Every student in the Lab School middle school in March makes and takes home a paper portfolio, we will again this year, and teachers don't mind (since it's authentic assessment) even though it takes up about 2 full class days to write a reflection sheet and compile the work into a neat 3 ring binder. My boss asked me to explore eportfolios for the future, so maybe I would pilot one this year, but no major changes yet.
I don't want a new tool, so can I make mine with what I know now? My personal portfolio used to be a website (mattfratt.com) that I built with dreamweaver, I was proud of it, it got me my current job six years ago when the founder of the school liked it, but no one looked at it and I never updated it since Dreamweaver is a pain. I once taught a class in Dreamweaver and we built portfolios, but it took like 5 weeks.
So mattfratt.com now points to my youtube channel, and that is my portfolio now. It's limited since you can only post video, but students could video tape their worksheets. So Youtube is one option. I'm lobbying for our school to use Google Apps for Ed. So using Google sites for a student portfolio, since they would all have gmail accounts, seems like a great idea to me, but I heard google sites is not that easy, so who knows. Facebook seems like it could be a portfolio but then again not really.
So if I can't use something I know, what exists now? There are website creation tools like Wix Weebly, and Wordpress . I saw tools like livebinders, pupilpages.com and equals6.com but have never explored them. There's an application in development called Orangebook that uses a phone's camera to scan and upload student work (I met one of the developers Stephen Silvius) that may be an option. It's not urgent but then again this seems like an essential skill that should be taught.
1 comments:
Great question, Matt! I think your quest for student portfolios and my quest for learning maps might be related: we're looking for good ways to look at student learning.
When I taught English, I would sometimes do projects where students used Google's Blogger as a portfolio. The fact that each blog post automatically gets a time stamp and is organized chronologically made it easy to observe growth over time. I also appreciated Blogger's ability to do quick entry's via email or mobile, because this made it convenient for students to write a quick blog entry reflecting on the day's class.
It sounds like you're looking for a solution you can use now rather than something coming soon, so I won't say much about Interfolio. Hearing about it for a few minutes over the summer did intrigue me though and prompted me to write this blog post of my own!
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