Students & E-Portfolios

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It has been quite a while since my last blog entry, and for good reason. I have taken on the challenge of single handedly creating/editing/implementing the curriculum for my school's Web 2.0 course. I have devoted a lot of hours to developing lessons, assessments, and the like. After thinking about how to best assess student learning in a summative manner, I came up with the idea of student e-portfolios.

I started to dig through the topic by performing a simple Google Search; the most valuable search result came in the form of Dr. Helen Barrett's Electronic Portfolio website at ElectronicPortfolios.org. Dr. Barrett is a leading researcher in the e-portfolio domain; her website has a lot of useful information, complete with diagrams, step-by-step instructions, and examples.

Having knowledge about how I could use e-portfolios as a summative assessment in my Web 2.0 course, I turned to my Twitter PLN for direction in how to have students create them. I got a few different ideas:

I liked the idea of the wiki, but thoughts came to mind about having students tip-toe around the public forum. The only answer for this was to utilize our Google Education Site, and keep everything protected and under that domain (as we usually do). I came across a page in Dr. Barrett's site that discussed how to create e-portfolios in a Google Site - I wondered how I had missed it before but was glad to have my answer.

Turns out it was extremely easy to introduce the topic to students, have them each create a Site under our Google Education domain, and begin creating and editing their e-portfolios. We even found a way to have students create a WordPress blog (of course, again on our own servers for privacy) and embed it into their Google Sites (using an iframe gadget). It is a work in progress, and students will contribute artifacts and reflections into their sites on a weekly basis.

If you have questions, feel free to ask. I will not be posting my students' examples as they are "hidden" in our Google Site domain.

Here is a short video about e-portfolios, and a quick how-to for Google Sites:

Cell Phones in the Classroom?

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I came across this blog post about integrating cell phones in the classroom. Most administrators and school boards have bans that prevent students from having their phones on during school hours. However, there is a growing trend among techno-savvy districts allowing students access to their phones outside of the classroom. What about giving them strict guidelines so they can demonstrate responsible use of their phones inside the classroom?

I believe as technology continues to change, as educators, we must change as well. We should be looking for ways to harness the power of these portable devices to increase student learning. Imagine giving your students a project where they must use their camera phone to take five photos of a problem plaguing their community?

You can have students upload these photos directly to flickr and create a slideshow. This slideshow could be imported to Google Docs and your students could create an online presentation for the local City Council. How's that for harnessing the power of the cell phone? Oh, and did I mention that Google Docs Mobile can be accessed on any cell phone with a basic web browser?