foolfillment: the blog

As I wrote yesterday, I had a class using glow today for the first time in the school. Really we just had a shot at logging in, played with the themes and a few other bits and pieces.

The first thing that struck us was the problems with logging in. The infamous space in the password threw a few people, but really most people got it and managed to get their new password set up okay. There were still about half a dozen pupils who saw a host of errors, one main one being unable to access the site – not sure if this was a glow problem or a problem with our network.

Once people got in there was no stopping them in exploring. People very quickly found the link at the top to add contacts, unfortunately pupils don’t seem to have access to the messenger – I need to find out if it’s there somewhere else, if it can be switched on, or if I have to have chats through glow meet.

We explored the glow groups for a little and everyone seemed able to get into the one I had created for the department, unfortunately I couldn’t find what permissions to grant them to be able to take part in a discussion, so more exploring needing to be done there.

Most people also managed to upload a picture and add a few links to their ‘My Glow’ area which pleased them, kids love a bit of personalisation.

All told the period went reasonably well, but from now on I don’t know what I will use it for. I set a bit of homework for the class – to log in at home and have a bit more of an explore, most of them seemed keen to spend a bit of time doing so, so I’d like to know how many of them actually do it.

Where to from here? Not sure, as I say, but think it will be a few documents and weblinks as resources. I’m also hoping to get my S4 class up and running with accounts in preparation for their exams. Setting homework through it will be difficult, but hopefully the discussion pages will be of use to them.

Tomorrow I’m going to try out taking a class into Glow. There are plenty of places where you can go to find out more about what Glow is, or what it can do so I won’t try to explain here, however for what it is worth I will try to keep a wee log of what we do tomorrow.

I have no firm plans of what we’ll do, other than I have about 50 minutes to play with it. I aim to take the class to the computer suite, show them how to get to the log in screen, and then hand out their logins. This is where I expect the first few things to go wrong. Getting them all signed in and password changed may prove problematic but we’ll see. After that I hope to show them a few things to explore, how to change the themes, show them a discussion page in the group I have set up for them.

I really don’t have any idea yet how we can use glow in our S1 course, other than a launching pad to some websites for our forthcoming research project. I quite like the idea of some sort of glowmeet with another class but have now idea how to go about it. I shall persevere though, and as I say I hope to post tomorrow about how we get on.