Tag Archives: Glow

Ollie Bray’s The Future of Digital in Scottish Education – Brief Thoughts⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

I’ve been listening to Ollie Bray’s The Future of Digital in Scottish Education. I say listening rather than watching as I huffduffed the video to a mp3 file so that I could hear to it on my commute 1.

Ollie was looking for feedback, so I though I’d jot down some notes. The quotes are taken from the Youtube transcript so are a bit odd. I’ve snipped out the audio too. There is no license but I think quoting in context is probably ok…

young people probably then going to need some content gosh we’re terrible and Scotland about Reinventing content all the time now we want to have agency to be able to create our own content but actually you know some sort of nationally procured content for some things is probably a good idea

One of the reasons it might be difficult to find the time for new and innovative digital practises is the amount of time spent by Local Authorities, schools and staff buying, filtering or creating resources. I know my own and most of my colleagues pocket is lighter.

Another reason is:

we’ve got an overcrowded curriculum in many ways I hope that we’re able to strip some of the things out

I’ve been hunting for the audio of David Cameron railing against the number of E&Os (>1800 I think) and the difficulty of keeping that in our heads. It really speaks to this, but can’t find it yet.

we also know of course that actually probably we’re about to kind of see and I I feel this that we’re about to get a bit more of a Resurgence of creative technology approaches and what I mean by this is that probably for a number of years now you know in some parts of Scotland we focus quite a lot on the productivity tools um you know 10 or 15 years ago there was a lot of work going on around podcasting and digital video and that seems to have dipped you know for a little while and we’ve been focusing more on these kind of productivity Tools around around that things like the ability to do a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation or to format something in word and all these things are worthy in nature that don’t necessarily you know develop kind of the creative approaches to using ICT

There is more in this vein.

I hope the resurgence happens soon. I’ve never understood why podcasting, in particular, didn’t catch on. I’ve listed some of the benefits before. So I’ll not go on.

I wonder if the dip in the creative use of digital is due to the power of the major software platforms we use for free. An examination of our choice of tools is something I hope Ollie will address. We tend to use the tools that are supplied without thinking about them critically. All software is opinionated. All vendors need to have their shareholders in mind. Are the education philosophies of these giants aligned with ours? I am wondering about social media tools as well as productivity & creative suites. Some of the more “creative” tools they supply seem to not give the user freedom but more the choice between predesigned templates, sometimes at random. What are the reasons for supplying free tools to education? I am not suggesting we should not use them, but that we should think about it.

Talking of tools, I wish Ollie still kept a blog. He asks for responses via e-mail or twitter. A blog post might have been a good choice. Could pull together the video, a transcript & responses.

There is a lot more to think about in the video, even if you only listen to it. Refresh of Glow, supply of devices and conectivity and more. If your interested in digital education in Scotland it is worth a listen. I’d be interested in others responses.

1. Huffduffer is a system for organising your own podcast from audio from the internet. Say episodes of podcasts you do not want to subscribe to. It also converts, using huffduff-video, videos to audio to add to your feed. Here is mine ↩

More than one Microsoft Teams account on same device⤴

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Are you using Microsoft Teams with more than one account on the same device? If you are then you may find the following helpful: Using Desktop/Laptop Microsoft Teams app If using a desktop/laptop app for Microsoft Teams, and there is more than one Microsoft Teams account going to be used on the same device, then …

Moving Glow User – Steps for Staff Glow Users Moving Establishment or Local Authority⤴

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At the end of each school year you may be moving from one establishment to another, or from one local authority in Scotland to another. You’ll want to be aware of how your move may change your access to your Glow account and actions you’ll need to take before the move. The following guides may …

Bookmark dl from o365⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Bookmarked Re: Get direct download link of a file in OneDrive for Business (TECHCOMMUNITY.MICROSOFT.COM)
Use "Get link", then use "People with existing access" to get the direct link to the file. Then, the url will be direct path to https://org.sharepoint.com/personal/user_org/folder/filename.ext?d=oiuqjaweorihjlkj Now, just remove everything after the ? and put in download=1 and magic happens. https://org.sharepoint.com/personal/user_org/folder/filename.ext?download=1

This works fine with files in Glow OneDrive even for publicly shared files.

I’ve started to use it on my class blog to share files. Here is a simple example. A PowerPoint on my onedrive, publicly shared, the first link is the standard share link, the second has the download parameter.

https://glowscotland-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/gw09johnstonjohn4_glowmail_org_uk/EVaRRmxQ5sdLuGfRss9xM7gBW4hpamdB48iNfKbixRpOUg?e=tegAeu

https://glowscotland-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/gw09johnstonjohn4_glowmail_org_uk/EVaRRmxQ5sdLuGfRss9xM7gBW4hpamdB48iNfKbixRpOUg?Download=1

Teams behaved a bit better today⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Teams behaved a bit better today. I got nearly the whole class in. I found that when pupil could not get access inviting them to join the call nearly all worked. This failed for one pupil.

Teams seems to use a lot of resources, a fair bit of beachballing and my fan started when searching for pupils to call in. I presume that Teams being an electron app and uses a lot of resources.

Glad I’ve got a small class, pulling in 33 one by one would be tedious.

On another positive note joining the meet with computer and iPad and then sharing screen with iPad continued to work well. I even manage to show the class team on the iPad screen in the meeting which was handy for explaining things. This is much better, I might even try PowerPoint again if things continue to improve. 1

Teams still seems a bit, what my class calls, laggy. Some pupils had difficulty uploading files to assignments. I found even small images were slow to post.

On a side note the Education Scotland – status page is nice

1. Things improved last lockdown when I had: Simpler Meets ↩

Liked a tweet by WordPress.com⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Liked a tweet by wordpressdotcom
Today we’re announcing an all-new P2 beta as a standalone product, powered by http://WordPress.com. We’re excited to have you try it out: https://wordpress.com/blog/2020/08/06/improve-your-remote-collaboration-with-p2/

We had the p2 theme in Glow Blogs and I though it had a lot of potential. I wonder if running your own p2 will be on the cards? I’d love to see it back in Glow.

We removed the p2 theme from Glow a while back and it hasn’t been updated for a few years now.