The
Issue
In my school, the only form of assessment that parents
see is the report card. Unless a student brings home an assignment, or parents
come in for a meeting, the report card is the main way in which my school
communicates about the learning of the students. I believe that e-portfolios would be a
wonderful way for students to share their learning with their families in a way
that currently, is just not being done. Another issue is the fact that I want to teach
my students to learn the 21st Century Learning Skills. As part of
that, I am looking for my students (among other things) to learn to be
creative, innovative, think critically and problem solve, communicate and
collaborate, and also have developed information, media and ICT literacy. I believe
that e-portfolios will help to develop many of these skills. I also want my students to have an active
role in their learning, taking charge of assessing their learning, setting
goals, and celebrating their own learning.
Electronic portfolios seems to be one of the best ways to go about doing
this.
Here are some thoughts
about what e-portfolios can do in the classroom:
- help
a teacher, student and parent see the growth a student has made over time.
- display
a variety of different kinds of work that a student does, giving a
well-balanced view of the students’ progress- not just relying on test
scores.
- demonstrate
a variety of different types of intelligences and abilities of the
student- think Multiple Intelligences.
- a
permanent means of collecting work from a student that can move on with the
student as they grow and look back on after many years
- fun
and creative way to make learning visible!
The Action Plan
While trying to figure
out what type of e-Portfolio to choose, I discovered that I had a number of questions
to answer before I could choose the best program to suit my needs. Some of the
questions I considered are:
a)
Do I need the e-portfolios
to be private, or can they be open to the public?
b)
Am I willing to pay
for a program, or should it be free?
c)
Does the program allow
for easy organization of information?
d)
Does it have a quick
learning curve, or will it be difficult for my students to use?
e)
Will the program allow
students to move ahead and add to it in future years, or will they start a new
one each year?
f)
Will the staff at my
school come on board with this technology, or will it be difficult to use and
unpopular?
g)
Will the site do
everything I need to it do, like upload all the different kinds of documents we
will need?
After doing some
research, the top three programs that I considered were: Evernote, Google Sites
and Wikispaces. I considered only free programs. I wanted to choose a program that could be
easily taken up by other teachers in my school, with the hope that one day, our
entire Middle School would come on board. In the end, Google Sites won, proving to be
the most versatile, easy to use and visually exciting. As I am also using Google Docs, and Gmail with
my students, Google Sites only made sense. I also found that the sites
themselves were more visually appealing than the Wikispaces. Evernote seemed
like an interesting idea, but after a lot of searching, I could find few
examples of teachers who had used it for e-portfolios. The fact that only PDFs could be uploaded to
the Evernote sites also made it limiting.
The plan for beginning
to use this technology in my classroom will commence next September. As we are
quite a long way through this year already, it would be next to impossible to
find time in our schedule to be able to begin this project now. As well, I teach collaboratively with two
other grade six teachers, and I would need them to be on board with this project
for it to fly. I am going to need time to do some convincing. In the Spring, when the grade six team is
working on the 2014/2015 calendar, we will schedule in time to work on this
project weekly. My plan will be to set aside a number of classes in September
to begin this project with my students, and then have a weekly set time for
students to add evidence and blog about their learning experiences throughout
the year. In late October, when we meet
with parents, we will introduce their portfolios to parents and use them to
discuss student achievement. As well, throughout the year, I will be notifying
parents to check their child’s portfolios, as new additions arrive.
The Evaluation Plan
My plan to evaluate the
success of using e-portfolios will come in two parts. First, I am going to give
my students a survey asking about themselves as learners at the beginning of
the year, getting them to describe their learning strengths and styles, their
special abilities and the areas that they would like to improve in. Then, at the end of the year, I am going to
give them a similar survey. By comparing
these two surveys, I should be able to see if my students have learned more
about themselves as learners. My
prediction is that students will be able to better articulate the things that
they have done well at, the areas in which they have made amazing growth, and
their learning strengths as well as weaknesses.
My hope is that they will be able to set better learning goals for
themselves for grade seven, than they do at the beginning of grade six, as they
will be developing metacognitively. The second portion of my evaluation plan will
be to survey parents after our initial parent/teacher evening, using Surveymonkey,
and ask them about their experiences.
Did they find that they learned more about their child’s learning, while
seeing the e-portfolios than in previous styles of parent/teacher events? What
did they like/didn’t like about it?
