GLOW - it's champion (and so am I)

It's official, I've been chosen (everyone else interested seemed to
drop out when they heard I was interested!!!!) as our Glow Champion,
and with reservations I'm really quite excited. (Reservations being
that it appears to be a lackey to the mentor without the laptop.) I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on what has up until now been an amorphous idea which seems rather appealing to me.
The whole concept of what is essentially an intranet for every school in a country just seems to make sense, and this idea has been summed up nicely in this article from the Herald.

Why US Is In Awe Of Our Get Up And Glow (from The Herald )

"If you were operating an organisation of 100
different offices around the country, you wouldn't allow each to make
its own decision about what hardware and software they use."

Multinational businesses operate intranets, why not education.

As my loyal reader(s) know I attended a sharing seminar about GLOW last week and met a bunch of very like minded teachers, every one of whom was committed to GLOW and what its potential is and to what it can mean to Scottish education. Jaye Richards, who was also there and who has done stirling (sorry about the pun) work with GLOW in her classes quoted a post from Neil Winton back in 2007 which sums up what is slowly but surely happening:

“I sat in the room watching the demo and realised that there is no
going back — that Scotland’s education system is committed to a radical
shake-up in the way it develops and delivers learning”.

A seismic change is happening in our education system: A Curriculum for Excellence, GLOW, potential massive changes in the assessment system. I see GLOW as integral to this. It should have the potential to change the way every single teacher in Scotland works, for the better and it is incumbent on every single teacher in Scotland to assess what it can bring to their practice. Obviously there are going to be problems. Not everything promised will work, but does everything work now? Until things improve we make the best of what we can.

It actually feels a bit weird writing this not having even mucked around on GLOW, but I can quite simply see what benefits something like this can bring:

GLOW Learn: sharing resources, creating assessments, constructing courses

GLOW Groups: online communities of educators in similar sectors / subject areas or cross-curricular groups, whatever you want.

GLOW Meet: web conferencing facility...it can work, I ahve seen it in action. Even if not in the classroom this kind of technology should save LA's money by cutting down the need to travel to meetings.

As a GLOW champ I am 100% certain that I am going to have to face up to similar kinds of comments that appeared on Ewans post related to the animoto we put together in Stirling but any kind of change brings about resistance and I would hope that slowly but surely I can help wear it down.

Comments

[Adam]

Thanks for the comments folks. I am actually looking forward to glowing.

[jaye Richards]

Well done you ! I've no doubt your GLOW stuff will be a model of good practice for all of us very soon.
The dual/team approach worked really well in my school. The 'mentor' and I both kind of evolved our own roles which complemented each other's work. It was a definite plus having a member of the SMT on board as well.

Good luck, and any help you think you need, even if its just a whinge when things don't quite go to plan (and they probably won't !) just drop a line...

Jaye

[Caroline Gibson]

Well done to you too! Looking forward to hearing how you get on.

[Sheryl A. McCoy]

Congratulations! You are right! This is a great opportunity, yet the task will be to keep the naysayers happy long enough to get something done.

IMHO, you love so many applications and activities of the web, it will be a matter of convincing others that building the intranet (hardware and administrational software) for all schools then let people have a place (sandbox, really) to experiment with webapps before they are approved for use in the intranet;D