E-Portfolios Year 2 What I have learned!

The second time around.

For a few years students at Sargent Park School have been doing electronic portfolios. In the past they have used power point to create portfolios that will be shared with their parents at student -led conferences.

| View | Upload your own

Last year the students continued to do the portfolios using power point but I got them to use a wiki to showcase their math work. The students did a parent quiz and then did math work with their parents during the student led conference. the students enjoyed the different take on student led conferences and used bubbleshare, slide.com and slideshare to embellish their work. For my first attempt at using wiki’s it was very successful.





This year we decided to do the entire E-portfolios in a wiki and all subjects came on board.



This was an exciting change for me. Normally I was the lone teacher pushing the technology and 21C applications in the school. This year my entire team participated. Great baby steps for advancing 21st Century learning in my school.


Last year for the math e-portfolios I created one site and all students subscribed and submitted pages. This setup had many advantages.

1. I saw in the history all changes and edits to pages.
2. Only one site was needed for all student work.
3. Access was quick and painless to guide parents through the maze of their math e-portfolios.

One of the disadvantages of this setup was that because there was only one wiki if a student saved a file or image that was named the same as another student the file would be rewritten as the most recent upload. (pic1 uploaded on Friday overwrites pic1 that was uploaded on Tuesday.)


This year with the whole team on board I decided a new direction was needed. I had all students create their own wiki to house their e-portfolios. Within each wiki the students would create pages for each of their subjects and embed work and do assignments that showcase their talents.


This then required a host hub to house all of the portfolios. While this sounds well and good it took longer to navigate through the pages and class then last year.

I do not know work better the previous years model of one super site or an edit of this years. I think I like this years model because it allows students to create file names of their choosing and not worry about file deletion. I would however make them use only one page per subject and creatively use a table of contents to navigate through that page. This would streamline the wiki and make it easier to navigate through.

My team members were apprehensive at first but started to warm up to the idea of these e-portfolios when they say the potential of them to show our Grade Eight students learning on the ICT continuum. The province has mandated that we must report to parents using a paper checklist and simple reporting page. These pieces of paper are not true representations of how their child has use ICT this year.

When you see all of our students work this is a representation of ICT learning. Not a piece of paper. It is a great representation of student work. those who did not complete the e-portfolios are definitely lacking ICT readiness. Then there are those who are off the charts creating works of art that demonstrate their strengths. What the portfolios do provide is a place for students to showcase their work over a period a whole year. They are constantly useing their sites as a repo sititory for their work.
Student Work
Jordan 8-16
Judy 8-17

Kate 8-41
Alexandra 8-73



This is a big change from last year. Last years e-portfolios were static and did not see growth after the student led conferences. This years portfolios are works in progress. The students are starting to use them as these new vehicles for their work.

Some of the problems this year showed up in the set up of the portfolios themselves. The portfolios had too may pages for my personal liking. Students instead of making one page for each subject with a table of contents created many pages for one subject. They were well done but took time to navigate through. One page would have been more efficient.

Now back to the team.They saw and see the potential of using wiki’s to showcase student growth and learning. They are eager to see the portfolios start in September when we begin school next year. They have expressed an interest of having portfolio days where we monthly go into the math lab and get the students to showcase their knowledge and work


So what do I recommend for you when it comes to doing e-portfolios.

1. Use a wiki. It is the best vessel to showcase the knowledge that is students want to display.
   
2. Use your network to find the best embeddable tools to showcase learning in different ways.
   
3. This year my newest applications were scribd.com a source of e-paper that allowed students to import their language Arts magazines online.
4. Issuu.com also a place to publish on line. This site is more glossy and polished than scribed but less searchable. Scribed offers key word searches throughout all their documents.
   
5. Sketchcast.com This is a really interesting site. It allows students to use a screen like a canvas and add voice to what they are describing. My students really liked the ability to add voice to an explanation of a topic.
6. Voicethread.com Without a doubt the best tool out there for educators. You can upload pictures and video to their site and have other members of the class add comments to what you have uploaded. Your comments can be in the form of text, audio of video.

More will be added later. All student portfolios can be found at sp08eportfolios.wikispaces.com

Publishing your own magazine

As part of my students LA program they are creating a magazine. They will be publishing it at their electronic portfolios . I am trying out a few tools.

One is Issuu. Issuu is a site that allows you 100mb uploads of magazines. Create these in a program that allows you to export them as pdf and you can upload them to issuu. I am attempting this and seeing how to get the job done. I have melded a picture from flickr, a keynote presentation and a google doc. When it is done it should look like this...

This embed gives you lots of options. You can just scroll through the magazine here in small view. Or you can go to Issuu and see it full screen. Just like voicethread you can enlarge the picture and zoom in and out.

One of the issues that surrounds this is creating one pdf file. The links they give for software to eliminate this problem are
for mac Combine PDFs 3.0
and for windows PDF helper 1.01

I also tried scribd. It seems easy and is similar to At the time of this post I had to reload the pdf and go again.
(15+ minutes later)It seems to take longer than . I am still waiting. Perhaps there is a file limit. This will be a real downer for the kids if the upload takes this long.
At 20 minutes...
Yeah it finally made it. Here is the same material on scirbd

hello

Either way this is a really cool way to embed some spectacular work at a students eportfolio or just to publish work. I am looking forward to how the student use these tools and how they can teach me.

Student-Led Conferences and Electronic Portfolios

Ok before I go any further I do not like Internet Explorer. This is the second time that it has crashed (viva Firefox) and I have had to redo this post. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

The students at my school create powerpoint presentations about thier progress during the year. They spend many classes creating these keepsakes and are very proud to show their parents at our conferences. This year we had an excellent turnout with over 80% of parents sharing thier students school experience.

I have my students create a parent quiz and have them teach their parents Grade 8 math. This is an awesome experience to see if you haven't everdone it before.

The storage of these portfolios has been an issue. We want them stored locally to force the parents to come to the school and experience the student-led conference. At the end of the year we keep some examples but most get wiped off the server and we start again.

This year I will show the students how to use slideshare. Here are a few examples of the portfolios. I have some issues in posting them to the web. One is that the students have their last names all over the powerpoint. I have edited these 2 examples. The extra links to assignments on the server at school are also unavailable. You will see the hard work put into these portfolios. Please enjoy these efforts.



Here is her wikispace.



Here is her wikispace.



Here is her wikispace.
I want to make the entire process 2.0 next year. The dilema is that when you let them do it from home the experience of getting parents into the school is lost.

If you enjoy the samples of the students work I will post more. They will post to their class blogs 816, 817, 841, 873.

They might post them to their wikispace math section.

What A Conference

I am still sitting in front of the computer screen waiting for the next set of presentations to roll out of K12online. But all has grown quiet. Or has it. As part of When Night Falls I stepped up and volunteered to keep the grass movement alive. I will create a Skype cast and have the tapped in room going at the same time just like When Night Falls.

When Night Freefalls was born.

I can hear you asking now when will this take place. I ask that you wait until my marks are in and the reports go out at the end of the week. Then I will sit down, chat with some people and put up the date. It will happen on a Saturday or Friday in December.

I am excited to try some of the new tools I learned to use during K12Online. In our school we have had electronic portfolio's to showcase the students work. I am attempting to have my 120 Grade 8 students create a wikipage each to be their electronic portfolio. This I hope will be a change from the powerpoint presentations they have done in the past. I can teach the students how to embed video, add pictures from flickr and a variety of other things to make this format more appealing.

Here is the problem. I am the math teacher. I will have to teach the other teachers how to do this in a short period of time. They need to be willing to have this change. I think I can sell these ideas to them. If not then there isPublish always my math wiki and math blogs to keep me warm.

Ah the beat goes on...