Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal June 2009 Volume 7(3)

CILIPS Conference: Schools

Bright idea

Managed by Learning and Teaching Scotland. Glow is the world’s first national intranet for education. Glow breaks down geographical and social barriers to allow joined-up working the length and breadth of Scotland. Transforming the way education is delivered in Scotland, the system works work alongside Curriculum for Excellence.

The proposal for Glow was first outlined by the Scottish Executive in 2001. The vision for what was then called the Scottish Schools Digital Network (SSDN) was to provide every local authority, school, staff member and pupil with access to online learning tools via a secure national network, the first in the world. In 2005, the contract to provide the services was awarded to RM plc, an established supplier of educational ICT services in the UK.

Work continued on the project, and in 2006 SSDN was renamed Glow, featuring prominently at the Scottish Education and Teaching with Technology conference. Piloting began in schools that year, and Glow was made available to the first local authorities in 2007.

From an initial four early-adopting local authorities, Glow is now a reality in almost every area of the country. Each local authority has its own plan for rolling out and supporting Glow in its schools, and training comes both from the national Glow Team and from local support staff in each area.

Glow provides users with learning tools, creating new opportunities for collaboration, personalised learning and innovation in learning and teaching. A Glow username and password unlocks access to web conferencing, secure online chat, instant messaging, discussion boards, and a national Virtual Learning Environment, along with many other features.

Glow Groups allow classes to complete class work and homework online, work with other classes in different schools, and even work with pupils across the world on collaborative online projects, while still inside a secure environment.

Glow has also been the virtual venue for hundreds of national events, and contains resources and communities at national level that teachers, school staff, pupils and parents can access. The national Glow Groups are places where anyone involved in education can discuss and plan together. The national librarians’ group is a particularly well-used community, and is a space for librarians and learning resource assistants from all around the country to work collaboratively and share ideas.

At the recent CILIPS Conference the programme director for Glow, Marie Dougan, spoke of recent events and during the conference the delegates were able to link live via the Glow Meet web conferencing system to a Glow CPD event for English teachers happening at that time in Stirling.

Among other recent events, the Glow team, in association with the Scottish Book Trust, was delighted to be able to broadcast a talk from the UK’s most popular male children’s author, Anthony Horowitz. The event took place at the Surgeons’ Halls in Edinburgh in front of an audience from two local schools, and was simultaneously sent out to hundreds of schools around Scotland via a web stream and Glow Meet. After Anthony’s talk, he logged into Glow and engaged in a Glow Chat session, fielding questions from fans in classrooms from Shetland to Argyll and Bute. Two weeks later the author MG Harris took part in a Glow Meet from the Lenzie Academy school library. MG, the author of 2008’s fastest selling debut children’s novel Invisible City, talked to the audience, both in Lenzie and in Glow, about her work, and then answered questions asked live via a video link from schools. More author events are planned as well as work with the Edinburgh Book Festival.

With Glow, the possibilities for connecting classes and creating learning opportunities are endless, and the wonderful thing is that the ideas for the best ways to use Glow come from the practitioners and their classes. 

Look out for details of the librarian’s Building Glow Communities event in session 2009/10. www.glowscotland.org.uk

View CILIPS Annual Conference 2009 presentations on Slideshare

Information Scotland Vol. 7(3) June 2009

Information Scotland is delivered online by the SAPIENS electronic publishing service based at the Centre for Digital Library Research. SLAINTE (Scottish libraries across the Internet) offers further information about librarianship and information management in Scotland.