Posts Tagged ‘Glow’

The Future of Glow…

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

Ok, big news this month for the infrastructure of Scotland’s flagship learning network, but, before I say any more, watch this wee video.

Cabinet Secretary Michael Russell has introduced the partnership between Glow and Microsoft 365 for Education, Microsoft’s educational cloud computing world.  In his statement he lets us know that,

“To ensure continuity we have taken the step of extending the current RM provision through to December 2013. Microsoft have agreed to provide the tools and services of their integrated application suite ‘Microsoft Office 365 for Education’ for free through to December 2014; this was the first offer of its kind in the world for a national schools project.  

Microsoft have also agreed to go further and deliver a package over and above the integrated application suite to deliver on the 5 key principles for Glow. For example, the improvements to the functionality and ease of use of the Glow application suite will be aided by a full-time dedicated staff member funded by Microsoft to help support and promote the service.

As a Government we will also work to integrate the ICT choices made by local authorities for their own education communities within our co-ordinated national effort.“

This last point is a contentious area.  Many local authorities have already made the decision to use Google Apps (I wish that was mine!) and do not want to loose them.  I personally have spent 7 years building a successful online learning network using Google’s ‘always’ free online tools.  Will I ‘evicted’ from my Google Cloud ‘Squat’?  Will the transition be supported?

However, the door is not completely closed and as a classroom teacher, I will continue to use Google tools as they are more easily manageable on my iPad and pupils seem to find them more intuitive.  Mind you, the iOS version of MS office is due out in the next 4 months as well as the SkyDrive App launching,  could this change my mind?  I don’t know, but MS Office 365 does look awesome.

All I know is that I want to be able to upload, host, edit, share and collaborate online with my learners using an easily accessible system for learners at all levels and abilities.

I don’t think we are quite there yet, but if my Glow account includes a free X-Box Live Gold membership then….

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Posted in Questions for Reflections, Video | No Comments »

Latest Do-Be update from Scott @ Do-Be.

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

scott

Do-BeScott has sent me some cool linkies for you to have a look at. Its is some of the work he has been involved in this week.

First we have a link to the Teachmeet page from Tuesday night.

We also had Val Kennedy from Inverkeithing talking about Teach-It Alcohol awareness (See about 7 minutes into this video).  Here is a report from a local Fife newspaper, The Courier about the project.

Do-Be also sponsored and gave away 2 paper Teach-It packs and 2 online access codes to Teach-It as prizes – how cool is that?

Lastly I was also at the Glow Futures presentation at the Apex hotel on Tuesday morning.  Check it out here.

Thanks for the update Scott – don’t work too hard!

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Posted in Alcohol Awareness, CPD, Education, Teach-It | No Comments »

Olivia Wexelstein Do’er #2

Monday, February 21st, 2011

using vokis (Medium)

This is the first blog post written by our second certified ‘Do’er’. Olivia Wexelstein is a teacher at Wellwood Primary School in Fife and Do Be Do’er.  She is  a fab person to follow on Twitter and is also chief organiser of TeachMeet Fife.  In her own words…..

I came across Teach-It two years ago at the Scottish Learning Festival.  I was very impressed with it’s simple, attractive layout and especially it’s content.  ICT has always played a very important part in my teaching and learning but I often found it difficult to find new ideas to stretch my learners.  Teach-It has been an invaluable tool in looking for new ways to support ICT across learning.

Most recently my class have been learning Scots poems to celebrate Burns day.  In order to encourage them and give them more confidence to read their poems in front of an audience we decided to record their voices using Audacity (Teach-It 1, Media lesson idea 8/9) and then create a Voki to add the sound to (Teach-It 1, Web lesson idea 7).

The majority of the class have used Audacity before and are quite confident in recording their own voices and then exporting them as a .wav file which is necessary so it can be used in a Voki.  This was the first time most had created a Voki and they really enjoyed creating their own character, especially the ability to personalise it.

The children then added their sound recordings to their Voki’s and published them in order to create the code required to put in our Glow Group and their personal Glow Blogs. Click here to view some of the Voki’s my class created.

The children thoroughly enjoyed this activity and for the majority of them, their confidence increased and they found it much easier to recite their poems in front of their peers.

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Posted in Education | 2 Comments »