June
26

OR: iTunes/YouTube and the Academic MySpace

This topic in one word: VOICE (individual identity, reflection, meaning making, and new literacy).

Why digital stories in ePortfolios?

  • Reflection is the heart and soul of a portfolio
  • Digital stories can humanize any model of ePortfolio

Plugs The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman.

“How we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much.”

Plugs A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink.

Balancing right brain skills for conceptual age with the left brain skills for the information age.

6 Essential High-Concept, High Touch Aptitudes

  1. Design - create objects
  2. Story - ability to fashion a compelling narrative
  3. Symphony - synthesis
  4. Empathy - forge relationships
  5. Play - laughter clubs
  6. Meaning - pulling it all together

Experiential Learning Model - Practice and Metacognition as a continuous cycle.

Storytelling as a theory of learning.

Learner ownership and Control of Electronic Portfolio Development.

Digital storytelling process:

Learners create a 1-4 minute story (digital video clip, first person narrative, illustrated by still images, music track to add tone).

Purposes of Storytelling

  1. Voice & Personality - Enhanced Audio of Granddaughter Victoria (so much energy!)
  2. Legacy - My Sister Sarah (tell story about her newborn sisters’ fight with cancer)
  3. Biography - Victoria reads her autobiography.
  4. Memoir - focuses on the memories of the storyteller, often much longer than a typical story.
  5. Reflection-Transition - Young man explains why he became a teacher to one of his elementary school teacher.
  6. Reflection-Decision - Use a digital story to weigh the options in a decision to be made, document the process used to make decisions.
  7. Benchmarking Development - A digital story as a snapshot throughout the development of a learner (example had a series of digital stories, twice a year from kindergarten to senior year in high school).
  8. Change Over Time - Maintain a collection of work over time to help recognize when growth has occurred. Victoria talks about how much she has grown since kindergarten now that she is in 1st grade.
  9. Evidence of Collaboration - provide explanation of the process of a group’s collaborative process on a project.
  10. Documentary - Take the place of a PowerPoint or research paper. Story takes on the characteristics of a documentary, often fact-based without emotional content.
  11. Record of Experience - Experience doesn’t always yield a discrete artifact. A digital story can reflect and document and experience and be presented as final evidence of an experience. Documenting a rural Alaska experience.
  12. Oral Language - Learning to speak in a second language. Learners record their voice, speaking or reading aloud at different stages in their development.
  13. Rich Digital Artifacts - Showcase student work with an explanatory narrative. Replacement for written narrative because some students have trouble reflecting textually.

Voice = Authenticity, digital storytelling brings out that voice.

Process to develop digital stories:

  1. Script development, sometimes in groups called story circles.
  2. Record the author reading the story (audio recording/editing)
  3. Capture and process the images
  4. Recods/edit the video.
  5. Present/share the digital story.

Online tools for video editing:

  • BubbleShare
  • PrimaryAccess
  • JumpCut
  • EyeSpot
  • PhotoBucket

Online tools for audio editing:

  • Odeo
  • Podomatic

Link to session page here.

June
25

Saturday 8:30-11:30
Helen C. Barrett, Ph.D.

Helen has been working with ePortfolios since 1991. She has recreated her ePortfolio many times with some 28 or so different tools. One of the main points Helen wanted to drive home — students get so much more out of ePortfolios if they are given some freedom to express themselves and take ownership of their work!
Authentic Assessment with Electronic Portfolios using Common Software and Web 2.0 Tools - a paper Helen wrote on ePortfolio tools

Creating ePortfolios with Web 2.0 Tools - some different tools Helen has used to create her ePortfolio with samples for each

One tool Helen has used and liked is Protopage.
Helen’s Protopage ePortfolio.

Another tool Helen likes is Task Stream. Some of its features:

  • secure
  • student ePortfolios
  • rubric/lesson plan builders
  • assessment

But! Task Stream is a commercial project. It is also not Helen’s favorite tool, it is the one she recommends among commercial systems. (Full disclosure: Helen has been working for Task Stream…)

Web 2.0 Tools for creating ePortfolios:

  • blogs
  • wikis
  • GoogleDocs
  • Etc!

ePortfolio Components:

ePortfolios are made of two parts

Working Portfolio - accumulation of student’s work
This is the digital archive of student work. It is a repository of meta-tagged artifacts with personal information and a reflective journal (blog). This is all of the student’s work collected.

Presentation Portfolio - collection for specific purpose/audience
This is a subset of the Working Portfolio. It is pulled from materials in the Working Portfolio for the goal of the specific Presentation Portfolio. There can be many Presentation Portfolios, depending on the purpose and audience. There can be multiple views and permissions (public, private, etc) to give audiences correct permissions for each Presentation Portfolio.

Portfolio Process

  1. PURPOSE - need to have specific purpose (Most important, and often overlooked!)
  2. Collect - archive the materials
  3. Select - Link the specific pieces to use for a portfolio (Note: hyper-linking helps students think metacognitively)
  4. Reflecting - Storytelling (why did I choose, etc)

What is the best tool? — It depends!

The software capabilities you require allow interaction between teachers & students

If you have good Internet access -

  • Task Stream (or any commercial fee-based system)
  • Open Source Systems
  • Web 2.0 Tools (blogs, wikis, etc)
    requires only a browser & Internet access to create an ePortfolio with Web 2.0 Tools. The software is on the company server

Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, T (2005))

Web 1.0 Web 2.0
Double Click Google AdSense
Ofoto Flickr
Akamai BitTorrent
mp3.com Napster
Britannica Online Wikipedia
personal website blogs
domain name speculation search engine optimization
page views cost per click

Using Web 2.0 Technologies

Advantages:

  • free
  • often open-source tools on web
  • “Me Publishing”
  • Shared Resources
  • Shared Writing
  • Media Creation Online

Disadvantages:

  • requires higher technology competency
  • mostly not secure websites

MySpace

According to the students: ePortfolio is like an academic MySpace - they use MySpace for friends, Task Stream for work. Many schools ban MySpace, but what is it really? It has all the elements of an ePortfolio for personal use. In fact, Helen suggests that MySpace is like the training wheels for ePortfolios.

Wikis

  • wikispaces (hosted site with free subscriptions for teachers)
  • mediawiki (open source - used by wikipedia)

Online Collaborative Writing Tools

What is an ePortfolio?

  • Digital scrapbook
  • reflection of self & growth
  • lifetime repository
    • we focus on student work

An ePortfolio is a purposeful collection of work that demonstrates efforts, progress, and achievement in one or more areas over time.

The Challenge - multiple purposes!

The Learning Portfolio - “Know Thyself”

  • lifetime of investigation
  • self-knowledge as outcome of learning
  • John Zubizaretta - The Learning Portfolio, 2004

The Assessment Portfolio

There are two kinds of assessment: Assessment OF Learning and Assessment FOR Learning

Assessment Of Learning:

  • Sumative
  • past to present
  • purpose prescribed
  • artifacts mandated (scoring for external use)

Assessment For Learning:

  • formative
  • present to future
  • purpose negotiated
  • artifacts selected by learner

The best way to improve student achievement - Assessment For Learning, because you give feedback on learning so that students can improve.

The Portfolio as a Story

ePortfolios should not all look the same. This should be a student’s tool to use as a laboratory where students construct meaning from own experience by looking at and reflecting on their work. Individualized and personalized, not template-driven. ePortfolios are a personal learning environment.

(Note: one great way to engage students is to add other media created by students, i.e.: a narrated slide show of student artwork.)

We are moving from filling in blanks on a web form to blogs & wikis, collaborative and constructive: learner focused, not accountability-driven. Students utilize this as lifetime personal web space.

Students need a sense of ownership!

So, how do we make ePortfolio development a natural process integrated into everyday life - instead of just something done at the end of the semester? How do we make it a Lifelong and Life Wide Learning process constructed throughout time?

How can we integrate ePortfolios with what we know about social learning & interactivity?

The Architecture of Interaction (Web 2.0) allows us a Pedagogy of Interaction (”ePortfolio 2.0″). We need to use these tools to create a process of self reflection, peer collaboration, and construction over time.
The overall goal is the development of lifelong independent learners (paraphrased, Ian Fox).

How-to: ePortfolios

Different tools for making ePortfolios.

Each page represents one learning goal. Items on each page include:

  • What (Artifact)
  • So What (Reflection — why, how, etc)
  • Now What (My Future Learning Goals — what do I still need to learn in relation to this goal)

My trial WikiSpace ePortfolio

With Portfolio in Hand - Nona Lyons

Caution! Portfolio perversion - portfolios becoming the new test. This inhibits student creativity and individualism. But, it can’t be completely individual, or there is no practical way to evaluate. We get a continuum…

  Totally Open Free-Form <——–> Totally Structured
Advantages Disadvantages <——–> Advantages Disadvantages
Student Perspective creativity, ownership no focus <——–> easy to do
(fill in blanks)		 no ownership
Instructor Perspective really get to know students grading <——–> easy to grade boring submissions (all the same, just with different names!)

Where is the balance?

This is the challenge!

No Tags
0
June
23

If you want a really powerful assessment management system, take a look at TaskStream. Unfortunately, this is a proprietary system, but I will go take a look at it on the vendor floor. Lesson builders, rubric builders, student e-portfolios, assessments.

We want to move towards interoperabiltiy in all of these technologies so that students can move their data between different systems; at least an export of standard HTML. Unfortunately, right now, we are working in ’silos’.

Two components to an ePortfolios:

  1. The working portfolio - the digital archive
    • An accumulation of artifacts
    • Tagged with metadata
    • Accumulation of personal information
    • Reflective Journal (blog)
  2. The presentation portfolio
    • Multiple different views
    • Multiple different purposes

The purpose determines the process. You should first ask yourself “what are we trying to do”.

When students move from a paper portfolio to an electronic portfolio, they start linking. When students start linking, they start developing thoughts more meta-cognitively. An electronic portfolio also allows for more collaboration between students.

What is the best tool? It depends!

MySpace profiles are training wheels for ePortfolios.

There are many free Web 2.0 technologies that are appropriate for creating ePortfolios. They are mostly free, however, you may run into issues with student data on third-party servers.

The idea is small pieces, loosely joined.

Student ePortfolio

Know thyself - A lifetime of investigation.

Check out: John Zubizarreta - The Learning Portfolio

Purposes of Assessment

Assessment OF Learning (Formative, past to present), Assessment FOR Learning (Summative, present to future).

An enhanced continuum of assessment for learning: see handout p. 5. Also see the differences between the two portfolio types on p. 5.

Helen noted that OSP is terribly frustrating because it is template driven…she cannot create her template in OSP.

ePortfolio 1.0 - Hierarchical, Portfolio as a test, data-driven, standardization focus, feedback from authority figures, web-based forms, positivist, accountability-driven, proprietary, digital paper (text/images), local storage.

ePortfolio 2.0 - Networked/emergent, portfolio as a story, learner-driven, focus on individuality and creativity, feedback from community of learners, small pieces loosely joined/mashups, blog/wiki, constructivist/connectivist, learning-focused, open standards, digital story (multimedia), networked storage.

Unfortunately, accountability (state tests, NCLB, etc.) can get in the way of this type of learning. We should try to make portfolios a part of the requirements for the standardization.

Mahara - Social networking, blogging, digital archive, several views of their work for different audiences with different permissions. Open source.

Web 2.o as an architecture of interaction allows a pedagogy of interaction in the form of ePortfolio 2.0.

Tools demonstrated: Wikispaces, Protopage, Wordpress, GoogleDocs

Hands-On Activity

Karen’s Wikispace Portfolio

Three questions to ask yourself when adding to your ePortfolio:

  1. What? (Artifacts)
  2. So What? (Reflection)
  3. Now What? (Future learning goals)

Non-structured portfolio:

  • Advantages for students: allows lots of creativity
  • Disadvantages for students: may draw a blank, no direction
  • Advantages for teachers: freedom to direct, get to know students better
  • Disadvantages for teaches: grading can be problematic.

Overly-structured portfolio:

  • Advantages for students: easy to follow templates to add content
  • Disadvantages for students: structure may be frustrating
  • Advantages for teachers: easy to grade
  • Disadvantages for teaches: boring to grade

Digital paper = text and images, digital story = tell your story in your own voice.

Digital paper + multimedia (audio/video) = digital story.

Final wish: may all your electronic portfolios become dynamic and interactive celebrations and stories of deep learning and understanding for their lifespan.

Link to materials.

Link to session page here.

Helen Barrett is using ProtoPage :) She also recommends Zoho! :)