I followed a link to his blog and read this :

“Mr Quinlan… can I show you something..?”

You don’t have to have been teaching long to have had one of those moments; when a pupil brings you something amazing they have done of their own accord. When left to their own devices children and young people can often come up with the most exciting examples of their learning

I decided to introduce the idea to my Primary 6 stage class last week – and they loved it. I wanted to stress that the idea wasn’t about regurgitating what they already knew, but that the point was to learn something new then share this new learning with their peers.

  I quickly made a makeshift ‘first ideas’ proposal sheet for them to complete.

They were allowed to work on the task on their on, in pairs, or in small groups.

There was a buzz of excitement in the class as they all made their choices about what they were going to learn. The excitement obviously spilled to areas outwith the class, because the HT mentioned how she’d overheard some Primary 6s discussing their ‘negotiated learning’. I hadn’t had the opportunity to share the concept with her … but I think she’s sold on the idea, too now

Here’s some of the new learning that took place last week:

 The aim of the evening was to enable the children to share:

• how they have been using Glow blogs and wikis in school and at home to improve learning
• what they have learned about the dangers of the internet
• strategies they use to keep themselves safe online

 I introduced the class to prezi and they all voted to use that instead of their powerpoint presentation. I’ve included a copy of it here.

It’s taken me longer than I’d intended to blog about this.

I’ll also try to blog about our attempts at ‘Negotiated Learning’ before the end of term. The children are loving it – thanks to Oliver Quinlan for the idea

 I made an attempt to reply to her comment but after reading her follow-up blog post on the subject and her thought-provoking accounts of her own experiences, I decided that another blog post on here was the best way to reply. She got me thinking about the stumbling blocks that have been encountered when children I’ve taught in the past have moved on to High School. I also went on a trip down memory lane this evening and experienced (again) some of the frustrations that Jaye talks about in her post.  I’ll quote from Maryam’s transition blog posts to try to demonstrate what I mean.

• Towards the end of primary 7 at Carronshore, Maryam wrote on her blog:  ” My favourite thing ever is English. I love reading and writing. They are the only two things that are important too me. I have been writing quite alot of posts about reading and writing, well i just love writing and stuff. …. I can’t wait to get to high school  to ask my English teacher for advice for getting really good ideas. “
• In this blog post she describes the excitement as her entry to High School looms ever closer: “I can’t believe we have finished primary school already! Its a bit quick. Well we still have a couple of weeks left of school but it doesn’t feel like it. We are finally the oldest in Primary school but now we will be back to the youngest in high school. That’ll be a bit hard. I’m looking forward too all the new lessons there and making new friends and stuff. I just cab’t wait for tommorow.”
• Maryam is now in 1st year at high school (last term):  “I thought i would go on my blog just for old times sake. High school has been SOOO weird. It’s like i have been there all my life and not been to primary school once, but i have not forgotten primary school, I MISS IT SO MUCH. We have been doing all sorts of stuff and we have had sooo much .. drama? I think that is the word for it. It has been so BIZZARE. I have just chosen my subjects before the easter holidays. It was kind of depressing.”
•  Her final post on her blog was when she entered 2nd year (she’s already regretting her subject choice) “So yes, it has been almost a month of school and i am in second year. It is alot harder than i thought, well kind of. I did choose the subjects i wanted , [i still regret picking some of them]!”

Maryam’s posts dried up soon after this, but her experience of her transition to High School echo the thoughts in Jaye’s post  when she wrote:

 ”my old school is now making children choose their examinable subjects two thirds of the way through S1 !!

If I had my way, they wouldn’t even get ‘distinct’ subjects until S3…”

Hmmm!!

Anyway - back to my post title! -  ePortfolios and Transition Stages.

I’m hoping that the ePortfolios might succeed where the blogs alone failed. Maybe if the children know that the purpose of them is to demonstrate progress in their learning journey, then the responsibility for the upkeep and the freedom to choose what is included would enhance the feeling of ownership. The wikis seem to accommodate the ‘growth’ aspect more than a blog (even with tagging, etc).

I love the way Kian has already set his pages up for Primary 7 and his transition to High School.  All the children choose their own layout and this one obviously made more sense to him.

I also really like his ‘Life Achievement’ section – others have used this phrase when referring to their ePortfolios. Check out Alyson’s ‘sticky’ post on her Glow Blog

Click on the loveheart to see my ePortfolio.I have all my achievements  inside and outside school!!!

(All my achievement through out my life) Fingers cross it works!!!

I also really like Andrew’s ePortfolio layout. He felt it was important to include a page with links to his favourite Glow Blog posts:

Our Individual Blogs

@cpsprimary6v usually update their Glow blogs from home, rather than at school. I think there are two main reasons for this:

• We have two hours a week in our school computer suite – and the children need to share the 16 machines (it’s a class of 30) – we have been known to beg, steal and borrow it at other times, too, but there are so many exciting things to do there, that there is rarely time to put on blog posts . We have a computer in the class, but that’s usually taken up with other things such as AR Reading and Smartboard use
• From the outset, I made the decision not to dictate how the children used their blogs. I’ve blogged before about the importance of a feeling of ownership if online spaces are to be sustainable. There have been lots of great posts made from home and we always share them in class. This has inspired others to write their own blog posts – and even just reading them out aloud has helped the writers and the listeners to think about how they might improve their writing. One very recent example for me of a feeling of ownership was when Mason chose to share his experience of travelling to Qatar to visit his dad - great

Our Individual Wikis

The growth of our Glow wikis has been slower. The children understood the blog ’Online Diary’ concept but building an ePortfolio is much more complex and I’ve been taking a closer look to see what’s happening. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find that there has been evidence of:

• Gathering evidence of Learning and Achievement - For example, Robyn posted her Burns’ poetry comptetition entry and continued to update her Glow wiki from home. Have a look/listen – Robyn’s ePortfolio .

I was also very impressed last week when Andrew  suggested that he could add his thoughts about his love of books to his ePortfolio. He wrote:

“I have always loved reading and I have a card for the local library. At school we do a thing called AR Reading. It’s where you take a test at the start of the year and get given a level. You then choose a book from our school within that level and read it. Once you have read it you take a test about the book on a computer at school. You then print out a sheet showing your result. You have a big jotter where you record what books you have read and score you got on the tests. I am on the highest level for AR Reading, and I enjoy it.”

• Showing evidence of how learning has progressed – reflecting on learning – Andrew  wrote about his attitude to maths and how he has “.. enjoyed maths from Primary 1 and have always tried hard in it. I find the work I do fun and I learn new things all the time. My favourite thing in math is long multiplication. My mum and dad taught me how to do long multiplication in P4. I can do most things I have been taught in math but there is a few things I could improve on. I mainly struggle on Rotational Symmetry, but I don’t think you will need to know that in life.”

            Charlotte also showed evidence of reflecting when she wrote about how she found it hard to work with someone else on a task – “Well at first we  could not agree on an idea but then we finally came to a compromise that we would combine both our ideas.”

What I’ve learned

I think allowing the children to use their Glow blogs and wikis in this way has provided me with evidence for assessment - I’ve seen a closer ‘snapshot’ of who they are. The children have shown evidence of achievements both inside and outside of school. Anna’s example is typical of an outside school achievement:

…..”We did our floor routine’s first. The judge would judge us on how slowly and neatly our routines were done. After that it was the volt. What I did was run, and then jump on a spring board, then land in squat jump onto the volt and then straight jump off. One of our coaches were compeeting. Then it was the award ceremony. It was team points. I kept saying to Alyson ‘ Were never going to win because we have 2 people and they have 3 or 4 ‘. In the award ceromony it was the 1-3 resuts, then 4-5 and then my one 6-7. I wasn’t even listening when the man called out the results because there was no chance we had one a medal because only the 3rd, 2nd and 1st got a medal. I heard the man say ‘Alyson’. It was then that I relised we had one a bronze medal! …”

… I’m already filling my head with more questions – I wonder what will happen to their ePortfolios in Primary 7 … and the S1 transition period. Hopefully they will survive as it’s the children themselves who are ‘in the driving seat’

“I have had a look at the blogs and they are great! I like the way you are
letting the children drive the use of the blogs, that is so important if they
are going to be successful. “

She also mentioned how we were using them on a post on her own blog at the time :

“I am speaking at the BFI ‘Reading on Screen’ conference for teachers tomorrow and although my main aim is to report on the evaluation of the very successful BFI ‘Lead Practioners Project’, I do want to highlight the potential that blogs have for disseminating children’s film productions and facilitating their peers’ critical comments on the films. I was contacted a few weeks ago by Margaret Vass, who is a Primary 7 class teacher at Carronshore Primary School, Falkirk. She told me about the excellent blog she has set up for the children in her class – I really like the children’s ‘WeeMees‘ and love the Voki posting developed by Bethany…blog on, Carronshore Primary 7!”

Bethany’s Voki on edublogs blog is missing now – what a shame

At the time, all of the Primary 7′s interviewed their parents so that they could write about their early years (as part of an autobiography).

Luckily I can still access the Vokis. Bethany’s is here:

Issues of this sort of thing happening have been discussed on this blog previously. 

I still remember the unfortunate incident that led to the decision to transfer the children’s blogs from learnerblogs to edublogs. Edublogs chose to have all new blogs, including pupil blogs, hosted at edublogs. It was made clear that all existing learnerblogs could, if chosen, remain where they were. Around the time of this announcement, however, spam comments began to appear on a few of the children’s blogs. Email alerts usually ensured that these were deleted promptly. On one particular occasion, though, one was noticed by a pupil in her comment moderation queue when she logged in to her blog. Unfortunately, it contained very inappropriate content.

It was a lot of work moving the children’s blogs from learnerblogs to edublogs …. and then edublogs let us down.

Recently I’ve  spent some time reflecting on the journey to give children a more stable online environment and I revisited this post and a thought-provoking comment from David Gilmour

“This is a good topic to debate, thanks for spending your Saturday night doing such a detailed post!

 Now that I’ve finally set up some ePortfolios with the class I have now, I’m hoping that  Glow will provide the stability we’re after.

And if it doesn’t – at least we’ll be sure to back up all the files as using the new Glow Wikis means that there’s no need to host content elsewhere.

Check out Anna’s ePortfolio - hopefully it’s just the beginning

I wrote that post while on secondment, and it helps that I now have my own Primary 6 class to experiment with Much of what we’ve been up to can be seen on the pages of our class blog - but I thought it might be a good idea to record the recent ePortfolio journey on here.

My previous post explained my thinking behind using Glow wikis as ePortfolios and here’s the story about how things are going so far:

When I first introduced Glow wikis as ePortfolios, Andrew wrote:

“Hi everyone! Welcome to my ePortfolio. Well, this is actually a GlowWiki but I am using it as an ePortfolio. Incase you were wondering, an ePortfolio is something online where you record your achievements throughout the years. You can use it to get a job when you grow up as well. So if you want to view all my achievements throughout the years, click on the pages to the left, or use the links on the banners below.”

Others have also begun recording their achievements. For example, Anna was keen to record her class talk about her cat called Pepper and she made a reconstruction of her original talk so that she could add it to her ePortfolio. Have a look/listen here

And, as part of our Victorian’s project, the class were asked to interview an older member of their family so that they could get a sense of the past. Brooke uploaded her interview with her Gran to her ePortfolio. Have a listen:  Brooke interviews her Gran about schooldays in the past

Ryan, on the other hand, was less taken with the idea:

“Hi my name is ryan r and I am new to the eportfoio and I do not know what to do on it. Hopefully my friend Jack D the expert can help me.”

His attitude changed, though, when he saw that others had been recording outside school achievements.  Some have started bringing in trophies and medals so that we can have photographic evidence to upload. Check out Lucy’s TaeKwonDo narrated slideshow

After seeing these, Ryan was keen to show off  his own achievements outside of school and brought in some of his football trophies. With help from others,  he managed to update his own ePortfolio and record his football achievements on photostory 3

There are more Glow wiki examples I could link to, but what I’m hoping is that the children will see the connection between their Glow wikis and they great posts they’ve been adding to their Glog blogs. There are lots and lots of examples of great blog posts, but I’ll link to Mason’s one about finding a reading book about his favourite film ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’. I didn’t know that Mason liked the film … or the book Mason’s blog post is here.

Their story writing, started on their wikispaces during their ‘pre Glow wiki era’, should also be included. The Terrible Time Machine is a great example. Read it here.   

We’ve also recently set up a class Glow wiki so that the children can demonstrate their ability to work with others.

 Check out our first task here: Our Writing Task

Eight groups are involved. The Billionaires have completed some of the tasks. Have a look.

More to come

While I was waiting for the Glow Wikis to make an appearance, I toyed with the idea of using the Glow Blogs as ePortfolios. The children seemed a bit bamboozled by the prospect, however, and I suspect that it was because they had been using these online spaces as a traditional weblog and found it difficult to make the connection.

I created a ‘sticky’ post and linked to pages on the sidebar. The ‘Sticky’ said:

Welcome To My ePortfolio

This is my Learning Space where I blog about things I’m interested in.

I also record my achievements inside and outside of school. Click HERE to read about them

I knew from the reaction that there was confusion and when Andrew changed his Sticky wording, I realised that they didn’t see the blogs as an ePortfolio:

Hi everyone! Mrs V gave us all ePortfolios!

An ePortfolio is a page on your blog where you record your achievements in and out of school. Click HERE to read about them.

 Even with that subtle change of emphasis, though, no-one added anything to the ‘ePortfolio section’ of their blog.

But now that they’ve been given a Glow Wiki as an ePortfolio, everyone in the class seems taken with the idea.

There have been some frustrating glitches … but so far these have been overshadowed by the positives.

I’m really looking forward to seeing where this leads

In case anyone is interested, here’s how I set up our Glow Wiki eportfolios:

In the  ’My Glow’ area, I added the Glow Wiki webpart.

I asked our school secretary (our ASM) to turn on the rights for me to set up a wiki.

I’ve since learned that @claganach, our ICT Curriculum Development Officer had turned them on for the whole school – thanks Malcolm

I decided to set my trial Wiki to public immediately because I wanted to be sure that when it was live it would ‘behave’ the way I expected it to .. if that makes sense??

I soon discovered that it differed from the class blogs and from the wikispaces I’d experimented with previously. I still can’t embed videos etc. hosted elsewhere into the Glow Wiki and any links using the link icon require viewers to be logged in to Glow to view them.

I’ve been finding ways around these hiccups, though.

For example:

• Uploading pictures is quite straightforward
• Although I haven’t discovered how to embed media in Glow blogs, the children can easily upload videos, podcasts, etc without the need to host elsewhere
• It’s possible to create links to other areas of the wiki if tinyurl is used to create the links. I’ve no idea why this is the case – but if any Glow experts can help me find the answer to this, the children in my class will be forever in your debt  
• The wiki URLs are very long so I’ve created a link to them on a page on our class blog. I think this also tends to create a sense of class community as everything we have is more connected.
• It was also very easy to copy and paste these links into a text editor webpart in my ‘My Glow’ area.

The children set up their Glow wikis in the same way as their Glow blogs were set up. 

I’m glad that I set up our Glow blogs in the way that I did as it meant that I was already a member of the children’s ‘My Glow’ area so I was automatically an administrator of their Wikis as well.

I’ll keep posting about how our Glow ePortfolios progress, and meanwhile I’d love to hear back from any ‘Glow in the Know’ folk who have solutions to the linking and embedding issues

Jack’s post was very short and to the point.

He wrote: 

“Hello mighty world ( that’s full of random people watching me on my blog ). Watch and see what happen’s because im full of good ideas.”

The class have now had their Glow blogs for less than four months, but a lot has happened in that short time and I thought that I would write this post as a reminder of the direction we seem to be going in.

I made the decision to allow the children to have complete control over the content of their blog posts. I was aware of how much more successful this approach is compared to directing the children to write about specific subjects when I carried out a case study of my use of blogs a couple of years ago. 

I am also satisfied that the children (and their parents/carers) recognise the responsibilities of having a blog and that they all understand the reasons behind our ‘Blogging Rules’.

These are embedded in a page on their blogs as a reminder.

Their blog posts have been very varied – some about the school Reading Scheme  , others on the subject of achievements outside of school,  or a family holiday.

Of course, there have been the inevitable football posts! Some just show random pictures , and a post from Kian about Falkirk Football Club Matches received 8 comments …  I’ve no idea of the significance of them (apart from the first one, of course!). Football has, however, inspired some super blog posts like this one from Andrew . Although Sean is a reluctant writer, he was motivated to write a great blog post  about his first time at a big football match - and delighted at the encouraging comments from teachers in other Authorities. But this comment from Jade caught my eye:

“ Well done sean,you have won my post of the week Competition,you might win again next week,if other people do a better one well you will just have to do another one but it is fine because you can win more than 3 times in a row!”

It alerted me to the fact that the children were actually reading each others’ posts. New blog posts were also appearing to back this up:

“Hello!,welcome back to the best post of the week! HERE is a link to the winner’s blog. The winner is Lewis with his post about Admivore,with an astonishing, 7 comments! he was tied with sean but he had more in his post! sorry sean, the finalests were Brooke,Anna,Lucy N,sean Lewis,natasha,Ryan R and Mason,they were all great this week so it was hard, but only one person could of won sorry everyone!”

One of the posts that was voted as a ‘winner’ was by Natasha. She had been off school recovering from an operation on her foot. It was a great way for her to keep in touch with her peers, and there are 16 comments on the post now. At the end of the post, she mentioned how much she was going to miss not being able to go on our impending trip to the Glasgow Science Centre:

“MY mum say’s I probably wont go on the trip D: because if I cant walk then I cant get to school therefore I cant go on the trip D: and if I cant then please DONT tell me what happened because if you do I’m gonna feel REALLY bad because I didn’t get to enjoy it but I hope everyone has a good time if I don’t make it”

As a result of her writing that post, the school:

• Contacted the Science Centre and arranged for a wheel chair to be available for her
• Phoned her mum to ask if she was available to accompany Natasha on the trip
• Arranged for the janitor to pick Natasha up at home and drop her off at the bus that would take us to Glasgow and then meet her off the bus again to drive her home (mum doesn’t have a car).

What a nice way to end my assessment of our Glow blogging so far … Natasha was VERY pleased she’d written that post and she followed it with a Thank You to all her classmates:

“Ok i’ll start off with Thanks peeps for all the comments. I really appriciate it!!! Ive read all of them and trieing to reply to them.  Anyway WOOHOO I can go on the trip tomorrow!!! YAY The janny will drive over here then drive over to the bus. I will then limp/hop into the bus then sit down when we get there (BTW my mum has to come) and I hop/limp into the science center. Theres a wheelchair I sit in it and my mum wheels me around!!! Thanks Guys!”

There have been some great benefits to our Blogging Journey, but so far this response to one of the Glow blog posts has been the ‘icing on the cake’

Last session, while on secondment, I spent a few afternoons with some Primary 6 stage children and set up wikispaces for them. I wanted to gauge how appropriate they would be if used as an ePortfolio.  

Jaimey was very keen to keep hers going, and continued to add bits and pieces to it in Primary 7, but with no teacher input, her interest is waning. The ideal scenario (for me, anyway!) would be that there was an Authority-wide strategy in place to promote the advantages of  creating ePortfolios and that appropriate CPD opportunities were made available … ‘blue sky’ thinking

The image on here links to Jaimey’s wiki.

But other issues need to be taken into consideration when planning to build ePortfolios. I initially chose wikispaces because the service is free and I liked the way that they looked (I’m referring to the sidebar menus).

However, when I first investigeted ePortfolio Portability and Longevity Issues  on here, David Gilmour  commented:

With portfolios that are needed long-term, though, we’ll need to be careful to take such risks into account.”

I understand what David means and I envy the eduBuzz blogs set up. But, as we don’t have something like this in place in my own Local Authority, I thought that wikispaces , a great ‘web 2.0 service’ (can I still use that phrase?) seemed like a good alternative.

This session, however, I’ve set up Glow Blogs for all the children in my class, and I have been pleasantly surprised at their enthusiasm so far. Until recently, I thought that the best idea to build ePortfolios was to create a link from their blog to a wikispace with a set-up similar to the one above. But I’ve since thought about creating a ‘Sticky’ post with links to other areas in their blogs where they can record achievements, etc. New blog posts can then continue to be published as normal below the ‘Sticky’. The idea is that their Glow Blog becomes a ‘one-stop-shop’ where they can update with reflective posts, but have an area to formally record successes (although there will still be links to a wiki, where some children have enjoyed updating stories over a period of time. Have a look at the joint effort by Brooke, Natasha and Eilidh ).

I created a Trial Blog and set it up with the relevant sections. The Sticky post shown in the image links to  HERE where I’ve set up areas for them to record achievements until they leave Primary School. The idea is that they create links to High School stages (and beyond?)

I exported the information from the Trial Blog as an extended RSS file and imported into the children’s blogs. I had a bit of a dilemma as to whether or not to open up the links from the ‘Sticky’ post in a new window. I worried that if I didn’t do that then visitors to the blogs who were not used to such online spaces (parents?) might get lost and not be able to find their way back to the homepage. After seeking advice on twitter, though, I decided that the best solution was to open the links in the same window and add a  ’Back to my Home Page’ link on the sidebar.

The class can choose from 3 link designs -  all they have to do is copy the html code into a text widget. I’ve saved the code into a word document, but they need to change the link from the trial blog to their own.

I’m sure they’ll manage  

In this example the link will go to Declan’s homepage, even though the original image is stored in the Trial Blog. 

<a href=”https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/fa/cpsdeclanw/2010/11/16/welcome-to-my-eportfolio/”><img src=”https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/fa/carronshoretrial/files/2010/11/home-button-1-150×150.jpg” title=”blog home” /></a>

Here’s the three choices.

 

Thanks again to David Gilmour  for his patience when explaining how to do this!

The sidebar pages widget transfers with all the correct information and the links go directly to pages on the children’s blogs, but the actual posts links still transfer back to the Trial Blog. I’ve remedied this by creating a couple of class ‘experts’, who then teach others how to fix the problem. This is still on-going ….. but if anyone knows of an easier solution, please get in touch.

This post has been a bit of a ramble, but I’ll finish with a reminder to myself of what I believe an ePortfolio to be. I don’t think something like this could be built in a hurry anyway :-)

Back to Basics

1. What is an ePortfolio?:

• It’s a collection of student work that tells the story of the student’s efforts, progress, or achievements 

2. What should they look like?

• There should be evidence of self-reflection

3. What’s the teacher’s role?

• They need to plan carefully to provide clearly defined criteria 
• Effective feedback should be given to students, to encourage them to observe their own learning journey

4. What about the pupils?

• Comments should go beyond “I think I did OK” or ” I think I have more to learn.”
• Pupils should be monitoring their own learning so that they can adjust what they do when they perceive they are not understanding.