Background
Many schools and LA’s are looking to use learning logs, or e-portfolios, to record pupil assessment and attainment (Visit the e-portfolio Glow group).
This post explains how to set up a simple e-portfolio using a pupil’s My Glow area and the Glow Blogs webpart. It uses the K2 blog theme (What is a blog theme?) and is considered by us to be an informal e-portfolio.
Other set ups will be available shortly, including a more structured template and one using a different blog theme.
Process
In this post you will be shown how to:
- Create a new blog
- Import a template
- Add widgets to your blog
- Change the page settings for the blog
To begin, get your pupils to create a new Glow Blog.
Instructions for creating a Glow blog can be found here (8 mins 55 sec)
space
We have created a simple template including an ‘about me’ page and categories. You can view the template here or have a look at how it might progress here.
This template can be imported straight into the newly created blog, or modified and exported again before putting it in a shared folder where pupils can access.
Templates are imported/exported by visiting the dashboard, clicking Tools on the left hand navigation and then either import or export. The sample exported file can be found here. Import it onto your blog to see what is available.
Instructions for importing a template can be found here (2 mins 5 sec)
space
Widgets do not automatically appear when blogs are imported from a template. Widgets are additional boxes of information that can be added to a blog to give the reader more information, such as a calendar, a feed from another website or a list of recent posts. Asking a pupil to put a widget on their blog provides a good opportunity to discuss with pupils what widgets are and how they are used. If you are using this template you will want to add on the categories widget and the pages widget.
It may also be a good idea to change the front page to a static page, rather than the latest posts, which is the default setting.
Instructions for widgets and static pages can be found here (3 mins 46 sec)
space
It is possible to export a Glow blog too. You may want to use our template to get you started, modify it, and then export it to share with pupils. If you choose to do this it would be great if you could share your new template with us.
