The Voice They Would Rather Hear: ePortfolio Profiles and Advice From the Mouths of my Students

Below you will find the ePortfolio Profile questionnaire my grade 9 and 10 students recently filled out on one another.  They looked at 2-4 ePortfolios by other students in our class.  Below (in red) you will find a random listing of of their responses.  Try it with your students and see what they say:

1. Name of ePortfolio author:
2. What is the first thing you notice when you pull up their ePortfolio?
3. List one word you would use to describe this student:
4. Does this student seem to be interested in learning?
5. Based on the ePortfolio, if you were to guess, what grades do you think this student earns in school?
6. Does this student have any outside activities that they are involved with?  What?  List them.
7. Name two things you enjoyed about this ePortfolio:
8. Name one thing you would like to see more of on this ePortfolio:
9. Does this student give too much information about themselves?

• Cool design
• Huge Shelfari Library
• you have HTML codes in your post
• need more widgets
• you have only included what was suggested in class, show me something unique about yourself
• check your grammar
• calming and professional
• interesting current events
• you have no activities but love to read
• big picture in header-I love it
• you are obviously interested in current events all over the world
• since you are ESL, post work from other subjects to showcase your strengths
• have you seriously only read one book?
• who are you outside of school?
• your blog is very bland, you are not, fix it now
• love the twitter headliner
• you seem very opinionated
• your blog is dark, you are not
• it was nice to read a different point of view toward America
• You make me want to know more
• you gave me ideas on things to include on my own ePortfolio
• I can tell you are passionate about music
• you seem intriguing
• you may want to include pictures and illustrations to break up all of your text
• you seem so serious, are you having any fun at school?
• I love your tag line "my views, my world" I need a better one now
• you misspelled your title
• your blog looks like you
• you misspelled learning, hello!
• you don't seem centered, your blog lacks direction
• time was obviously spent on the aesthetics behind your blog
• I had no idea you were so creative
• you have posted too many essays, show that you have a life
• add more categories-you are only showing schoolwork, what about all of your community service?
• get rid of some of your games, you appear childish
• you seem like your theme-blank and boring
• your bookshelf is irritating and destroys the mood of your blog, fix it
• if you use a dark color as a background, make sure we can see your font
• you tell me nothing about yourself
• great creative writing
• you like badminton, who knew?
• I love your fan counter
• I can tell you really like school
• you are like a jewelry box, I keep finding new treasures
• you may want to update your blog
• even your titles are creative
• I am surprised we picked the same layout, maybe we are more alike than I thought

As a parent and a teacher, I know that these comments meant a lot more to my students when they knew they were from their peers instead of coming from me.  Try it with your students and see how they can help one another create a stronger presence on the web.  Show them how their digital footprint can make a difference. 

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Sustaining ePortfolios Through Transition

I have been quiet lately, yet my silence has been for a reason.  I always tell my students that sometimes what you don't say is just as important as what you do say.  I have spent the last two months listening, reading and thinking.  I have listened to my students and their needs from their ePortfolios, I have read pages upon pages of research about ePortfolios, and I have thought.  I am in the unique position of finally feeling as if I am in a good place with all of my students and their ePortfolios.  I feel as if I have everything in place to make them shine and now it is all coming to an end. 

I have been teaching at the International School of Bangkok and I have less than 4 weeks left.  I am finishing a second Master's Degree and all of my research revolves around ePortfolios.  How was I going to do a research paper on something I no longer had any control over?  My husband's job is transferring us to New Delhi, India.  In two months I will be at a new school, with new colleagues, new classes, and new infrastructures in place.  It was less than 36 hours before my proposal was due and as I continued to read, the questions came to me:

Would my students continue with their ePortfolios after all the time and effort we had given them when I was no longer there? 

What motivating factors contribute to ownership of an ePortfolio where it no longer matters if a teacher is or isn't a proponent of ePortfolios? 

The answers were right before my eyes.  I would watch my students and track their process on their ePortfolios as they transition from one class, grade, school, teacher to another.  Since life is taking me out of the equation, I will watch and see what happens from afar.  Isn't that essentially what we are all striving for when we look at the effect of ePortfolios?  How do we get students to buy-in to the process so that ePortfolios are not another thing teachers have to manage, but a part of what they do on their own?  We'll see what happens over the next few months from afar. . . 

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Educational Research I Want to Read

I am currently sitting in a graduate course titled: EDF 689 Methods and Teaching of Educational Research offered by SUNY College at Buffalo in Bangkok, Thailand.  I am one course away from a second Master's degree which I am fairly excited about.  That being said, I personally hate doing research.  But I feel pretty passionate about ePortfolios and I am attempting to practice what I preach to my students everyday:

Always find a way to make your learning personal.  

So since I already know what I plan to do, here are my ideas for everyone else thinking about doing research: 

• Look at the attitudes of parents to technology in the classroom-what role does technology play in their lives (i.e. Do they blog, Facebook, Twitter?)  What are they really so afraid of?
• What technology tools are teachers finding the most useful/least useful in their classrooms?
• What is the correlation of GPA scores for college freshman compared to students that were full IB diploma candidates?
• What are the real attitudes and perceptions of parents, teachers and students about homework?  Look at HS, MS and ES.
• Do teachers that give more homework more or less effective teachers?
• How does class size relate to learning?
• How does the educational background of the teacher correlate to student achievement?
• Are international schools more technologically advanced than stateside schools?
• How can technology or curriculum coaches be better utilized during the school day?
• What independent reading programs are working at different grade levels?

What are you passionate about?  Is there any research to back up your beliefs?  Become the research educators rely on to prove we know what we are talking about when it comes to educating the future.


  

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Looking an Your ePortfolio Profile

The next step to transferring your blog into an ePortfolio is looking at other ePortfolios and seeing how others view your online presence.  Go to netvibes.com and click on your class section (i.e. 10/6=ENG 10, period 6).  Read a minimum of 5 ePortfolios from our class and complete at least 2 questionnaires below for your fellow classmates.

ePortfolio Profile

1. Name of ePortfolio author:

2. What is the first thing you notice when you pull up their ePortfolio:

3. List one word you would use to describe this student:

4. Does the student seem to be interested in learning? YES / NO

5. Based on the ePortfolio, if you were to guess, what grades do you think this student earns in school?

A+ / A / A- / B+ / B / B- / C+ / C / C- / D+ / D / D- / F

6. Does this student have any outside activities that they are involved with? What? List them?

7. Name two things you enjoyed about this ePortfolio:


       1.


       2.


8. Name one thing you would like to see more of on this ePortfolio:


9. Does this student give too much information about themselves: (i.e. phone number, address, hangouts, etc.)?         YES  /  NO

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Next Steps to Creating Your ePortfolio

After my high school students created tags and categories for their ePortfolios, their next steps were to:

1. Add one Widget that represents something about their personal interests
2. Update Shelfari with the latest novels they have read and are currently reading (each student had previously created a Shelfari widget for their ePortfolio)
3. Add a minimum of two links (maybe one to your Week Without Walls blog) that represents some of their interests
4. Add an “About me” page that showcases something about who they are as a student and member of society.  They were told not include their complete name, address, phone number, or picture. 

Once each student goes through this process, we will begin to look at one another's ePortfolio profile to analyze and access how each student is perceived digitally by their peers (my next post).  

Students begin to feel empowered as digital citizens when they control their personalized learning environment.  So far, only about 60% of my grade 10 students understand the possibilities available to them by using an ePortfolio to showcase their learning.  They are far more concerned with their status update on Facebook.  This is my attempt to change how they view the web and how they are seen by the outside world.  We'll see what happens next . . .

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Creating an ePortfolio out of a Blog: Directions for Students

First Steps to Create an Eportfolio from Your Blog

Step One:

• Log in to your blog and go to your dashboard 
• Post any recent papers /update your blog with your newest learning (for example: the Literary Analysis Essay and the Research Paper from MWH and English 10)

Step Two:

• Go to the Edit page on your dashboard
• Go through your entries and label your posts correctly with Tags and Categories

What is a Tag?

• Known names
• One, two or at the most three words
• Tags can be categories
• Tags help search engines find you
• Posts = as many tags as you want
• Tags help visitors once they get to your site
• Work like interactive yellow pages for the web

What is a Category?

• Unique names
• Long wordy names
• Categories can not be tags
• Categories do not help search engines find info
• Posts=1-4 categories
• Categories help visitors find you on the web
• Reflect the Nature of Your Site

Now go to your dashboard and begin to add new Categories.  Your categories should might include School Subjects and After School Activities that you are currently involved in such as:

• English
• Modern World History
• Modern Languages
• Art
• Music (formal and informal)
• Math
• Science
• Drama
• Photography
• Community Service
• Sports
• Interests
• Travel/Week Without Walls
• Think about how you spend your free time

And then your next step: add a Category widget to your sidebar and possibly label it: Subjects/Areas of Study/etc.

Stay tuned for what to do next . . .

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Turning WordPress into an ePortfolio

A portfolio is not built in a day.  It is a collaboration of a body of work over a period of time.  An ePortfolio works the same way.  As a teacher, we can't say, "Today class, we are creating portfolios."  The students will all look at you as if you have three heads.  
    
An ePortfolio has to be built up over time.  With students in the driver's seat of their presence on the web, we allow students to control their digital footprint, and utilize the power of web 2.0 to showcase their strengths to a specific audience: the world.  This year, my HS English students have begun their first steps (and mine) at using ePortfolios to represent their online profile as lifelong learners by using WordPress as their storage.  Although I have looked at a multitude of different options to house their portfolios, such as Google sites and Moodle tools, I am still a firm believer in starting with a blog for a number of reasons. 

One: a blog is transportable.  I teach at an International School where my students are transient.  I have 9 new students sitting in my class that were not there in December.  I need to provide my students with a tool that they can take with them to not just other schools, but other countries and region of the world.  If their ePortfolio is housed in Moodle on our school server, it will stay there.   With WordPress, students can take their blog with them, not just when they move but when they begin university and life in the real world as well.

Two: a blog allows students to edit.  You know what I am talking about.  How many times have you posted something and then realized you made a mistake.  Maybe it was a colossal mistake (accidentally writing something that is taken the wrong way by a reader) or a minor one (a spelling error), but we have all made them in our lives.  A blog allows the writer the freedom to go back and edit at any stage in the game.  Not only that, it allows writers to control when an item was published.  (This is my little trick that I may have used in the past when I was taking a few graduate courses and didn't want it to look as if I had completed 3 blog posts in one day.)  In GoogleSites, anytime you edit a document, the document is "posted" as your most recent item.  If a tenth grade student decides they would like to go back and edit something from 7th grade, do they really want their 7th grade Humanities report on Geography listed as their most recent learning?  WordPress allows them control.

Three: WordPress makes sense.  It is easy to navigate.  It allows a multitude of Widgets, control of your header, lots of freedom with the HTML code, and comment moderation.   And it is compatible with a multitude of other web 2.0 services on the web like YouTube and Flickr. 

So this brings me to this week in my classroom.  My students have been using WordPress this year to host their blogs.  Now, 6 months later, we are ready to begin transferring their blogs into ePortfolios.  I now have my students posting work from a multitude of classes across the curriculum.  They are comfortable with using WordPress.  Now the real work begins.  Over the next few weeks, I will take them through a variety of steps to transform their blogs into an ePortfolio.  Stay tuned for what will come next . . . 

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