Given the current school closures in Scotland schools and teachers are looking for ways to continue to deliver education.

You can use Glow to deliver education during an unexpected event. There are many different Glow applications and services. Here are some of the features of Glow Blogs that may be useful.

• Many schools already have their school websites set up on Glow Blogs. These may be the natural place for parents and pupils to look for information in the first instance.
• Public Glow Blogs can be seem without having to login. Pupils and parents who are unable to logon to Glow will be able to access information.
• Glow Blogs are websites are accessible in a web browser in a wide range of devices. The requirements are low and without installing a particular application.
• Information can be presented in a variety of ways. Text, images, audio, video and embedding content from other websites (For example YouTube).
• A the simplest level, text, it is very simple to post to a blog.

What sort of information can you provide to visitors

• General Advice around school closures. Information about hub schools and links to Local Authority information.
• General Learning Resources
• Advice and resources for classes and groups
• Information of how pupils can connect to other services in Glow. Classrooms, Teams, Sharepoint sites etc.

All this information can be organised to make it easily accessible to pupils and visitors visitors.

The help blog should help you if you need to find out how to do something. Use the menus or search to find content. We have  FAQ and Tips  pages too.

You can get more help via the support, or leave a comment on the appropriate page.

During the times of School Closure many schools are using Glow.

Blogs are particularly suited publishing news and information in a timely fashion and one of the easiest ways to post public information that does not need a log on to. The recent infrastructure changes make Glow Blogs a more robust platform too.

If you need help with Glow Blogs, here is how to get it:

If you need to know how to do something the Help Blog is a good place to start use the search box from any page of look at the Site Map.

There is a list of Frequently Asked Questions (and answers)
Three of the most common are:

• Users Pending
• No Admin Access
• How much space do I have on my Blog

If you can’t find what you want you can get in touch using the contact form. Or leave a comment on any of the pages. If you do not get an answer to these please email gw09johnstonjohn4@glowmail.org.uk

If the problem looks like a bug or a problem with an account you need to log it with the RM help desk via you LA.

If the question does not relate to Blogs you are better looking at:
General Glow Help Information

If your question is about Accounts and password
Accounts and passwords

The themes made unavailable in December will be retired completely on the 30th of January along with themes that were removed from the theme picker  in 2015.

Removal of old and unmaintained themes will allow us to update Glow Blogs and keep blogs secure.

If your blog uses on of the old themes, it will be automatically switched to the Twenty Fourteen theme on the 30th of January 2020.  As this may result is a few changes to your blog appearance, menus and widgets we suggest that you change your theme before then.

We have general information on themes and advice on testing and changing themes  here on the help blog. Please get in touch if you need more advice.

You can find out more about the process on Glow Connect:

Guidance on Glow Blogs Theme Retirement

Themes being retired include: classic, default, digg3, dundee, fjords, K21.0.3, oxygen, p2, regulus, suburbia, suffusion, visual and wp-andreas01.

As we work on improving and upgrading Glow  Blogs some of the themes currently in use are not compatible with newer versions of WordPress. These are going to be retired, first made unavailable in the theme picker from Tuesday 17^th December  and next year removed from Glow Blogs altogether. Glow Key Contacts will be receiving advice.

More information is available on Glow Connect

Retirement of Glow Blogs Themes

If you are using one of the listed themes you start thinking of changing to another one. We have information on changing themes here.   Please leave a comment or get in touch if you need more information on changing themes or need advice on how to support a particular feature.

There are now well over 200000 blogs in Glow Blogs. Many have now fallen into disuse.

We are going to be removing some inactive blogs to help with the performance of those in use – this will include private blogs with no users and blogs with no updates for over 2 years. Further information will be issued in the next two weeks.

So if you have a blog you use, but it has not been updated for a couple of years it might be an idea to update it.