A Letter to Teachers and Directors of Schools

Hello.

I bumped into the idea of "replacing grades with narratives" on pages 154-161 in Dennis Littky's book, "The Big Picture: Education is Everyone's Business" (2004). Alfie Kohn and Joe Bower http://joe-bower.blogspot.com/p/abolishing-grading.html are other influences.

I learned about the Mastery Transcript Consortium from an Edutopia article. It's clear that an important pillar supporting the new transcript is a way to display student work. "Let's get rid of grades and instead show how the student's work speaks for itself." I've seen complicated portfolio systems and I cringed as a teacher.... (So much training is needed!) Some of the portfolios systems in Collier County (including Naples, Florida in Southwest Florida) are painful to look at. So I searched for a simpler way...

I learned about Digital Portfolios from High Tech High (HTH) students in San Diego.

I had heard about HTH from Tom Toch's 2002 book "High Schools in the Human Scale" and I searched the school's website hightechhigh.org ... and found Abel Thon's portfolio and the expansive website created by Ben Staley (two students at HTH). I contacted both students and their tips resulted in two ebooks ("Show Your Work" TINYURL.com/showyourwork and "A School Counselor's Guide to Digital Portfolios" TINYURL.com/sundp5).

Abel's site TINYURL.com/AbelSite

Ben's site TINYURL.com/exampleDP

I offer both ebooks free to your members as a way to help students, teachers, parents and school directors to learn more about how a website designed and maintained by students can help kids "show what we can do with what we have learned"... That is Tony Wagner's phrase. Perhaps you are familiar with his PathBrite interview where Wagner says,

"The single most important thing you could do tomorrow for little to 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."

https://pathbrite.com/blog/tony-wagner-the-single-most-important-thing-you-can-do-tomorrow-is-have-every-student-establish-a-digital-portfolio

Here are the links to the materials. If you can use them, great.

I also created a "presentation book" (with big fonts, it's like pages from a Powerpoint put into a book) called A QUICK GUIDE TO STUDENT WEBSITES (designed as an introduction for school directors). TinyURL.com/SunPortfolios5

I created a tribute website to spread the free ebook by Dr. Fischler, who advocated projects and discussions and digital portfolios. TINYURL.com/SunABE

1. Get the idea into the heads of teachers and students that "learning is not passive." Use Dr. Fischler's book of commentaries to guide teachers and students toward projects and away from lectures. TINYURL.com/FischlerEbook

2. Focus on projects TINYURL.com/BlazekProjects gives a list of projects that students can select from. Blazek explains the book in this video: TINYURL.com/MattBlazek

3. Learn history backwards: start with your grandparents and ask, "What do you remember?" TinyURL.com/personalHistoryWorkbook (video by Enrique Gonzalez, a former principal who pioneered the use of Personal History Workbooks in Los Angeles) and TinyURL.com/PersonalHistoryEbook (the ebook)

4. Create a website to store the work that the student has done.

Select the best work and display it on a public website (digital portfolio) TinyURL.com/showyourwork and TINYURL.com/sundp5

I hope these items help.

Please feel free to download Dr. Fischler's free ebook and posters

TINYURL.com/FischlerEbook see page 26 "Learning should be fun for the learner."

TINYURL.com/FischlerPosters posters to shift the mindsets of students and teachers

Steve McCrea

Teacher

advocate of Free Websites (to break the hold that "subscription portfolio systems" have on student work)

FreeWebsiteProject.blogspot.com

TinyURL.com/FWPstart 11 steps to creating a free website.

+1 (954) 646 8246

FreeWebsiteProject2016@gmail.com

The Center for Projects, Presentations and Portfolios (CPPP), a non-profit virtual space to distribute free resources