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Hot Off The Press!!
Here they are – four brand new blog posts from Primary 6V.
These posts are just some of the ones published today and they’re worth reading!
One was published earlier today, and the others were written at home after school.
They’ll be shared in class and we’ll give them each a ‘Two Stars and a Wish’ comment.
Primary 6V would also appreciate any comments from visitors.
Reading and discussing each others’ blog posts is a great way to learn how to improve writing – much better than using textbooks 🙂
Click on the Blog Headers below to read the new posts:
1. Homer The Hamster – a great read!
2. Farewell Mrs Green – wonderful 🙂
3. Comic Relief – tomorrow!
4. Football Training – to be continued
More Great Things From Primary 6V
Since the last post, there have been lots of new great updates on Primary 6V individual Glow blogs.
The Blog header icons below link to some great posts.
Charlotte wanted to tell everyone about her fabulous trip to New york with her Mum. She waited until she had some pictures to include before she wrote her blog post. Click on her Header icon to read about her adventures.
Alyson has written a great account of her weekend. Click on her Header to read the blog post.
Kian has written a wonderful imaginative story based on some bunnyhero labs characters. Click on his Header image to read about the adventures of ‘Pepe the Spanish Warrior’, ‘Hamish the Highland Pig’ and ‘Finney the Ferret’. Others in class have already begun writing their imaginative stories after creating their own online pets. What a great idea 🙂
We’ve also been working on writing our autobiographies … visit again to have a look. They’ll be on our Glow ePortfolios soon!
Meanwhile Robyn has added hers to her blog. Click on her Header to have a look.
And if you want to see Jack’s, he’s added it to our One True Media account
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.onetruemedia.com/share_view_player?p=d95f3e07784bf85d772aab" width="408" height="382" allowfullscreen="true" /]
We’ve Moved!!
We haven’t posted on here for a while .. but that’s because we’ve moved 🙂
We’re now blogging from our new class GLOW blog. Have a look! 
You’ll find lots of links to our Individual GLOW blogs on there, too – we’ve included some links below to entice you.
And keep an eye on our class Glow maths blog, too. We’re planning to add to it very soon. You’ll find it HERE
We’ve loved all your comments over the last five years and we hope you’ll continue to visit our class blog at our new home
More About Primary 6V's Great Blogs!
In the previous post, there are links to some Primary 6V’s individual Glow blogs. Today we read all the posts out in class and gave them ‘two stars and a wish’ comments ….. the hardest bit was keeping the ‘star’ comments to just two 🙂
One of the posts was from Andrew who wrote:
“Hi everyone! Everybody in my class went on a school trip to Callendar House last Friday. We went there to learn a bit more about the Victorians, which is our topic for this term”.
He also designed this image on ImageChef – it looks great so it’s been included on here!
Some more posts about the visit have recently been written on more of our blogs and there are links to them below. Let us know what you think!
Click on Robyn’s Header to read her report:
Cameron B also wrote a post about his visit. Check it out HERE
Here’s Hayley’s memories about the day – click to have a look
Lucy wrote a great report as well. Click on her header icon to read it 
Garry enjoyed the trip and learned lots – but he’s glad he lives now and not then! Garry’s Post
Tommy’s post is HERE and Kyle’s is HERE .
It would be great if you left some comments for them.
.. But there’s more!
Matthew is in Primary 4 and has been visiting our class. His blog is already looking great. Click on his blog Header icon to read about his Treasured Possessions.
Ryan wrote about how much he’s looking forward to a sleepover this weekend – have a read
Finally … Anna also wrote about her weekend – and she just might keep on doing that. What a great idea! Click on her Glow blog header icon to read her latest post:
Introducing Primary 6V's Glow Spaces!
Primary 6V have their own individual Glow blogs and they update them regularly. In class, we enjoy reading new blog posts and sometimes we give them ‘Two Stars and a Wish’ (we found this animated picture and really wanted to include it here so we asked the creator and he said we could – thank you!)
If any visitors to this blog want to give some advice as to how we could improve our writing by leaving a ‘Two Stars and a Wish’ comment, we’ll do our best to follow your suggestions 🙂
One of the recent blog comments was written by Robyn describing her visit to the Youth Club. Click on her blog Header icon to have a read:
Tommy’s been reading a book with a great title – ‘The frog and the Monster’s Toothache’! Check out what he has to say about it … and have a listen to his Voki message on his blog sidebar:
Matthew is in Primary 4 and he joins our class every day for maths. He’s only had his Glow Blog for a very short time, but he’s already learned how to make an animation and show it off on his blog. What do you think?
On Friday we went on a school trip to learn about what life was like in Victorian times. Click on the next three Blog header icons to read what Brooke, Alyson and Andrew learned:
We hope you visit again soon to see how our Inanimate Alice tasks are coming along.
Check out the great effort by the Rain Drops and Wellie Boots group!
We’re also writing our Autobiographies on our Glow Blogs and links will be on here soon, too.
Watch this space 🙂
Welcome To Carronshore Blog's New Glow Home!
The Carronshore Blog has been on the go since 2006. You can view the journey of the blog so far by viewing a Photopeach Presentation made by Mrs V in 2009. Have a look HERE
The blog’s new home is now on Glow and this session, Primary 6V are going to use it to tell you about all the wonderful things they’ve been up to inside and outside school.
For example, they are using Glow Wikis as ePortfolios.
Click on the image to listen to how Anna intends to use hers.
Their Individual Glow Blogs are definitely worth a visit, too. Click on the image below to view Natasha’s. We’ll showcase lots more soon,
And finally – keep an eye out for our Inanimate Alice style digital stories on our class shared wiki … they’ll be appearing soon!
Glow Wikis, ePortfolios and Longevity
At time of writing my case study, I decided not to dictate how the children should use their individual blogs. During the research period, I contacted Jackie Marsh – and she agreed (I gained permission at the time to quote her):
“I have had a look at the blogs and they are great! I like the way you are
letting the children drive the use of the blogs, that is so important if they
are going to be successful. “
She also mentioned how we were using them on a post on her own blog at the time :
“I am speaking at the BFI ‘Reading on Screen’ conference for teachers tomorrow and although my main aim is to report on the evaluation of the very successful BFI ‘Lead Practioners Project’, I do want to highlight the potential that blogs have for disseminating children’s film productions and facilitating their peers’ critical comments on the films. I was contacted a few weeks ago by Margaret Vass, who is a Primary 7 class teacher at Carronshore Primary School, Falkirk. She told me about the excellent blog she has set up for the children in her class – I really like the children’s ‘WeeMees‘ and love the Voki posting developed by Bethany…blog on, Carronshore Primary 7!”
Bethany’s Voki on edublogs blog is missing now – what a shame 🙁
At the time, all of the Primary 7’s interviewed their parents so that they could write about their early years (as part of an autobiography).
Luckily I can still access the Vokis. Bethany’s is here:
Issues of this sort of thing happening have been discussed on this blog previously.
I still remember the unfortunate incident that led to the decision to transfer the children’s blogs from learnerblogs to edublogs. Edublogs chose to have all new blogs, including pupil blogs, hosted at edublogs. It was made clear that all existing learnerblogs could, if chosen, remain where they were. Around the time of this announcement, however, spam comments began to appear on a few of the children’s blogs. Email alerts usually ensured that these were deleted promptly. On one particular occasion, though, one was noticed by a pupil in her comment moderation queue when she logged in to her blog. Unfortunately, it contained very inappropriate content.
It was a lot of work moving the children’s blogs from learnerblogs to edublogs …. and then edublogs let us down.
Recently I’ve spent some time reflecting on the journey to give children a more stable online environment and I revisited this post and a thought-provoking comment from David Gilmour
“This is a good topic to debate, thanks for spending your Saturday night doing such a detailed post!
I’m really pleased that Marc got such a good audience for his writing.
Another aspect to this, which cropped up this week for us with the demise of Bubbleshare.com, is the longevity of Web 2.0 services. Inevitably there’s an element of risk in using these free services, and we’ve accepted that. For the schools involved, we’ve had a lot of useful learning – and fun – from it. The slideshows will vanish from the sites, but they’ve probably served their purpose and copies of the original images will still be on disk in the schools.
With portfolios that are needed long-term, though, we’ll need to be careful to take such risks into account.”
Now that I’ve finally set up some ePortfolios with the class I have now, I’m hoping that Glow will provide the stability we’re after.
And if it doesn’t – at least we’ll be sure to back up all the files as using the new Glow Wikis means that there’s no need to host content elsewhere.
Check out Anna’s ePortfolio – hopefully it’s just the beginning 🙂
Glow Wiki and ePortfolio Update
Well, it’s taken a while to create something that looks like an ePortfolio for an upper Primary aged class – but I think I’m getting there. When I first heard of the concept, I wrote a blog post on here and I like to revisit it now and then to make sure that I’m not cheating and calling something an ePortfolio when it clearly isn’t. The original post is here.
I wrote that post while on secondment, and it helps that I now have my own Primary 6 class to experiment with 🙂 Much of what we’ve been up to can be seen on the pages of our class blog – but I thought it might be a good idea to record the recent ePortfolio journey on here.
My previous post explained my thinking behind using Glow wikis as ePortfolios and here’s the story about how things are going so far:
When I first introduced Glow wikis as ePortfolios, Andrew wrote:
“Hi everyone! Welcome to my ePortfolio. Well, this is actually a GlowWiki but I am using it as an ePortfolio. Incase you were wondering, an ePortfolio is something online where you record your achievements throughout the years. You can use it to get a job when you grow up as well. So if you want to view all my achievements throughout the years, click on the pages to the left, or use the links on the banners below.”
Others have also begun recording their achievements. For example, Anna was keen to record her class talk about her cat called Pepper and she made a reconstruction of her original talk so that she could add it to her ePortfolio. Have a look/listen here
And, as part of our Victorian’s project, the class were asked to interview an older member of their family so that they could get a sense of the past. Brooke uploaded her interview with her Gran to her ePortfolio. Have a listen: Brooke interviews her Gran about schooldays in the past
Ryan, on the other hand, was less taken with the idea:
“Hi my name is ryan r and I am new to the eportfoio and I do not know what to do on it. Hopefully my friend Jack D the expert can help me.”
His attitude changed, though, when he saw that others had been recording outside school achievements. Some have started bringing in trophies and medals so that we can have photographic evidence to upload. Check out Lucy’s TaeKwonDo narrated slideshow
After seeing these, Ryan was keen to show off his own achievements outside of school and brought in some of his football trophies. With help from others, he managed to update his own ePortfolio and record his football achievements on photostory 3
There are more Glow wiki examples I could link to, but what I’m hoping is that the children will see the connection between their Glow wikis and they great posts they’ve been adding to their Glog blogs. There are lots and lots of examples of great blog posts, but I’ll link to Mason’s one about finding a reading book about his favourite film ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’. I didn’t know that Mason liked the film … or the book 🙂 Mason’s blog post is here.
Their story writing, started on their wikispaces during their ‘pre Glow wiki era’, should also be included. The Terrible Time Machine is a great example. Read it here.
We’ve also recently set up a class Glow wiki so that the children can demonstrate their ability to work with others.
Check out our first task here: Our Writing Task
Eight groups are involved. The Billionaires have completed some of the tasks. Have a look.
More to come 🙂
Our Glow Wikis – So Far
The class now have their own Glow Wikis. I’d been waiting patiently for their launch to assess their suitability for use as an ePortfolio. I’d played around with the idea of using wikis as an ePortfolio last year while I was on secondment and wrote a couple of blog posts about the ‘experiment’. One of these can be seen here.
While I was waiting for the Glow Wikis to make an appearance, I toyed with the idea of using the Glow Blogs as ePortfolios. The children seemed a bit bamboozled by the prospect, however, and I suspect that it was because they had been using these online spaces as a traditional weblog and found it difficult to make the connection.
I created a ‘sticky’ post and linked to pages on the sidebar. The ‘Sticky’ said:
Welcome To My ePortfolio
This is my Learning Space where I blog about things I’m interested in.
I also record my achievements inside and outside of school. Click HERE to read about them
I knew from the reaction that there was confusion and when Andrew changed his Sticky wording, I realised that they didn’t see the blogs as an ePortfolio:
Hi everyone! Mrs V gave us all ePortfolios!
An ePortfolio is a page on your blog where you record your achievements in and out of school. Click HERE to read about them.
Even with that subtle change of emphasis, though, no-one added anything to the ‘ePortfolio section’ of their blog.
But now that they’ve been given a Glow Wiki as an ePortfolio, everyone in the class seems taken with the idea.
There have been some frustrating glitches … but so far these have been overshadowed by the positives.
I’m really looking forward to seeing where this leads 🙂
In case anyone is interested, here’s how I set up our Glow Wiki eportfolios:
In the ‘My Glow’ area, I added the Glow Wiki webpart.
I asked our school secretary (our ASM) to turn on the rights for me to set up a wiki.
I’ve since learned that @claganach, our ICT Curriculum Development Officer had turned them on for the whole school – thanks Malcolm 🙂
I decided to set my trial Wiki to public immediately because I wanted to be sure that when it was live it would ‘behave’ the way I expected it to .. if that makes sense??
I soon discovered that it differed from the class blogs and from the wikispaces I’d experimented with previously. I still can’t embed videos etc. hosted elsewhere into the Glow Wiki and any links using the link icon require viewers to be logged in to Glow to view them.
I’ve been finding ways around these hiccups, though.
For example:
- Uploading pictures is quite straightforward
- Although I haven’t discovered how to embed media in Glow blogs, the children can easily upload videos, podcasts, etc without the need to host elsewhere
- It’s possible to create links to other areas of the wiki if tinyurl is used to create the links. I’ve no idea why this is the case – but if any Glow experts can help me find the answer to this, the children in my class will be forever in your debt 🙂
- The wiki URLs are very long so I’ve created a link to them on a page on our class blog. I think this also tends to create a sense of class community as everything we have is more connected.
- It was also very easy to copy and paste these links into a text editor webpart in my ‘My Glow’ area.
The children set up their Glow wikis in the same way as their Glow blogs were set up.
I’m glad that I set up our Glow blogs in the way that I did as it meant that I was already a member of the children’s ‘My Glow’ area so I was automatically an administrator of their Wikis as well.
I’ll keep posting about how our Glow ePortfolios progress, and meanwhile I’d love to hear back from any ‘Glow in the Know’ folk who have solutions to the linking and embedding issues 🙂