At long last Scottish Government have announced the way forward for Glow in schools. As you probably know, the current Glow system was due to be turned off in September of this year, but no clear replacement had been identified. The current Glow contract with RM has been extended by 15 months to allow us all a breathing space while the new Glow 2 apps and services are made available. The contract to provide these free apps and tools has been awarded to Microsoft and will be based largely on the free tools that they have provided through their “Microsoft Live apps” service. The more surprising news is that they will only provide this service until 2014. Simultaneously, Scottish Government will be developing our own sign in and authentication service, which will let us include a more flexible set of tools possibly including those from Google, WordPress and others after 2014.

The upshot of all of this confusion is that we are moving towards a single password sign-in that will take you into a variety of useful free internet tools and services after the current Glow network is switched off, but we will be making this transition over a couple of years.