Comments on: THIS is why I love digital portfolios: what do my classes look like?

By: molly

molly — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 19:54:30 +0000

I like the students doing the work. They are working cooperatively and are engaged.

By: Chris Ludwig

Chris Ludwig — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 00:39:36 +0000

Sort of. As I understand interactive notebooks, which is very little, they often are of a defined format that has a page for the notes during the activity and a page for a reflection on the activity. The examples I saw in my brief exposure to interactive notebooks look a lot more teacher-driven whereas the portfolios are student-driven. The teacher can create a Google Site page for the student, but what goes on the page is entirely up to them. We do some activities in class but students can take their exploration of a topic further if they choose and go as in-depth as they desire. Both ways of record keeping, the notebook and the portfolio, seem to be on the right track in asking kids to think about what they are learning, what they are confused about, and what they really understand. The major differences are, of course, that an online portfolio is a lot easier to share than a physical notebook and has a lot less limitations as to what sorts of artifacts can be put into it.

By: kathryn lapid

kathryn lapid — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 20:50:44 +0000

So this is similar to interactive notebooks?

By: Kay-Kay

Kay-Kay — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 14:46:53 +0000

You’re right… reflection is difficult even for young kids. I teach 3rd grade and it takes quite a bit of discussion, think time & discovery experimentation in order that they have working information to discuss. It’s incredible what they pick from one another as we’re dig deep into discuss the material and making connections. I don’t think my students could create or write a written or digital reflection if it were not for this discussion and learning how to express in an academic tone.
Great discussions here!

By: Chris Ludwig

Chris Ludwig — Thu, 24 May 2012 16:22:12 +0000

Tracie, I don't give regular tests, and in fact hardly do much "testing" at all, certainly not the multiple choice variety. When I do testing it tends to be of the practice kind, like a problem set on Moodle and is more diagnostic/formative than summative. We do a few tests in each course, but the students just use those as another artifact to put into their portfolio. For example, in biology we just completed a lab practical exam on fetal pig anatomy and if you look at a student's "organ systems" portfolio page, you'll see that they describe earning a 98% or whatever on the pig test. As for the reflection, no, they certainly don't enter the class knowing how to be reflective. It takes a lot of practice and discussion with the students to get to the point that you see in the exemplar portfolios. A lot of students never get near the level of reflection that you saw there. I see the whole spectrum, from kids who don't do anything on the portfolio, to kids who simply list links of what they did, to kids who will write paragraphs describing how much they loved or hated a particular topic or activity. I did give them a framework at the beginning of the year that was based on this article. I could see several students using this format in their reflections so it seemed to help.

By: Tracie

Tracie — Wed, 23 May 2012 21:21:24 +0000

LOVE this. I ventured into digital portfolios this year without much in the way of a plan. This is definitely where I want to go.

Do you give regular tests? How does that figure into your grading?

I am assuming your kids don’t come to you knowing how to reflect in this manner (or do they???). Do you have prompts for kids to write from?

By: Steve Silvius

Steve Silvius — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:21:01 +0000

Cool example of a student’s display portfolio. I would love for you and your students to check out threering.com which is in beta and is trying to make it easy for teachers/students to create “progress” or “working” portfolios. I believe that, done well, eportfolios can provide us a way to pay rigorous attention to student growth and learning in a much more authentic way.

By: Chris Ludwig

Chris Ludwig — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:19:11 +0000

Ryan,
This is our first year using Infinite Campus, so feel free to take what I say with a grain of salt, I’m no expert. For first semester, I did set up my standards as “assignments” within IC, but I ran up against the fact that my standards are big things that we work on all semester, so the due date on the assignments (12/20/11) was doing really weird things to the student portal and incomplete assignment reports. Administrators hated it more than kids because they were doing a lot of hand-holding at the beginning of the year and printing of lists for kids’ incomplete assignments and mine were all over the place. My tech director figured out how to get standards-based grading working for me and a few other teachers and I switched over as soon as it was up and running. It took the admin staff a while to figure out which buttons to click to correctly pull my grades for eligibility purposes, but we got it figured out in the form of the “progress grade” which is a manually assigned letter grade. As it stands right now I have only the 9 major standards in the IC gradebook and they are all graded on an A, P, PP, U rubric. The content area score (Standard 1) has some additional record keeping that happens on a student’s individual Google spreadsheet along with narrative comments on a student’s latest work.

Just to clarify, there is no math happening in my use of IC, its all manually entered. Its fairly easy to use, and I’m never in the IC Java gradebook, which doesn’t work on iPads anyway. Also, I don’t have long lists of standards that make it into the final gradebook, only the 9. I found this primer by Marzano recently that said to have no more than 20 standards per course, which is good advice, I think.

As for the mini-poster activity, my students have used a variety of formats in how they handle presentations of lab data. Most students do them straight onto their blogs, but others have used Prezi and Glogster, which have better visuals and organization than most standard blog posts. All these options, blog, Prezi, and Glogstser, have public commenting options that I encourage kids to use, but we really haven’t to their full potential yet. That’s an area I want to work more on for next year.

By: Chris Ludwig

Chris Ludwig — Mon, 21 May 2012 13:42:16 +0000

Elena, This portfolio is a good example of a chemistry portfolio. Like I mentioned, the chemistry portfolio seems a little more "holey" than the anatomy or biology, at least in terms of completeness of topic and content areas (there are blank pages), but that's due to my pacing of the course and in part to the early departure of our senior students from classes. See what you think.

By: Ryan Woodside

Ryan Woodside — Mon, 21 May 2012 12:22:34 +0000

Chris,
A question and then a comment:
1. How is your gradebook set-up within IC? In the past I tried to use the IC gradebook to organize my learning objectives, but I needed one more level within the gradebook hierarchy. I wanted a student’s grade to be organized into unit (categories), learning objectives (I had to use assignments), and individual assignments (this is where IC broke down for me). I wanted to have the individual assignments listed within each learning standard so my students and I could track their performance on that learning goal. Believe it or not, this became cumbersome in IC! Are you using a numerical mark table or a standards choice? No one is my school is using a standards-based grading system, so I don’t really have a support network.
2. Any thoughts about modifying a mini-poster (see blog point by Brad Williamson here http://goo.gl/W2ESx) as a web-page display for blog posts for a more activity/laboratory based class? I’ve used the miniposters in the past, and I think the idea could transfer well to a digital environment. The poster display could then have a on-line comment/question session outside of class time.