Standard Grade Music – Using a wiki for project work
Context
Irene Stewart
Irene Stewart is a Principal Teacher of Music at Bellshill Academy in North Lanarkshire. She began using Glow quite recently, encouraged by her own son’s use of Glow in primary school. She saw the potential for her secondary pupils to be accessing materials from home and also to be able to ask questions on Discussion Boards for help with their homework. Her son’s obvious enjoyment of using Glow made her think that her pupils would be motivated by using it.
This is the second of 2 Cookbooks which will look at how Irene has started to use Glow with her Standard Grade classes but mainly with S3. This second Cookbook on Irene’s use of Glow will focus on the pupils using a wiki to upload project work for Standard Grade Music.
The first Cookbook can be found here: Std Grade Music – A Glow Group using a Graphical Interface.
Glow wiki
Glow wiki
Wikipedia describes a wiki as:
a website that allows creation and editing of any number of interlinked pages … wikis are often used collaboratively by multiple users.
Glow itself describes wikis as:
online, collaborative spaces that can be used for almost anything. From class topic work, to school working groups, wikis are extremely flexible websites with infinite uses.
wiki web part
front page of the SG Music wiki
In a Glow Group there is a separate web part you can bring in and then use it to create a wiki within your Glow Group. You can choose to have this public facing, even though it is a part of your Glow Group, or you can choose for it to have the private membership of your Glow Group.
In her Standard Grade Listening Glow Group she has created a Glow wiki to allow the pupils to upload their group project work. This also allows them to see and comment on what other groups have uploaded. Irene was keen to use the Glow wiki so that the pupils would be able to quickly upload larger files. She was also keen that it was easy to allocate each group their own page within the wiki and yet allow them to have access to all the pages where other groups had uploaded their project work.
The project has different groups of pupils researching jazz. Each group of pupils have created a page which can be accessed from the menu at the side. They have then uploaded their presentation files and any appropriate images and audio files to go along with them.
Later, the pupils will be able to use the comment facility on each page to comment on each other’s work.
wiki group page – click on this to enlarge
Ingredients
What did Irene need to do to allow her pupils to upload their work to the Glow wiki:
- A staff Glow account within Bellshill Academy
- Her pupils provisioned and allocated their Glow usernames and passwords
- A Glow Group created at school level
- S3 pupils set up with at least contributor membership of this Glow Group
- A Glow wiki web part added
- A Glow wiki created
- The front page edited with instructions for pupils about uploading their projects
- Pages created within the wiki for each group of pupils
You will be able to see the whole Glow Group in the Virtual Tour video in the Method section below.
On the Noticeboard page there is a Glow wiki web part containing the link to the Standard Grade Music wiki. Once clicked this opens in a new window and the pupils are able to upload their projects to share with each other.
Recipe
In the first video below, Irene takes you on a virtual tour of her Glow Group. The following videos will show you how to replicate what Irene has set up in terms of a graphical interface and hidden pages in her Glow Group.
Irene’s tour of the Glow Group – (3:33)
Creating a Glow Wiki (4:24)
Editing a Glow Wiki Home Page, adding text and images (4:44)
Adding pages to a Glow Wiki (4:33)
Adding links to a Glow Wiki (7:39)
Leaving a comment on a wiki page (1:39)
Impact
When she first started her training on Glow Irene felt there was a lot of information to get through and that this could be off-putting. But once she got started with Glow she found she really enjoyed using it and it was generally easy to use.
Irene feels that the pupils really enjoy using Glow, even at this early stage. They have been particularly interested in the discussion forum, being able to do their homework online and being able to upload and share their project work.
View the following videos to get an idea of the impact that using Glow has had on Standard Grade Music in Bellshill Academy.
Why Irene first decided to use Glow (0:40)
How Irene found it when she first started to use Glow (0:36)
What the pupils thought of using Glow (0:50)
How Irene uses Glow with her pupils (0:40)
How Irene would like to take Glow forward (1:00)
For further help, information and examples for Glow wikis visit the following links:
Getting Started with Glow Wikis Cookbook