Using a Glow Survey to evaluate ‘Connecting the Learning’ shared homework tasks

Overview
Bernadette Cassidy teaches Primary 5 at St Mary’s Primary School in Bannockburn. She incorporates a wide range of cooperative learning exercises into the activities she sets her class. One of these exercises is about ‘Connecting the Learning’.

Context
‘Connecting the Learning’ is the process of Bernadette planning a topic with the children so as to create an enjoyable, coherent and relevant context for learning.

Recently, the pupils in Primary 5 were studying the Scottish Wars of Independence.
Through planning this with the children, Bernadette provided a wide range of engaging and stimulating activities throughout this topic. The focus was very much on the children being active learners.

Bernadette describes some of this in her own words:

 “Our P5 topic last term was the Scottish Wars of Independence. As part of the topic the children created a film advertisement and a brochure with a Digital Artist on tourism in Stirling. We visited the Wallace Monument and Stirling Castle on a trip, we built a small medieval castle in our classroom, made poster presentations on Medieval Life, Feudalism, Medieval Jewellery and Armour and Heraldry. The class also created a Timeline wall with lots of information about the wars of independence. During our Open Afternoon, they hosted a cafe to raise funds for SCIAF and did a quiz with parents as well as presenting all their work and showing the advertisement.

For the Open Afternoon, the classroom was transformed into a ‘Tourist Office’ which was split into different areas. In one area was a model of a Medieval Castle built by the pupils; in another was a lego model of the Wallace Monument that they had made; in the middle of the room was a suitcase, filled with the clothing and other items that the pupils felt should be packed by visitors planning to visit the Stirling area. The pupils acted as Tour Guides for the afternoon and were able to share lots of information about Wallace and Bruce with the visitors who included Parents and pupils from other classes. This included playing the video advertisement they had made and appeared in. There was also a cafe in the Tourist Centre, as the pupils all felt that this was an essential element of any good tourist experience!

The class also held a Glow Meet session with ‘Mr Browne’ from the Tourist Board. You can find out more about this in the cookbook ‘Your Tourist Board Needs you!’ 

Shared Learning Homework


One aspect of this ‘Connecting the learning’ topic was the Shared Learning Homework. This required the children to share their learning with people outside of school. Information was given to parents to let them know the purpose of these shared learning activities and to encourage them to support their children in these.

The pupils were given a list of 15 shared learning homework activities, and were required to complete 8 of them. There were three compulsory activities:
1. To build a castle from a shoe box with someone at home.
2. To create a ‘Wanted’ poster for the capture of William Wallace by the English.
3. To make a collage of Stirling and the historical places in the area.

Pupils could choose any other five activities of their choice.
For the tasks that required a form of written output, such as writing an acrostic poem for William Wallace or Robert the Bruce, or making a presentation about an aspect of the topic that interested them, the pupils uploaded their completed work into the Document store in their class Glow Group.

The Document Store is where many items of the childrens’ work is stored, making it a great vehicle for peer review too. 

Bernadette had carried out similar ‘Connecting the Learning’ Shared Learning Homework exercises previously and had evaluated these by sending out a questionnaire to parents/carers in paper format. This time, she decided to use Glow to evaluate it.

Glow Survey

Within the P5 Glow Group, Bernadette created a Glow Survey.
She added it to the Noticeboard Page of the Glow Group for ease of access.
Pupils logged on to Glow at home and completed the survey.

They were asked questions such as:
- How many shared learning tasks did you complete?
- What do you like most about this type of homework? Give a reason why.
- If you could change anything about this type of homework what would you change?  Give a reason why.
- Did you upload any of your homework to Glow?

Using the paper questionnaires, Bernadette had previously had a return rate of about 11 out of 25.  Using the Glow Survey, she received 18 responses, a huge increase!

The children found the survey a really enjoyable way of giving their feedback, as it was much more novelty than simply filling in a sheet of paper.

Ingredients

So what did Bernadette need to do to enable the pupils to take part in a Glow Survey to evaluate their shared learning tasks:
- Have a Glow Group at school level
- Ensure all pupils had Contributor rights to the Glow Group
- Create the survey and add it to the page
Let’s have a little look at the P5 Glow Group and the survey in it. You can then use the ‘how to’ videos to learn how to replicate this for yourself.

Tour of the P5 Glow Group (5:15)

How to create a survey (14:16)

How to respond to a survey (5:19)

Impact

Using the Glow Survey to gather feedback has increased the number of responses that Bernadette received from the class. This gives her more data to use to evaluate the effectiveness of the tasks and plan for future shared learning exercises.

 Also, as the data is stored in Glow, she has permanent access to it and does not need to file away paper copies for future reference.

It is also possible to create a template of a survey, so Bernadette could use this survey as a template for future evaluation surveys, to save having to create a new survey from scratch each time.

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