Making Glow Happen: How lessons learned from deploying a smaller scale authority-wide web publishing system in East Lothian schools may help.

In 2005 East Lothian began systematically exploring the potential of easy-to-use web publishing tools and interactive web sites (weblogs) to enable improvements to teaching and learning.

In October 2006 that led to the introduction of a dedicated weblog publishing service, which now hosts around 1000 individual sites.

This system, edubuzz.org, is like a mini version of Glow with a single purpose.

A common set of web-based tools is available to all schools, and the whole system is managed centrally.

A core group of staff, analogous to Glow mentors, have facilitated adoption within the schools and helped tailor the service to educational needs.

Benefits to date include significant gains in parental involvement, student engagement, and staff networking.

Because of the similarity to Glow, the development provides a rich source of experience that can be used to help inform Glow deployment in other areas.

This talk will cover the key lessons learned and provide an opportunity to network with some of the people involved.

Topics covered will include the marketing approach, using feedback to match the technology set-up to educational needs; providing training and support for staff, pupils and parents; classroom implementation and benefit evaluation.

David Gilmour is the education network development officer in East Lothian Council.

He taught Maths and Science at Preston Lodge High School before becoming involved with East Lothian's work to improve teaching and learning in East Lothian schools.

This development, now known as eduBuzz (http://edubuzz.org) involves exploitation of a multi-user weblog system which he manages.

Before moving into education in 2004, David worked in industry as a physicist before becoming an information systems specialist.

His most recent industry role was as a senior information systems strategy analyst in the nuclear industry. He has studied information technology and business change with the Open University and is a member of the British Computer Society.