“There are two kinds of light – the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.” – James Thurber.

Recently I’ve spent more time talking about blogging than actually blogging. We’ve had meetings with ICT co-ordinators and head teachers to update them on developments within the city and blogging was discussed there. I’ve talked to P7 pupils at Muirfield School about their blog. We’ve held meetings with the new Glow (glow? GLOW?) mentors and blogging was discussed there. In fact, we set up a new blog for the mentors to discuss issues surrounding the implementation of SSDN/Glow.

As I’ve been talking about Glow, I’ve been becoming more enthusiastic. The initial sell from LTS was that we’d have a lot of resources to use but I think it will take some time before the resources build up to a useful collection and, anyway, many teachers will reach retirement before they give control of a lesson over to a VLE.

I think the most immediate benefit will be GlowGroups and the various collaborative tools which will allow all sorts of sharing of ideas and expertise throughout Scotland.

It now looks like the various functions of Glow will be phased in rather than all appearing at once. In some ways this will lessen the impact but it should also mean that teachers can get used to one function before moving on to the next.

Let’s have illumination, not glare.