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.

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!