Introduction
The case studies and sample portfolios in most books are offered as
examples of how schools arrange their systems to participate in the Digital
Portfolio project. While the case studies are not models to be followed,
they do suggest some possible steps a school can take to get started.
If you are interested in starting to work on Digital Portfolios in your school, please understand that they are not a magic bullet. Digital Portfolios can be a "provocation" to help a school think about its systems, its vision, and what it wants students to be able to say about themselves. They can also be just another gimmick that turns off a school to technology, portfolios, or both.
The assumption underlying this project is that the most effective use of Digital Portfolios is as a school-wide innovation. This suggests that the entire school needs to be involved in the preparation, planning, and implementation of a Digital Portfolio system. This will undoubtedly take longer than an innovation that can be carried out by a couple of teachers in their classrooms -- but the students will gain more from the experience if it is clear that the portfolios represent a tool used in a larger agenda of school reform.
If you are still interested in pursuing the development of a Digital Portfolio system, the following ideas might help you get started.
Inventory Your Systems
Most case studies delineate how each school answered a set of questions
related to other school's systems. A good place to start might be to consider
how your school would answer each of these questions.
Vision
What should a student know and be able to do?
Assessment
How can students demonstrate the vision?
Why do we collect student work?
What audiences are most important to us?
How do we know what's good?
Technology
What hardware, software, and networking do we have? What will we need?
Who are the primary users of the equipment?
Who will support the system?
Logistics
When will information be digitized? Who will do it?
Who will select the work? By what criteria?
Who will reflect on the work? When?
Culture
Is the school used to discussing student work?
Is the school open to tuning standards? With whom?
As you answer these questions, consider multiple perspectives. Do students,
administrators, parents, teachers, and others see the school's systems
in the same way?
The main menu of the Digital Portfolios represents a vision of what a graduate of each school should know and be able to do. Creating that vision is one thing; helping staff and students internalize that vision is quite another. The Digital Portfolio can help, but only if the vision is reasonably clear in the first place. Of all the questions listed above, establishing a vision is perhaps the most important. The other systems can come together later -- but it's much easier when the faculty, students, and community know what the school expects of its students.
It's fairly easy to list all the possible audiences for a Digital Portfolio. The more important question is, which audiences are most important to us? Is the Digital Portfolio's purpose to help students understand themselves? Or, is it to serve a gate keeping function to help determine who should graduate and who should not?
There are many appropriate audiences, but it is not fair to students to ask them to develop a Digital Portfolio for a set of "potential" readers. There needs to be some defined readers of the portfolio that will be receptive to examining student work. Before a school considers how the portfolios might be used by outside readers, such as college admissions officers, for use after the student leaves school, the school should ask itself how it will use the information in a portfolio to help the student while he or she is still in school.
Determine What Information You Want to Collect
Each of the schools in the Digital Portfolio project collected some information, in addition to student work, that helped to put student work in context. Most of the schools asked for some kind of self-reflection, where the student explains why a particular piece fits in the portfolio. The original assignment can help the reader understand what the student was responding to. Evaluations can be very useful -- but collecting evaluations either means that teachers need to enter their evaluations into the portfolio, or students need to be trusted to accurately enter teacher assessments.
The student work itself can have multiple components. Do you want to encourage the collection of multimedia pieces? Do you want to see work in process (rough drafts, early attempts at experiments) as well as completed works?
Again, it is very useful to think about the audience, and the purpose, of the Digital Portfolio. This will help you determine what information will be useful to the reader, and how the student can best present him or herself.
Digital Portfolios can be hard to visualize. For many teachers and students, Digital Portfolios only become clear when they see a sample portfolio of work from a student from their school. Thus, it often helps to have a little demonstration of a Digital Portfolio, using your school's vision, and designed for the audience your school thinks is important.
At some of the project schools, such a mock-up was created by digitizing an existing student's paper portfolio. At others, teachers or administrators created their own portfolios, and used that information as the basis for the mock-up.
The mock-up need not be a fully working program; its purpose is similar to an architectural model -- to provide a visual sense of what the final version might look like. In fact, the developers of the mock-up should assume that they will have to make changes on the prototype before it can be used within the school.
The mock-up is also an opportunity to test the limits of the school's technology. It is one thing to know how a scanner should work; it is another to actually use the scanner for the purpose of developing the portfolio.
Bring All Participants to the Table
A mock-up can be used to begin a discussion among teachers, students, administrators, parents, and community members about what students should know and be able to do. Often, the examination of a mock digital portfolio is the first time many of these individuals will have "read" a multimedia document, and the facilitator of the conversation will have to be aware of when reviewers are commenting on the multimedia technology and when they are commenting on the portfolio itself.
Bringing a group together to look at student work through the medium of a Digital Portfolio helps the group to understand what potential the Digital Portfolio has, and what it would take for the school to use it well. The key to a school-wide innovation is continual communication among all involved, both to help keep the project on track and to provide constructive feedback on what the portfolios can be useful for in the long run.
The pilot can be a block of time when students have the opportunity to create their own portfolios. This is a chance to test the technology in the school, as well as the format of the portfolios themselves.
In the pilot phase, it was found that the best students are those who can handle things when they don't go perfectly. The pilot phase will show the glitches in the system, ranging from the limits of the hardware and software to the internalizing of the vision across the entire faculty. Some students who regularly receive good grades may have trouble with a system which still has bugs, while other students who do not feel particularly well versed in technology or exhibitions may be very good at describing what has gone wrong or dealing with the experimental nature of the pilot.
Your pilot needs to have a goal: x number of students will create portfolios with x entries within x weeks. One possible guideline is to select about 10% of your student population, and ask each student to find at least one piece from each course that he or she is currently taking. Remember, though, that these students will need more guidance and support, and will be taking on a responsibility above and beyond what is expected of other students. For this pilot project, you will want to observe rather than judge the process of creating digital portfolios; if students do not deliver exactly what you expect, consider how much of that process was due to factors outside the students' control. Students need to know what is expected of them in this pilot, and what incentives the school will provide for their participation.
Reflect on the Process and Products
The pilot phase helps teachers and students to understand both the process of creating a Digital Portfolio and what an interesting "product" (i.e., a completed portfolio) might look like. It may be worth re-gathering the group that had joined together or had participated in developing the vision, to examine both the process of developing a Digital Portfolio and the actual products created by students within the pilot phase. It's worth considering not just what can be improved but also whether the project, using the current hardware and software, is using resources that could better be used elsewhere.
The group may want to reconsider the answers to the questions listed in the first section. Are the answers clearer or muddier? What systems need to be enhanced to allow the Digital Portfolio to be used beyond the pilot group?
If the school's goal is to have all students develop digital portfolios, the school needs to consider how it will move beyond the pilot project. Are there strategic groups of teachers and / or students who would be first to adopt this system? Might there be an ongoing project at the school that would benefit from the use of a Digital Portfolio?
Again, the key is an open dialogue. Some teachers or students may resist the idea of putting together a Digital Portfolio; it's worth considering why that resistance is there, and what legitimate issues are being raised -- because, eventually, you will want all of those resistors to be a part of the project.
The school's systems will have to be revisited, but you can learn from what the pilot phase has suggested and determine how to rearrange the systems to best support Digital Portfolios throughout the school.
Resources for Learning About Digital Portfolios
Several publications from the project are available, including:
Related publications include:
Resources for Building Digital Portfolios
The specific digital portfolio software used in this project is not commercially available. However, schools interested in working with digital portfolios can choose from a number of software products. These fall into two broad categories: software specifically designed for work with portfolios, and general hypermedia software tools.
Please note that this listing of software by no means constitutes an
endorsement of these products.
Software specifically for portfolios
These tools are specifically designed for collecting information about student work. The particular features vary, and thus you should carefully consider what you want from your portfolio system, and how each tool might help.
To purchase any of these tools, you may want to contact the company
directly, or go through an educational software mail order firm, such as
Learning
Services (800-877-3278, east, or 800-877-9378, west) or
Educational
Resources (800-860-9008, or 847-888-8300 in Illinois).
Eastern US, contact: Computer ImageWorks, Ltd., Rochester, NY, 800-340-6499;
Western US, contact: Global Corporate Solutions, Austin, TX, 888-800-4274
A number of schools are using hypermedia tools to build portfolios from scratch. In a typical project, students are given some guidelines (include five pieces of work, including the assignment and an assessment; on a front page, include buttons to link for work in writing or that show problem solving), and some instruction on how to use the particular software tool. These tools allow for greater flexibility than those listed in the previous section, but they require at least a little more time to learn and use.
In addition to the hypermedia software products listed below, some schools
are considering how to create digital portfolios using web-based tools.
The assumption is that student work will be available on a school's local
internet, rather than to the entire internet. You may want to consider
HTML and web page editors and organizers for your development.
This site is made possible by an 8(g) Innovative Professional Grant
For more information please contact:
Jan
Anyan or Martha
Bates
Winn Parish School Board
304 East Court Street
Winnfield, LA 71483
(318) 628-6936
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