E-Portfolios

It is the end of the school year. Both you and the students are exhausted, yet this is the perfect time to engage your students in processing and reflecting on what happened throughout the year. It is time to bring closure to the work, make meaning of the students' experiences at school, and give them a final word about their accomplishments. 

This is why I chose to have students complete an electronic portfolio. An electronic portfolio is a collection of electronic evidence assembled and managed by a student. My students' e-portfolios tell the story of the student's work throughout their time at our site, and provide them with tangible evidence of what they accomplish throughout the four years of our program.

The final portfolios are opportunities for students to be creative as they interpret their their own work and learning from the year. As opposed to being told what they should know, as the students create their e-portfolios they have an opportunity to articulate their learning, reflect on their accomplishments and connect to their work in a more personal way.

The e-portfolio can serve to introduce a student to their next teachers, providing them with a tangible artifact to share. As the students add to their portfolios, they create the story of their learning, and can even pull ideas for further research or work later on in their academic careers. Finally, along with academic blogs, e-portfolios help students develop a positive digital footprint.

For a lot more information about e-portfolios, you might want to visit Helen Barrett's E-Portfolios with Google Sites. 

The creation of the e-Portfolios is not only a worthwhile, rigorous and fun end of year project for the students, it is also tied to the CCSS standards.

• WHST.6-8.1 Write arguments focused on discipline-specific content.
• WHST.6-8.2 Write informative/explanatory texts, including the narration of historical events, scientific procedures/ experiments, or technical processes.
• WHST.6-8.4 Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
• WHST.6-8.6 Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and present the relationships between information and ideas clearly and efficiently.
• WHST.6-8.7 Conduct short research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question), drawing on several sources and generating additional related, focused questions that allow for multiple avenues of exploration.
• WHST.6-8.10 Write routinely over extended time frames (time for reflection and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of discipline-specific tasks, purposes, and audiences.

Depending on the artifact selection, as students develop their e-portfolios they often explore several crosscutting concepts such as:

• Cause and Effect: Mechanism and Prediction: Events have causes, sometimes simple, sometimes multifaceted. Deciphering causal relationships, and the mechanisms by which they are mediated, is a major activity of science and engineering.
• Scale, Proportion, and Quantity: In considering phenomena, it is critical to recognize what is relevant at different size, time, and energy scales, and to recognize proportional relationships between different quantities as scales change.
• Systems and System Models: A system is an organized group of related objects or components; models can be used for understanding and predicting the behavior of systems.
• Structure and Function: The way an object is shaped or structured determines many of its properties and functions.
• Stability and Change: For both designed and natural systems, conditions that affect stability and factors that control rates of change are critical elements to consider and understand.

To engage students in the creation of the e-portfolios I present the following video.

Note to teachers: You might want to create your own, to showcase some of the work the students have done in your class. This video was created using Stupeflix, which in the free version does not include a watermark. However, even a simple timed slideshow created using Powerpoint or Google slides serves the same purpose. An alternative would also be to create s scavenger hunt of student notebooks or blogs, responding to a prompt such as, "Remember when...".

Once the video has finished playing, I invite students to have a conversation. Prompts might be "Did I miss anything?" or "What about in other classes, what do you remember from this year?"

One of the things I enjoy about the e-portfolios is that they provide me with an insight into what the students think. Reading portfolios rejuvenates me, as it helps me understand things about my students and their experience in our program that I might not have seen otherwise. Even though the students know that I will be reading and sharing their work, they tend to be very honest in their opinions. As I read them I start thinking about how to improve my practice or how to bring life into a project or assignment that I thought would make it into the portfolios, but didn't.

The portfolios also help me connect with the students that I loop. Even though I might know about a specific project or assignment from another class, the perspective I gain from hearing the student voice as to how this or that helped them improve on something in particular gets me thinking about how to include whatever it is in my practice. 

The samples e-portfolios I am including reveal things like:

• Teachers in our program "try to be more interesting" and our "lessons are intriguing"
• The students feel they are developing the ability to conduct lengthy in-depth research (Science page), as well as the "21st Century skills that you need throughout life"