Renfrewshire ICT Blog » glowscotland

Visit of Professor Tim Brighouse

gordonmckinlay — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 16:57:24 +0000

You will be aware of the work of Professor Tim Brighouse through the two books issued to all head teachers over the last couple of years. The more recent book “How Successful Head Teachers Survive and Thrive” was issued to all schools at the start of this term. Professor Brighouse is a non executive director of RM, the company providing the infrastructure for GLOW. As such we are very pleased to give you advance warning of the visit of Tim to Renfrewshire on the 11th of March 2008. Plans are at an early stage but will include a conversation workshop with head teachers on leadership along with a keynote presentation at the third of our GLOW evening events. The evening event will be at Gleniffer High School from 7-9:30pm and will include presentations on the use of GLOW to enhance learning and teaching along with the keynote by Professor Brighouse. It will be possible to book your place at the evening event via the online CPD system (http://renfrewshire.cpdservice.net). You can book your place at this event using CPD online. Search for GLOW on 11/03/2008. If you have already logged in to CPD online then just click here. There is no charge for the evening.I am sure that you will not want to miss the opportunity of hearing Professor Brighouse so this early notification aims to help you in keeping your diary clear.

GLOW Launch

gordonmckinlay — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 11:00:00 +0000

Last night saw the GLOW launch in Renfrewshire at Gleniffer High School. About 250 people with representation from most schools in Renfrewshire attended the event. We heard from Alan Wait from Learning Curve about the importance of digital literacy in the 21st century. Paul Smyth gave a first live glimpse of some of what GLOW has to offer. Finally Douglas Chapelle from RM gave a presentation of the importance of thinking through the issues of ICT in learning and teaching. Douglas highlighted the Tim Brighouse book”How Success Head Teachers Survive and Thrive” which was distributed to all our establishments earlier this term. If you have not yet had a chance to look at this can I commend it to you.

This was a great evening and we are very thankful to all the contributors for the time they gave up. The next steps are all to do with implementation. Steven Wilson has been working hard at the ops training and this is ongoing with mentor training later in the month. It looks like it will be all go very soon!

Planning for Implementation

gordonmckinlay — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 19:24:37 +0000

Glow Messenger – Success,
originally uploaded by Gordon McKinlay.

We spent a busy afternoon this week with staff from RM putting in place the plans that will allow us to implement Glow as early in the new session as possible. This was a very productive afternoon and I feel that we have now got all the important issues sorted out including the technical issues and training issues.

Importantly for staff in schools in Renfrewshire, EasyMail will not vanish at the end of June as we thought a few months ago. We are now looking at a direct switch from EasyMail to GlowMail in September or October. This should mean no loss of service.

On the training front, Steven and Ann have been working very hard to get all of this in place. There should now be an administrator a teacher administrator and a Glow champion in every school. Training for each of these people is in place. Steven will send out dates and further details at the start of the new session.

In the meantime, the last phase of Glow piloting has just about come to an end. Each of the elements being tested this time round all seem to work through our firewall. This was despit a wee glitch on mail day last week. Thanks to everyone who took part in that exercise.

It is now the end of term and staff in schools will be away for a well deserved break. Tose of us who don’t deserve a break are going to continue to work at making sure that everything is in place for the launch of Glow in the autumn.

You should also be aware of the Glow launch evening on the 9th of October. This will give everyone a great opportunity to see Glow first hand. This event has been designed on the back of the very successful showcase event we had last February. Watch this space for more details early in the new session.

Have a great summer!

Gordon

Change afoot

gordonmckinlay — Mon, 14 May 2007 18:25:19 +0000

Since I took over my new post as acting senior adviser I have not had much time to do anything with the ICT blog. I am now taking matters in hand. Our new staff tutor, Steven Wilson, is about to take it over so that schools in Renfrewshire can stay up to date with what is going on.

Social networking is an important aspect of our ICT strategy both within and without Glow. It would be odd, therefore, if we didn’t use the medium ourselves! There is a lot going on that Steven will keep you up to date with. This includes;

Glow;
games and learning;
interactive whiteboards; and
child protection on-line.

Expect to see an update on all of these here very soon.

I will keep my hand in every now and then when something of relevance crosses my horizon. For example, we are currently getting the in-service catalogue finalised at the moment. A letter should be out about that this and we are working hard on the curriculum for excellence conference at the end of May.

I hope you continue to find this medium of communication useful. I know that we have not had many comments over the past year but from conversations around it seems that lots of folk read the posts.

Getting to Grips with Web Parts

gordonmckinlay — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 10:14:02 +0000

I have spent a bit of time this morning trying to get a bit of a handle on understanding how the Glow portal works. To do this I created a group and then added a variety of parts. In order to use tools such as web conferencing and chat you have to add those parts to a Glow group. I created this group for the staff who are having a look at how to use the system for themselves.

All good so far. The main problem is that we can’t actually use the chat or web conferencing facilities due to firewall difficulties we are currently having! It is going to be a bit of a damp squib if we can’t get that fixed over the next week or two. At the moment the only place anyone can actually use the tools as if they have a broadband conenction at home. Not ideal.

Glow Piloting – week 1

gordonmckinlay — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 15:55:28 +0000

Well the phase 2 piloting of Glow has started. We have four schools involved again and ten other staff having a look under the guise of “Mentors”. The mentors have only just got their user names and passwords this week so they have not got very far to date.

It would be fair to say that we haven’t started very well. Although we can log in, use the portal and the groups, the chat and web conferencing features are not getting through the firewall. Gaving tried to access the chat feature from home I know that it is working. This means that there is something wrong at our end. Hopefully we shall get it sorted quickly so that we can then get on with piloting.

I have been posting some pictures to flickr so you get a bit of flavour of what is going on there.

Glow Phase 2 Pilot

gordonmckinlay — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 19:37:57 +0000

Tomorrow sees the start of preparation for phase 2 of Glow piloting in Renfrewshire. We have two meetings tomorrow: one for the pilot schools and the second for the mentors. In the afternoon the four pilot schools: Barsail and St Fillan’s primaries and Johnstone and ParkMains High schools will learn about what is expected of them as they pilot the use of the new tools which have been added. A day’s workshop is planned for the pilot schools before Easter with the main period of time with the children likely to be the couple of weeks after Easter. The twilight session will brief the glow mentors so that they know what is going on this time round. We are also planning practical workshop sessions for these folk, one of these will be a virtual workshop. All those who have agreed to be involved in this have agreed to be involved in the workshops so that we can get some solid feedback for the Glow team. The pilot is due to run from the 19th of March to the 3rd of May. This time staff will be able to get access to the system wherever they are. This should make things a lot better for everyone trying to get a good feel for what Glow is all about.

After the meetings tomorrow I shall post the powerpoint presentation here so that anyone else can keep up to date with what is going on.

Glow – Phase 2 Pilot

gordonmckinlay — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 22:52:30 +0000

Phase 2 of Glow piloting is about to start. The four schools (Barsail and St Fillan’s Primaries and Johnstone and Park Mains High) will be involved in trying out more of the services which will be the final part of Glow. This time round the schools will be trying out web hosting, web conferencing, chat, mailing lists and secure file transfer.

We will provide feedback to everyone in Renfrewshire as we go on with the pilot.

ICT Showcase – Evaluation

gordonmckinlay — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 12:11:44 +0000

Many thanks go to everyone involved in setting up and running last night’s ICT showcase. We had 200 teachers plus a number of other in attendance. David Muir and Ewan McIntosh gave a brilliant and stimulating presentation on some possible uses of web 2.0 in learning. The previous posts give some of the detail.

Over the next couple of days the audio from the evening will be available here and on the Renfrewshire EDS site so you can download it and listen again! A DVD is being produced for distribution to all schools in Renfrewshire. If you want a copy then please let me know and we shall see what we can do.

Initial feedback has been very positive. If you were there last night, please make sure you complete the evaluation on the CPD online system and send me your feedback as well. The event last night was an experiment

Glow Feedback Session

gordonmckinlay — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 08:38:46 +0000

Yesterday saw the end of the phase 1 pilot period of Glow. Folk from the four schools involved in Renfrewshire met together to talk through what had gone well and what had not gone well. Paul and Vicki then joined us and we were able toprovide some verbal feedback to them. I still have to write up the report form but I’ll do that at the start of the week.

Generally, the feedback was very positive. There were some technical problems, particularly with Safari (although I can’t replicate them), no joy with Mac OS9 (but then we thought that might be the case) and the passwords caused a real issue to begin with.