February 2021 – MDLT Blog

Digital Learning Support Offer for Moray Educators

The Moray Digital Learning Team are continuing to provide support and training opportunities to educators and schools move into a phased return. Below are details of all the primary resources we have available to educators to help them develop their own digital skills.

SharePoint Site – The Moray Digital Learning Team site has lots of resources for Glow, the software within and more in their site. It contains short how to videos, guidance documentation and links to our previous digital learning webinars. We also post daily digital learning tips, updates and more. Please note you must be logged on to Glow to access this SharePoint site

Moray Digital Drop In Team – This is a Microsoft Team community where we post

relevant updates to functionality within Glow or other approved software
links to new resources
details of any known issues

You can ask for support on anything Digital Learning and Teaching related in the Ask the Team channel.

The Drop In Sessions channel is where we run our webinars – the upcoming schedule and places should be booked on Gateway CPD Manager.

Moray Educators can request to join the Team by clicking – here

Blog – This blog is where the Moray Digital Learning Team post our updates, announcements, details of upcoming CPD and other useful information.

Other great sources of information and support are available from the Education Scotland Digital Learning Team.

DigiLearn Scot blog – This is a fantastic resource from the Digital Team at Education Scotland. Here you can find all of their upcoming webinars and previous recorded webinars as well as other really useful resources for Glow and the software within.

Glow Connect– this is the national Glow website with additional information about Glow, what it offers and details of any service interruptions can be found here.

It is also worth remembering that there is lots of information and guidance available outside of Glow, so it is accessible for parents/carers or educators on the fly via any device with a internet access –

Digital Support Site – The website created to help parents/carers support learners in accessing Glow and staying safe online has recently been updated. The aim of this resource is help understand what Glow is and what it offers and how learners can access their learning in Microsoft Teams or Google Classroom.

Sill can find your what you are looking for?

If you still can’t find the answer to any of your queries please make sure that you direct your question or request to the correct team.

The graphic below lays out which teams deal with different types or issues or requests related to Glow and Technology.

Coming soon – Microsoft Stream

Stream, which is a video hosting application, will be rolling out to Glow users during February. This is a phased rollout as it involves relicensing users, so will take approximately 3 weeks to complete. Stream will be replacing Office 365 Video, which will be retired on 1st March.

O365 Video content will automatically be migrated to Stream through a Microsoft process. It will not be visible within Stream until the migration is finalised. This would be a good time to do some housekeeping of old video content which may not longer be relevant or required; however O365 Video can continue to be used until the end of February.

While the rollout is completing, Stream will be ‘read only’. Users will not be able to upload content. Prior to the ‘go live’ date further guidance will be issued so please look out for this in our normal communication channels. Once fully enabled only staff members will be able to create content in Stream; however learners will have access to view content.

Any links to or embedded video stored in O365 Video redirect to Stream for a 1 year period. Staff should plan to review and update any links referring to O365 Video during this period or videos will become unavailable.

For more details on Stream and how it can be used click – here

Updated Glow Connect Guidance

Information for parents and carer on Glow Connect has been updated recently to clarify the guidance around accessing their child’s Glow account.

You can find the updated information – here.

The guidance makes it very clear that parents and carers should support users in their use of Glow but should not be logging into to the child’s Glow account independently.

As a reminder below is the guidance which was previously issued –

It is important for all Glow users, both learners and staff, to remember that their account details should be kept private. School staff should remind learners and parents/carers that Glow is for the use of learners and teachers/support staff with the appropriate security checks only. We ask that parents/carers do not access Glow directly by logging in with their child’s details, but would encourage them to engage with their children to find out about and support the learning they are doing within Glow.

To meet the requirements of the Glow agreement that allows our users to access Glow, login details should only be provided to the user themselves. This can be done either in person, over the phone or other agreed alternative methods of communication with the appropriate checks to verify the users identity. This is in order to maintain the security of the system and safety of all users. Providing log in details to non-Glow users, including parents/carers could put the Glow environment and users at risk.

In the event of a security breach Glow passwords for the whole school have to be reset and if action was not taken quickly, every pupil in the school could have their Glow account disabled. If a reset is required learners should be assigned unique passwords to ensure that there is no possibility of learners accessing each others accounts.

You can find Password Guidance on the Glow Connect. Staff should be aware that if they are supporting pupils to choose a new password that it should be unique to each pupil and should not be shared or duplicated, this includes creating a single password for a whole class/year group.

The use of password grids like the one below could be helpful in assisting younger learners to choose a password and can be send home as a reminder for home access. Written codes or reminders can also be helpful.