Phase 3 Pilot - AOL access
I contacted GLOW admin today regarding access at home using AOL. As the remote acces is the same for phase 3 as it was for phase 2 we will still not have access at home.
Lynn B
Phase 3 Pilot
Now that the latest pilot is over, I’m not sure I know a great deal more about Glow. There wasn’t much that was new and some of the irritations from previous pilots hadn’t been fixed. There’s still so much that we haven’t seen.
After a lot of hassle we got video conferencing working. At first we blamed corporate firewalls but that proved to be a red herring. Then we tried to hold a video conference using four identical PCs. Two wouldn’t connect to the conference and of the two that did, one soon froze. However, when we tried again near the end of the pilot, everything worked smoothly. When it was working it was easy to use.
We’ve been working with our colleagues in Aberdeenshire to share ideas and experiences of Glow. We discovered that they had access to some of the admin functions and could configure school and LA pages. This was much more interesting and useful than what we’d be looking at. When we asked why we hadn’t been this access we were told that the Shire had access because they had been previously involved with piloting but they didn’t want to burden the rest of us with too much information. I find this attitude unacceptable and condescending. The more we see of Glow, the better we can evaluate it. Just seeing parts for short bursts of time has not given us a real feel for how Glow will operate once it is released in its entirety. Remember, Glow will be launched in a few months. We’re still very unprepared.
My other main concern is that there is no sign of the national connections which will give Glow its power. For example, you can create Glow Groups which can be shared throughout an Authority but there is currently no way to access Groups in other Authorities or even to see the Groups they’ve created. National connections aren’t a frill but are an essential element of the whole Glow philosophy of providing a national intranet.
This all sounds negative but I think Glow really has the potential to make a significant difference to learning and teaching. If it doesn’t live up to the hype, we’ll have major problems. Implementing Glow effectively in our schools will be complicated enough. If Glow doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do or the training provided is inadequate or we have to spend a lot of time getting to grips with the administration of the system - £37,000,000 will have been wasted.
One last moan - there appeared to be very little activity from the mentors during this pilot. Everything that was created on the site - Glow Groups, uploaded documents, discussion boards, etc - was done by those in the Local Authority.
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Home Access to Glow
I haven’t been able to get in to the site at home. -’Internet Explorer cannot display this webpage.’ Is anyone else experiencing difficulties?
First impressions of the trial Glow Portal
I’m going to use this blog to detail my observations on the new glow portal and collect them a my feedback to the Glow team. I’ll try to categorise comments as ‘Things I like’, ‘Things that need to be fixed’, ‘Things that could be better’ and ‘Things I’d like to see’. I know there’s an emphasis here on more negative comments but I think it’s important to provide this kind of feedback to the developers so that the final version is as close to what the users need as possible.
These are comments after only a few hours playing with the portal so they are likely to be modified over the next few weeks.
‘Things I like’
The user interface is consistent. Once you get used to how one feature works, other features are likely to follow a similar pattern.
The user guides are simple and straightforward.
The ability to organise web parts allows some flexibility in how pages are presented.
I like being able to attach a file to a calendar entry - it’s a good way of keeping documents for a meeting together. (I must check if you can link to existing documents.)
I like the ‘everything in one place’ philosophy.
‘Things that need to be fixed’
When using the calendar, the cursor doesn’t change to a hand when you click on the arrows to move forward a month.
There is no ‘return to default’ or ’save page layout’ which would be useful if you mess up when changing the order or size of web parts on a page.
When uploading a document you should be able to give it a title at the same time, not add it after the upload.
Searching for a user timed out several times. This may be a problem with our connection but was worrying.
When folders are nested, there is no indication of where the folder is in the file structure. An indication of the file path is required.
When deleting a glow group, you get a ‘your website has been deleted message’ which is misleading and there is no way to move from the page without using the back button.
Editing the content of a web part, although consistent, is not intuitive. Clicking on the web part title is not the obvious way to find out to edit a document or weblink. Perhaps making this clearer by having a more informative tooltip.
‘Things that could be better’
I’d like to be able to type directly into a day on the calendar rather than the present way.
The distinction between the different areas - school, local, national is always clear but perhaps this will be more obvious in the real version.
There should be a way of nesting glow groups under subheadings or in folders.
‘Things I’d like to see’
I’d like a web part that would take an RSS feed.
I haven’t been able to get the video conferencing or chat going at work because we appear to have firewall problems. I can do it from home and what I’ve seen appears to work well.
Glow has a lot to offer so one of our main training issues is likely to be deciding just what a basic training should contain and what should be kept until later.
Communicate.07
I was lucky enough to attend Communicate.07 in Stirling yesterday. There were lots of inspiring seminars but I was particularly impressed with one I attended on the use of the mobile phone in education. There were ideas from simply using the stopwatch to bluetoothing your whole class with a podcast on verbs or a song you want them to listen to. I have long thought that soon we might be telling pupils off for not having their phones in school. I wonder what other people think?
Microsoft donate to Charity
This seems like a worthwhile site to make a search from as Microsoft donate money for refugee children each time you search. I found it on Ewan McIntosh’s blog. Does anyone know if this would be safe for us to let our pupils use in school?
Have you seen Rock You ?
For those making blogs have you seen the Rock You plug in for displaying photographs ? Some of my class saw it on another blog and asked me to find out how to use it. They are really excited about it. I think that it looks much better than the rows of photos that I’ve been putting in up to now.
Finding things in blogs
Here is a good tutorial from Andrew Brown on how to find things in blogs. If you’re not already a reader of Andrew’s Blog, I highly recommend it.
BETT 07 Video Review
The video review of Bett 07 is worth taking a look at. The same page has links to podcasts and materials from seminars.