Planning out the Digital Portfolio..... I'm going to finally do it!

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 21^st 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.

I have begun template for the portfolios and shared it in Google Sites.  It is called: LCMS ePortfolio (By kstevens, template for grade 6).   It can be accessed at: https://sites.google.com/a/langleychristian.com/example-e-portfolio/ .

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?