Using a wiki as an evidence store for pupil e-portfolios
Context
Maureen Atkins
Maureen Atkins is a Maths teacher at St Aidan’s High School in North Lanarkshire. She has been making good use of Glow in her teaching. She was involved in the school making the decision to move ahead with using e-portfolios with the S1 year group. Maureen was keen that evidence of pupil achievement that she had captured in the classroom would be available to be used by the pupils when creating posts in their e-portfolios. This Cookbook will focus on the Maths Store Glow Group and on the wiki. You will see a tour of the Glow Group and wiki and also interviews with Maureen where she will explain what she was setting out to do.
This process could be used across any whole school seeking a method to give pupils access to evidence from classes for use in their e-portfolios.
Ingredients
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Maureen decided that the easiest way to give pupils access to evidence from their Maths classes was to create a Glow Group called The Maths Store and then create a wiki inside this group for various files to be uploaded to. The plan was originally that the whole Maths Dept would use this but the school are looking into having a school-wide evidence wiki. It was materials such as, scanned images of posters the pupils had made; PowerPoint files from their Famous Mathematicians presentations and photos Maureen normally takes in class for evidence that she wanted to give the pupils access to. There is a 5Mb limit on uploading individual files into the Glow Blogs currently being used as pupil e-portfolios. With this in mind, Maureen compressed some larger image files before adding them to the wiki to make it easier for the pupils to upload them to their individual e-portfolios.
What did Maureen need to do to enable the pupils to upload class evidence into their e-portfolios:
- Have a staff Glow account at St Aidan’s High School
- Have her pupils provisioned and given their Glow usernames and passwords
- Create a Glow Group on the school site and set the pupils up with at least Reader membership
- Remove pages other than Noticeboard page from the Glow Group
- Add a text editor web part with instructions
- Add a wiki web part and create the wiki
- Edit the wiki to give instructions and create a separate page for her class to use
- Upload images and files to the page in the wiki
- Pupils with e-portfolios created
- Pupils need access to a computer to save the file and upload this to their e-portfolio to become part of a post.
Recipe
The first video below is of Maureen taking you on a tour through the Maths Store Glow Group and through the wiki itself. The videos that follow will allow you to follow the same steps that Maureen has taken to be able to achieve this yourselves.
Maureen’s Tour of the Maths Store Wiki (3:09)
Creating a Glow Group to use as an evidence store (1:38)
Removing the unwanted pages and adding a text editor (3:06)
Adding the wiki web part and creating the wiki (2:17)
Editing the wiki (3:17)
Uploading evidence to the wiki (1:28)
How the pupils can access the evidence from the wiki (1:33)
How the pupils would use this in their e-portfolio (3:20)
Impact
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Maureen notes that the pupils were very keen to use the evidence she had provided in the wiki for their individual e-portfolios. She notes:
They were even going home and trying to do it. They’re excited about it … because they live in that world. This use of ICT, they like it, they are very comfortable with it.
They were very keen that it gave them a vehicle to be able to show their parents. This is something Maureen knew that both the parents and the pupils were keen on before but that there wasn’t really a mechanism for sharing until Glow.
In the videos below Maureen talks about various aspects of the impact of this project.
Why Maureen was keen to become involved with Glow? (0:24)
Why did Maureen decide to create an evidence store in Glow? (0:35)
What was involved in getting the materials onto the wiki? (0:39)
How the pupils have responded to using evidence and making posts in their e-portfolios. (1:05)
You may wish to visit other Cookbooks written about St Aidan’s High School:
- St Aidan’s High School Transition – Interactive School Map
- Sharing Instrumental Performance Videos at St Aidan’s High School