Lynburn Primary: giving pupils responsibility for their own Glow Group

Overview

The pupils' own Glow Group. Click to enlarge.

Jacqui Clark is a P5 teacher at Lynburn Primary School in Fife. She has been using Glow for about eighteen months, first with her own class and then supporting colleagues and pupils throughout the school.

This is the second of two cookbooks about Jacqui’s work. The first focused on how Jacqui used Glow to support learning in areas as diverse as Mandarin, Christmas and the Royal Wedding! In this cookbook we look at how she has given the children in her class their own Glow Group and given them the responsibility for ensuring it is used appropriately. She is delighted with the way they have responded to that challenge.

Context

Jacqui’s Primary 5 class were already well used to Glow, to the Glow Group environment and in particular to using Discussion boards to post comments about their work or to ask questions.

One pupil's page. Click to enlarge.

The class were then keen to have their own Glow pages. While pupils could have used their ‘My Glow’ for this purpose, Jacqui decided to create a Glow Group with one page per child. Pupils use these pages to post messages for each other, upload photos of activities they are involved in outside school, post up personal news, announce when they have uploaded new work for peer assessment and store pieces of work they want to be able to share with their families

The P5s have been given ‘Administrator’ rights to this Glow Group, allowing them to be able to create new web parts when required. This is an uncommonly high level of rights for pupils to be given on a Glow Group (’Reader with Discussions’ or ‘Contributor’ are more typical), and could cause some problems, such as with pupils deleting each others’ work. However, the class have proved very mature in their use of the Glow Group and handled the responsibility well. Indeed they have taken the messages of internet safety and being responsible citizens to heart, rapidly flagging up to Jacqui any item that they feel is inappropriate.

Jacqui Clark talks about her pupils’ Glow Group (1:47) 

Ingredients

For the class Glow Group, Jacqui needed to do the following:

* created a Glow Group on the school site

* gave her pupils Administrators of the Group

* created a page for each pupil

The pupils themselves then:

* created multiple web parts, so that each had their own News, Documents and Discussions web parts

* added a Glow Image Gallery web part

* added content to their own pages and to their friends’

Method

The following video clips show how to customise and use a Glow Group as Jacqui and her class have done.

* how to add, rename or delete pages (2:56) 

* how to upload a document (2:24) 

* how to add a post to a discussion board (3:00) 

* how to create an additional Documents (or other) web part (7:42) 

* how to close, restore or move web parts (4:21) 

* how to compress images before uploading to Glow (8:12) 

* how to upload images to an Image Gallery web part (8:51) 

Impact

Using a Glow Group for ’social’ purposes have proved a hit with Jacqui’s class. While every pupil has a ‘My Glow’ space, it is not easy to allow other pupils access to this, nor easy for staff to keep an eye on what is posted. Use of a Glow Group gives all members of the class easy visibility of everyone’s pages. For staff it can provide a good teaching environment in which to reinforce lessons about internet safety, to discuss the implications of copyright when sourcing images on the web, and to encourage respect for peers.

Lynburn pupils talk about their pupil Glow Group (0:35)