Using Glow In Primary to Secondary Transition (part 2)
Overview
As is outlined in a different cookbook (you can see that cookbook here), Mrs MacKenzie from Lairdsland Primary School worked with Lenzie Academy and the other associated primary schools to use Glow to help prepare the P7 pupils from the primary schools for their imminent move to Lenzie Academy.
A key part of this Glow group was the use of discussion boards. They were used to allow pupils from each primary school to ask questions of the teachers in 6 of the Academy’s departments and also a group of prefects from S6. This required the use of multiple discussion boards in the one group and this cookbook outlines how this was done.
Context
A key part of this project was to allow the pupils to ask questions which would then be answered by teachers from the Academy and by S6 pupils. It was important that the questions were kept separate from each other – this would allow the English teacher to see all questions meant for them without having to filter through all questions to all departments.
Discussion boards were also seen as the appropriate solution. Glow Chat would have allowed the same question and answer session however it is real time and it was important in this project that schools could ask the questions at different times from each other. Also by using discussion boards all pupils could see the questions set by other pupils.
Ingredients
A page for each department and a page for the prefects
A separate discussion board on each page
Recipe
Set up the pages – Glow groups by default come with 4 pages – Noticeboard, Discussions, Documents and Glow Groups, This set up was not appropriate for the Transition Glow Group and so Mrs Mackenzie removed all the pages other than Noticeboard (this cannot be deleted) and added pages – one for each department and one for the prefects.
Watch the video to see how pages can be added and removed from a Glow group:
Create a separate discussion web part for each instance required – if you drag the discussion board on to each page then they are just different views of the same discussion board. This was not appropriate for this group as the questions had to be kept separate from each other. Instead Mrs Mackenzie created 7 discussion boards through the Advanced Settings and then dragged each Discussion board on to the appropriate page.
Watch the video to see how different discussion boards are set up and then used:
This project is going to run again this year and interest is being expressed by every department in the Academy!