficult compared to most Web 2 stuff and especially AJAX techniques, the interface for adding webparts is clunky.

Given that this is a pilot and the problems I list are to do with the interface rather than the concept Glow is looking promising.
These are my opinions, no one else’s. To be taken with the usual pinch of salt.

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Normally in the first few days of a holiday I’d find the time to blog that I do not have in a working week.

Not this time, I spent the first 3 days immersed in Glow. There is a lot to try out. I’ve experimented with the web hosting tool, the video streaming, the meeting tool (Marratech) and participated in a few discussion boards. I’ve left various bits of feedback.

Yesterday I gave up and went for a walk and I am off for another one today. I probably need a wee break.

I am going to play a bit more over the holidays though. I don’t think it is appropriate for me to post too much here.

You can see various stuff about Tagged: glowscotland including some screenshots but glow is probably a bit too beta to talk about publicly yet.

I would like to test the tools, with others inside glow. Unfortunately I’ve not met many folk in there yet. So if you would like to meet up in a glow meet, have a yack and test glow meet a bit let me know.

Update, I rushed this post out yesterday and went for a walk leaving the post on hold, a senior moment.

Since then Tess Watson has posted a great report on Glow ?Chat? And ?Video-Conferencing?.

As Tess seems to be more in the know about glow it looks as if it will be ok to blog about the working of the beast. Tess also wants to meet up with folk in there so I’ll give that a go (see her blog for her request)

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I spent the afternoon at BarCampScotland BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment.

Organised by

and others it was the first BarCamp in Scotland. Interesting for lots of reasons. The idea is that everyone there should present a short session.

I was there with

to talk about ScotEduBlogs (my slides).

Robert Jones and John Johnston

Originally uploaded by Edublogger.


and I met for lunch at Susie’s Wholefood Diner and had a wee yack about ScotEduBlogs, it was great to accually meet Robert after a few months of online collaboration.

I pretty much stuck to education presentations:

Ian Stuart talking about Islay High School amazing project to embed ict in all areas, give all the children an UMPC and lots more. A really exciting project. I had a quick play with one of Ian’s UMPCs which was a great tool for children, nice handwriting recognition, they looked really usable and portable.

Digitalkatie talked about giving all the children in her school mobile devices too, another exciting and motivational project.

One of the problems I had was not writing down the location and time of all the speaker at BarCamp. So I was a few minutes late for Tess‘s discussion of Glow her report of how her pupils took to glow was very reassuring as was the screenshot of the primary pupil view of the portal. I feel a lot more positive about glow after hearing from a real classroom. I am still a bit worried about losing our international audience.

I also watched a couple of nice podcasting presentations and a very interesting higher edu blogging one, unfortunately I didn’t get a link from these, due to lack of attention to the speaker boards and the fact I did not take a laptop with me.

Flickr: Photos tagged with barcampscotland

barcampscotland: Technorati