Developing a Glow Group structure to support numeracy

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Alan Thomson is an ICT Development Officer working in Midlothian’s ICT Development Team. In this cookbook Alan describes how he is helping the Numeracy Development Officer for Midlothian, Helen Martin, develop a Glow Group structure aimed at supporting Numeracy across the curriculum in Midlothian.

Context

With Alan’s help, Helen had set about developing a comprehensive Glow Group for supporting numeracy. As the group developed, two issues needed to be addressed:

• a great number of Page Tabs were being created in the group to house the wealth of content to be published. In Alan’s view this was resulting in an unwieldy group that lacked structure
• complications were arising in planning for who (staff, pupils, parents) would be able to access what. The developing structure made it very difficult to limit access to particular Page Tabs

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In re-planning, Alan and Helen recognised that what was actually required was a ‘portal’ solution where a numeracy ‘home group’ that all the stakeholders could access, would contain links to either hidden pages within the group or to other Glow Groups. This would allow Alan to better control, through Glow Group membership, who could access what. To streamline the navigation through the new structure, Alan created a single page Glow Group to act as the ‘home group’. Contained in the single page are buttons that link to the hidden pages or other Glow Groups.

In this cookbook, Alan will show us what has been achieved to date. We will also see how to go about replicating what Alan set up.

Ingredients

To replicate Alan’s structure and graphical user interface, you will need: 

1. A Glow Group with a single page
2. Text Editor web part
3. Hidden pages to link to
4. Other Glow Groups to link to

Recipe

In the first video below, Alan talks us through the work that he and Helen have done to date. The other two videos outline how to replicate the navigational structure demonstrated in the numeracy group.

Impact

Through careful planning, Alan and Helen have developed a Glow Group structure that facilities seamless navigation to resources, areas of interest and information regarding numeracy in Midlothian schools. Managed by Glow Group membership, the structure allows for communal access to some areas for staff, pupils and parents while restricting other areas, for example Staff Only. The inventive solution illustrates how Glow has provided the platform to become the ‘one-stop-shop’ for supporting numeracy in Midlothian.

David Lines, Senior Officer (Curriculum) in Midlothian’s ICT Development Team, is the driving force behind the use of graphical user interfaces in Glow to streamline navigation. David has created a CPD tutorial aimed at showing users how to create engaging user interfaces using commonly available tools and the Text Editor in Glow. The tutorial is contained within a Glow Group and David has opened the membership of this group to all staff in Scotland. The link to the group is below (Glow login required).

Creating a Graphical Interface

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