Tuesday, September 22, 2009 10:17 AM
Guest post: Dr. Helen Barrett is a retired teacher educator, an independent researcher, and international trainer/consultant on electronic portfolios and digital storytelling in education. This year, she is writing a book about using Web 2.0 tools to create Interactive Portfolios.In schools and colleges across the world, students are developing "E-Portfolios" which include digital collections and reflections on their work, created for a wide variety of purposes. According to this website, "An e-portfolio is a learner-driven collection of digital objects demonstrating experiences, achievements and evidence of learning. E-portfolios provide learners with a structured way of recording their learning experiences... and can include a range of digital evidence such as audio, video, photographs and blogs."
An e-portfolio is created from many small, inter-connected pieces. Google's suite of web-based products offers a rich environment for creating e-portfolios, which incorporates several different elements and tools, depending on your purpose:
- "E-Portfolios for Learning" provide an environment to reflect about your learning, telling your own story of growth over time. These working portfolios are often structured as journals or blogs where you can include samples of your work along with personal reflections. (This is my Blogger blog, where I document my activities, achievements, and reflections... my personal learning environment.)
- "E-Portfolios for Personal Branding and Self-Marketing" let you develop a "resume on steroids" for showcasing skills and samples of your best work to potential employers, customers, or graduate schools. (This is my Google Site, set up with my own domain name in Google Apps, highlighting my professional achievements.)
- "E-Portfolios for Assessment/Accountability" are used by educational institutions to document achievement, sometimes replacing or supplementing standardized tests, or more traditional forms of evaluation. (I don't have an example, because many of these highly structured portfolios are behind passwords and most universities use customized systems for this purpose.)
- Begin with a working portfolio, that could be as simple as a reflective journal or blog in Blogger, the Announcements page type in Google Sites, or even a Google Docs document set up as a diary.
- Using several Google tools, collect digital documents that represent your best or typical work:
- Google Docs provides a great environment for developing and storing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations as well as PDFs. Google Docs also lets you share your work with others for commenting and feedback.
- Share videos and images using YouTube and Picasa.
- Upload other file types as attachments in Google Sites.
- To create a more structured presentation of your work for a particular audience, select certain pieces to go into a more tailored portfolio/website. Google Sites can help you organize your work with a reflective narrative, telling your story while linking to supporting evidence (selected entries from your journal/blog and links to files in your digital archive) to meet your intended purpose. Here is a high school portfolio where a student documents his senior project.
7 comments:
Very thoughtfull post on achivement. It should be very much helpfull
Thanks,
Karim - Creating Power
Sounds great. But I have a problem and very little outlet to get any feedback. When trying to set up my students on Google Docs today, they were confronted with an SMS requirement to verify their account.
Students are not allowed to have cell phones in class, not every student even has a cell phone, so this severely limits my ability to build Google Docs into my classroom as a everyday tool.
What am I supposed to do?
You didn't say the age of the students. K-12? Higher Ed? Are you signing up for regular gmail accounts? Or are you using GoogleApps for Education (with your school's own domain name)? For K-12 schools, you should be using GoogleApps for Education, where you can set up a protected environment, and you can set up your student accounts, restrict access, etc.
that makes sense to me, thanks Helen...I can use this advice...Anthony
Helen
I'm happy to see this nice summary of Google apps for portfolio purposes. You point to the idea of institutional portfolios, but don't have examples to show.
Our work at Washington State University is now focused on assessment and accreditation.
In the spring of 2009 the University did its 10-year NWCCU accreditation, which was an electronic portfolio at http://universityportfolio.wsu.edu The site is presently closed, but soon key parts of it will be open.
For the 2009 accreditation it looked like a set of SharePoint document libraries, with files (the self studies) and folders (exhibits and data) for each of the units within the university.
We are exploring taking that first university portfolio in an exciting direction that will involve bringing community into the assessment process (and opening the portfolio up). The idea is to move our accreditation work toward Transformative Assessment practices. You can see a webinar that outlines our vision and play with some limited samples
In the terms of our showcase/workspace discussions, this university portfolio not a workspace. It is a showcase that aims at gathering feedback.
Very nice! Thank you for this template http://www.itemplatez.com
Helen,
Here is part of what I promised above, its a beta of the Washington State University Accreditation Portfolio. It will let you try the academic program assessment process that involves a self-study written by the fictitious Department of Rocket Science.
What we are developing is a portfolio site where each academic program would deposit its self-study and then the self-studies would collect general community feedback as well as invited feedback.
To try it, visit this site, you will find the directions to guide you through the Rocket Science assessment process:
https://universityportfolio.wsu.edu/2009-2010/Pages/default.aspx
Again, the process:
1. Read over the Assessment Criteria (you can download the rubric at the link above or read it online).
2. Read the Rocket Science self Study
3. Go through the online rubric and assign Rocket Science scores on each of the four dimensions of the rubric, add comments and feedback on the rubric and the process.
You may also share this process with others who may be interested
Nils S. Peterson
Assistant Director
Office of Assessment and Innovation
Washington State University
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