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Essential Questions
Essential Questions
• What are the benefits of digital portfolios?
• What are the benefits of digital portfolios?
• What will I make my priority as I begin (or continue) to use digital portfolios?
• What will I make my priority as I begin (or continue) to use digital portfolios?
Key Ideas
Key Ideas
• Digital Portfolio's are backed by research. Specifically, they support student self-reflection, self-efficacy, and formative assessment.
• Digital Portfolio's are backed by research. Specifically, they support student self-reflection, self-efficacy, and formative assessment.
• Relationships are integral to learning. Digital Portfolios provide an opportunity to build and transform relationships.
• Relationships are integral to learning. Digital Portfolios provide an opportunity to build and transform relationships.
Activate Your Thinking
Activate Your Thinking
John Hattie is a world-renowned professor from New Zealand who has dedicated much of his life to evidence-based teaching. In an education system where there is always a new teaching strategy, program to follow, or philosophy to ponder, Hattie looked at all the things we do in education (interventions) to support learning to see which had the greatest impact known as 'Visible Learning'. The good news from Hattie's work is almost everything, roughly 95%, had a positive impact on students learning. Yet there were also a significant amount of interventions that schools we are pouring significant time and resources in that had little to no effect on student achievement.
We invite you to take a look at Hattie's most recent list 'Visible Learning 250+ Influences on Student Achievement' and consider the follow:
Which intervention(s) effect size surprise you?
Based on this research, what impact might it have on your use of digital portfolios?
(Hattie states that an effect size of d=0.2 may be judged to have a small effect, d=0.4 a medium effect and d=0.6 a large effect on outcomes. He defines d=0.4 to be the hinge point, an effect size at which an initiative can be said to be having a 'greater than average influence' on achievement.)
Know the tools, by using the tools...
Know the tools, by using the tools...
Throughout this course you will be encouraged to reflect on your learning using tools that you might choose to help your students make their thinking visible via their digital portfolio. One of those tools is Padlet. Please reflect on the following questions presented above:
Why are you engaging in this course?
What impact do you hope digital portfolios will have on your students' learning?
Anchoring our learning.
Anchoring our learning.
As we consider the role of digital portfolios in our practice, it is worth anchoring ourselves in our district's 'Criteria for Quality Communication of Student Learning.' This guiding document created by SD23's Assessment/Communicating Student Learning Committee "empowers educators to more effectively communicate student's accomplishments and growth over time as they develop their unique profiles as learners in relation to the learning standards."
As you review the document, you'll notice throughout this course how digital portfolios are an excellent vehicle to support the five criteria.
Acquire Some Ideas - Digital Portfolio Benefits
Acquire Some Ideas - Digital Portfolio Benefits
There are a number of benefits of digital portfolios. In Matt Renwick's 'Digital Portfolios in the Classroom' he makes the case that implementing digital student portfolios is a necessary action and should become part of a teacher's assessment process. Matt offers the following 11 core reasons for digital portfolios
Celebrate All Students as Learners
Digital portfolios provide opportunities for students to demonstrate their learning in a way that meets their needs. No longer is a single assessment tool necessary...the can write, post a video, make a screencast, etc.
Improve Home-School Communication
What comes home with students in a backpack is often a very narrow view of what is really going on for them as learners. By developing digital portfolios with students we create a mosaic representing who they are as learners. This mosaic of student posts, reflections, and understandings foster a greater degree of communication between student, parent, and teacher.
Facilitate Better Feedback
As we witnessed in the Hattie data, feedback is crucial for learning. Feedback via a digital portfolio can take many forms and often offers opportunities that might not be there without them. For instance, the ability to record a student reading, over multiple months, allows the teacher to provide specific, authentic feedback while also giving the learner ownership to see and reflect on this learning themselves.
Highlight the Process of Learning
Digital portfolios provide learners an opportunity to showcase their best work AND also highlight the journey along the way. When we take the time to visit with students, discuss the journey they took to achieve their goals, and celebrate their accomplishments along the way, we convey what we value.
Demonstrate Progress over Time
Often lesson plans and units can serve as isolated events to our students. Digital portfolios allow us to hold up a mirror to students so that they can see that as they may dip in and out of various content areas their curricular and core competencies are constantly growing. Seeing and hearing this growth can be the fuel to learning.
Guide Students to Become Self-Directed Learners
By moving the role of assessor from teacher to student, schools can see even greater gains in learning (Hattie's self-reported grades). When students are put in charge of their own learning journey through reflective questioning and goal setting, they have more ownership of the process. They put themselves on the hook for achieving a higher levels and are therefore more likely to experience success.
Maximize Formative Assessment
Conversation between student and teacher via a digital portfolio assessment, helps reveal each learner's true level of understanding. Through the triangulation of evidence of in-class observations, and the products and conversation a digital portfolio assessment offers, teachers can augment future instructional plans. In addition, students have a better sense of their strengths and next steps of learning.
Integrate Speaking & Listening
Authentic tasks like curating and reflecting on digital portfolio content provide ample opportunity for students to share what they have learned and for them to listen to feedback from their teacher or listen to their learning develop over time. By integrating speaking and listening into our instruction we are preparing students for the future where these skills are not practices in silos.
Advocate for Every Student
Some students do not fair well on traditional assessments. Our first priority as educators is to ensure all of students have access to the same high quality instruction and assessment. Schools cannot achieve equity if they do not provide every student the opportunity to be successful in schools, digital portfolios may be a helpful option.
Work Smart as a Teacher
What digital portfolios can do for a teacher is provide the ability to collect data worth collecting. This may include student work, student reflections, goals, and conversations about their growth over time. This paired with teachers observations provide a triangulated approach that provides great detail for a well-informed professional judgement to be made. In addition, handing ownership on what is posted, reflected, and shared to the learner has a positive effect on potentially reducing workload on teachers will having the ultimate affect of improving student learning.
RELATIONSHIPS
Matt Renwick actually only had a list of 10 benefits, but took the time to highlight 'Relationships' as the most important reason for digital portfolios. It transforms the teacher-student dynamic from a hierarchy to partnership. Through digital portfolios we learn about who students are, as learners and as people. A strategy that will be highlighted later on, when making space in digital portfolios for students passions and interests that may fall outside our curricular areas.
"Relationships are the agents of change."
~ Dr. Bruce Perry
"The single most important thing you could do tomorrow for little or no money is have every student establish a digital portfolio where they collect their best work as evidence of their skills, where they're working with their teachers and other adults to present their best work, to iterate their best work, so that they actually have real progress they can show."
"The single most important thing you could do tomorrow for little or no money is have every student establish a digital portfolio where they collect their best work as evidence of their skills, where they're working with their teachers and other adults to present their best work, to iterate their best work, so that they actually have real progress they can show."
~ Dr. Tony Wagner
Establishing and sharing your focus
Establishing and sharing your focus
As we've explored in our introduction to digital portfolios there are a wide-variety of reasons for choosing to head in this direction. Reflecting on your current classroom(s) of students, your student's families, and the point you are in your professional journey as an educator, what will you make your main priority for choosing digital portfolios? Explain why.
Please share your results HERE via FlipGrid. By making this visible, as tough as it may be, it helps us see this goal through!
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