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Monday, 27 October 2014

Accessing Glow

Glow is the Scottish school intranet for educators and pupils which was launched at the Scottish Learning Festival in 2007 and at the time was the third largest single online platform for education in the world. The intranet allows teachers and pupils to connect to the world wide web and to communicate with each other and thus facilitates some of Curriculum for Excellence`s requirements which are about motivating pupils, group work and interdiscisciplinary learning.

A major migration project was instigated in 2013 to move content to a new environment which includes Microsoft Offic 365, an integrated cloud application suite, that is demonstrated in the video below. So pupils are able to connect to Glow using their own digital devices from any location and can still participate in online learning even when not at school.

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Glow overview October 2014 from Glow Scotland on Vimeo.

The ICT in Education Excellence Group, in their final report, recommended that the system should remain flexible enough to allow it to evolve. At the moment not all schools have adequate broadband and wifi and not every child has their own smartphone, ipad or laptop, but the ambition is there to push forward towards a nationwide communication system for schools.

Of course, since the online services are stored in the cloud, there is a need for users to authenticate themselves in order to obtain access to their accounts. This is what the group has to say about it:


"The Digital Scotland initiative is exploring options for the online delivery of public services and, as part of this, is considering the possibility of providing an online identifier for all Scottish citizens. Obviously, it would make sense to utilise this, as far as possible, in the authentication system for Glow Plus."

Each Glow user account will have the name and photograph of the user as well as other details. Many pupils will have their fingerprint on the school record, as well as data about their education, wellbeing and families. If everything goes to plan, all of this information will be connected to the online identifier. It does not matter that the information will not exist in the one database, since each piece of information will have a shadow in the cloud and will be matched to only one unique individual. It can be collated.

It can be easily understood why the Scottish government has already spent millions on this project. Never mind lifelong learning, children are being set up for lifelong monitoring.

PDF file: ICT in Education Excellence Group - Final Report (2.2 MB)
See Glow data breach:
http://alicemooreuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/data-protection.html

1 comment:

  1. Engage for Education•2 years ago


    Jaye, thank you for your comments. You are entitled to your views – and, as you know, I welcome a debate on these issues.


    As I said at the meeting, I believe we are taking this work forward in the right way – and with the right people in place. We are prioritising authentication, in line with the Excellence Group’s recommendations, and taking an agile development approach to the work going forward. Above all, users will be at the heart of the development process.


    In addition the Excellence Group will continue to have an important role going forward as a Reference Group and I am delighted that two members, Professor Muffy Calder and Ian Stuart, have agreed to serve on the Implementation Board.


    Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning (comment on engage for education)


    http://engageforeducation.org/2013/02/ict-in-education-excellence-group-meeting-with-cabinet-secretary-for-education/

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