Jonesieblog

Today I had my first day of training as a Glow mentor.  I’ve seen the portal before, but things have progressed over the last few months and it was useful to see what is possible now.

RSS feeds and widgets can now be inserted easily into pages, which is very cool.

My job over the next wee while will be to educate other teachers (and pupils?) about Glow, and to lead by example in putting it to effective use in the learning and teaching process.  Whilst this is a daunting prospect, I’m looking forward to taking on such a positive role - it’s all too easy to slip into the usual teacherly pass-time of moaning and criticising!

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Scott Wilson has a superb diagram on his blog showing how institutional software and user-controlled spaces should interact in an efficient learning environment.

He also has a slide show about OpenID and education, in which he says:

Far from threatening institutional viability and control, distributed, user-owned technology offers an escape route from escalating costs, liabilities, and bureaucracy that come from a supply-driven model. Rather than spinning us out of control, they offer a way to get back under control.

Oh yes!

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Someone has been listening

 I’ve just been into the phase 3 version of the Glow portal, and they have included instructions to insert rss feeds into pages.  The way to do it is rather circuitous, but at least it is now doable.  I’ve tested it with a couple of feeds, and it seems to work fine.

The “glowing potential” bit has a page showing how to insert external web sites into pages, and they have use our scotedublogs.org.uk as one of the examples.  Very flattering

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We all know that we can do everything that Glow does so far with free tools available on-line.  That fact has no bearing, in my opinion, on whether or not Glow is a worthwhile enterprise, and so I shall refrain from banging on about it.

I’ve been back in the Glow portal this evening.  Everything worked smoothly on Linux running Firefox.  This is a real credit to the original architects of Glow. It would have been so easy to get sucked into a Windows or Windows/Mac only solution.

Once inside I began trying to set up a glow chatroom.  I have to say that this was not an intuitive process, but I got there in the end, and I’m sure it’ll be easier next time.

It did strike me, as I looked around, that this whole environment will by default be hidden to the wider world.  We will have to think carefully about the implications of that.  I currently have two classes doing scribe post blogs, and their global audience is a big selling point.  It will be a shame if the wider world isn’t able to see what we are doing or share the resources we create.

The VLE should, of course, have some privacy - I look forward to seeing how this turns out. Or I could just use Moodle now… oops, I promised didn’t I?

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I just read this at the clacksblog

News has just reached us that Mentor training is being delayed until after the summer holidays.

I wonder if this applies nationally? Anyone able to fill me in on the details?

[UPDATE] Apparently it does apply to us all.  No reason to panic - IT projects get delayed all the time. 

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