Russell Street School ePortfolios

This month the PEN (Principal’s Electronic Network) is hosting a forum on ePortfolios. I have been invited to join in this discussion and initiate the forum discussion.

It is always difficult to write an initial forum post that leads on to effective discussion about the topic. How long should it be? Should you play the devil’s advocate? Do you just state the facts as we know them now? How much crystal balling should you do?

If you have any answers, let me know. Otherwise here is my initial post designed to be the starting point for an ongoing discussion about eportfolios.

The NZ Curriculum “…gives schools the flexibility to design and deliver programmes that will engage all students and offer them appropriate learning pathways.”

The document further describes effective pedagogy and assessment, recognises parents as key partners, encourages elearning to open up new opportunities, and promotes student engagement in their learning.

My suggestion is that the eportfolio is able to provide the container that will capture the essence of a learning programme that caters for all of these features.

While the traditional portfolio focused on best examples of work to be showcased, the modern eportfolio, with its ability to network learners, integrate the best of Web 2.0 and show the process of learning, focuses more on supporting learners by being an integral component in the learning process.

How are you connecting learners, parents and teachers? How are you capturing feedback before, during and after learning? How are you facilitating learners in reflecting on and sharing learning through multimedia? How are you allowing learners to collect examples of their learning in an environment similar to what they use as part of their out of school networking?

The eportfolio makes this possible. It supports effective learning, assessment and elearning as described in the NZ Curriculum. It involves parents in the learning process and most importantly, engages students. Far from being a current buzzword in education, the eportfolio is an essential component that links the essential strands of learning together.

In my ULearn08 workshop, Assessment for Learning and ePortfolios, I had the attendees complete a couple of questionnaires to get a better picture of where they were at with their eportfolio development. Made in Google Docs, these forms are super easy to make and share.

Interesting as a snapshot or cross-section of the conference goers.

And in answer to the question: What is the one thing that you would like to know of take away from this workshop? here is a sample of the ideas and questions posted.

• To be able to implement e-portfolios within my school
• Ideas for the setting up of eportfolios
• Practical examples for implementing, management strategies, PD requirements
• Software available to create e-portfolios.
• Examples of e-portfolios.
• Interactivity from school to home. Ability for students to be able to access and edit work from home in a safe and secure way.
• Examples of others eportfolios
• Some ideas for starting along the eportfolio track
• The most appropriate software to support e-portfolios,
• The possibility and options for ePortfolio for our school, or even just pioneering in my class.
• How eportfolios are managed and shared with parents & whanau
• How to manage ePortfolios with Junior 0 - 2 students so that they are authentic, student-centered, but manageable for teachers
• How to keep the portfolios as an assessment tool eg feed forward comments etc, use of rubrics for work
• Successful stories of using them
• Mistakes you have made that we by knowing about will not make
• What are e-portfolios and how/why should our school implement them?
• The value of e portfolios as a tool for assessment and improving outcomes
• Ideas of how you have set these up (what is included) and how you have allowed access to staff, student and parent access

It is really interesting to see so many of the questions that our school had also asked as we began our initial exploration into ePortfolios. Unfortunately, there is no one solution fits all.

I really enjoyed the workshop and a big thank you goes to those that attended for your participation in these questionnaires.

Toni Twiss, another 2008 eFellow, has started a discussion thread on the Vodafone NZ Corporate Responsibility Forum. The forum is based on the question, “How might access to mobile technologies impact education in the future?”

He is my initial response to the discussion. Why don’t you add yours?

Information literacy, as you have clearly stated, is a highy important skill and increasingly so as access to and information itself grows at an alarming rate. The ability to carry around in your pocket a device where access to the web, the ability to share and network information is right there, further highlights the need for students to have the skills necessary to make sense of these resources.

The quoted text, “that teachers currently give the information out to students that they have already deemed to be correct. There is not authentic context requiring students to critique information” concerns me greatly, especially if it is more than just a generalisation and the majority of teachers really do still churn out information for students to consume.

When Jane Gilbert, from the NZCER, talks about the different types of knowing she discusses how knowing what, is far less important than knowing how, who or why. If we relate this to information literacy one could argue that while the information is important, students must know how to find, sort and analyse, know who they can utilise or ask for assistance, and know why this information is required, before the content, or the what beomes useful.

Teachers, as stated, ultimately hold the key to enabling information literate students. As Suzie mentions, guiding students through the process of inquiry or research to teach them the skills is an absolute must before they are let free. I great site I have used is this one to help facilitate a small part of this process.

While the abilty of mobile technologies allow students to access the flood of information any time, any place, any where, I see the an equally exciting potential of mobile technologies in sharing information as well. MOSEP (2007), describe how these devices support the idea that “…students can literally carry their eportfolio around with them and update it at any time in any place.”

This is something that really interests me. A small moblie device than can access learning, share the process and celebrate student achievement, as well as record feedback and reflections to improve learning. Exciting stuff especially when you combine that with this type of development.

Mobile technologies offer some really exciting posibilities for both accessing and sharing information. But as you have stated Toni, it needs to be guided by effective pedagogy first as well as teachers experiencing and understanding the ways that their studetns are finding and networking their own information.

Helen Barrett in her latest blog entry has made a big claim regarding Google Apps, formative assessment and eportfolios.

I am now convinced that in GoogleApps (Sites, Docs, etc.) I have found the best free Web 2.0 tool for maintaining an online personal learning environment that can be used for formative assessment in education.

I have a lot of respect for Helen Barrett and have used and referenced her work and research many times. However on this occasion, I do not fully agree.

Google Apps are fantastic. They continue to offer new apps and improve on existing ones all for free. I would be lost without my gmail, docs, calendar and reader. If you were to take a snapshot of my personal learning environment (PLE) and time spent in various web 2.0 tools, GoogleApps would far and away take up the largest slice of the pie.

However, my experiences with Google Sites as a means for pulling together all the strands of an eportfolio for the students at our school, were not entirely successful. I base these thoughts on the set of criteria we developed in order to select the eportfolio tool that best fit what we required to support teaching and learning.

If I take one of the criteria, based on the concept that viewers should not have to click links and download files, it should just be there, embedded waiting for the play button to be clicked…

Ability to demonstrate learning: The ePortfolio solution needs to be able to display (show within the portfolio not provide a link to file) all the possible media that the students will generate or want to share. This includes but is not limited to: podcasts and movies (m4v, m4a, mov), documents (pdf), images (jpg, png, gif) and embedding Web 2.0 content.

In my experiences with Google Sites, this is not possible. Embedding Web 2.0 content just doesn’t seem to work, apart from Google related products. This has caused me many frustrating moments as the embed code is stripped for other content. Again, Google Sites is a great product but are we trying to fit an eportfolio in a package that doesn’t really work?

Regarding the statement of GoogleApps and formative assessment, any tool that supports feedback, reflection and commenting can theoretically support formative practice. However, when one looks at Barrett’s process for developing eportfolios using Google Sites, what I believe is one of the most important aspects of a formative eportfolio, the student acting on feedback and their own assessments to improve their learning, only gets a passing comment at the very end.

The portfolio developer should be given the option of updating the work, based on the feedback and the rubric.

I see formative assessment as being cyclic in nature with the student action as I described above central to the process. After all, self-direction and self-regulation by the student are two very important outcomes. The following diagram (click for larger version) was developed to reinforce this point as part of the big picture of developing eportfolios for learning.

So what do you think? Is the student action component as important as I believe? Are the GoogleApps really the best solution despite my reservations? Let me know!