We recognise the importance of being prepared for unforeseen events in school life – snow days, flooding or fire just to name a few. There are also many opportunities where the curriculum is delivered to learners across Scotland from different locations. Here’s how Glow can be used as one of your key assets to deliver education remotely.
Glow is an anytime, any device and anywhere service – all you need is a device with an internet connection. It can be accessed at home, from another school building or even to support pupils away from school. All pupils and teachers in Scotland are entitled to a Glow account.
A Glow account provides access to a suite of applications configured for your school. This can include Microsoft O365, Glow Blogs and Google Workspace for Education.
The advice below will help you to work through the practical tasks that need to be undertaken in advance to ensure Glow can be used to provide a remote learning experience when the need arises..
We hope this helps to identify how you can use Glow to work as quickly and easily as possible during an unforeseen event. Your Glow Key Contact can help if you have any questions and further support is available from the Glow Team at Education Scotland via Glow Enquiries.
Is your school set up to use Glow?
- If you don’t know who manages your school Glow accounts, or you are not sure if your school has been setup to use Glow, please contact your Glow Key Contact in the first instance and they will be able to advise you.
Do you have a procedure for forgotten usernames and passwords?
- If pupils and staff are working away from school premises you should have a process in place for these users to be able to reset passwords or confirm usernames securely. Usernames, passwords and other personal information should not be posted publicly on social media.
Make sure staff and pupils have access to their Glow accounts
- All teachers can reset pupils passwords but more staff could be given help with accounts and passwords or Password Admin rights to support this. Share the Glow RM Unify Admin User Guide to help staff manage accounts
- Encourage staff to set a password recovery email address. This will enable everyone to reset their own password if they forget their login details.
Resetting your Glow password – Glow Connect
Working together regardless of location
- There are a number of tools in Glow that can be used to support online learning, collaboration and sharing of materials. Get familiar with the different options available and support to get started here
- Get some plans in place to agree a ‘meeting place’ in Glow and where learning will take place and materials will be shared. This may be different across departments in the school or supporting the collaboration spaces that have already been set up. For example Teams, Classroom, OneNote, Glow Blogs, SharePoint
- All Glow services are accessible through the web browser on any device, including mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Mobile apps can be downloaded and used to provide easy access and alerts to some of the tools in Glow. Use the Office Mobile Quick Start Guides to get started
- online face-to-face meetings can be set up using Teams meetings and Google Meet (web conferences) e.g. to deliver topics and classes online for pupils.
- Use Notifications to share news and information across your school for logged in users
- Glow Blogs can be used to make simple blogs or complex websites and a number of options are available when sharing them. They can be used to support the sharing of information across the school or individual classes. This might be to share news with parents and pupils or to share materials. For help on setting up school websites or class blogs visit the Glow Help Blog
- Sway can be used to create content such as school newsletters to share with parents and the wider learning community outside of Glow. More information on sharing Sways can be found here
- Glow Yammer can be used to help staff keep in touch or to ask questions and get help with Glow
- There are a number of easy ways to share content in Glow and out with Glow to support areas such as parental engagement. Some of the options that can be used during school closures or throughout the school year are detailed here on Glow Connect
- Forms can be used to capture information from sources both in and out with Glow. For example using a survey to gather pupil views across a whole school or creating a quiz for formative assessment. Find more information on sharing and collaborating using Forms.
Sharing information with pupils, parents, carers and the wider community
- If you would like to keep your parents, carers and pupils updated then public posts on Glow Blogs may be suited to your needs.
Useful links for more information about Remote Learning
Supporting remote learning | Supporting remote learning | National Improvement Hub
Learning and Teaching Online | Learning resources | National Improvement Hub
Consistent online resources | Sharing what’s working well | National overviews | Supporting remote learning | National Improvement Hub
