Turning a Blog into an E-Folio

I am in over my head and loving every minute of it. Recently at ISB, Jim Fitzgerald and I have decided to join forces and introduce the power of blogging to our fellow colleagues and students in the high school next year. Our goal is to enable students to have one place to showcase their growth over the course of their education.

Ever since I began teaching, I have kept a writing portfolio for every student each year. This process involves one hanging folder per student, a filing cabinet and various examples of the student's work. Throughout the year, the students reflect on their growth, and use their portfolios to go back and edit and rework ideas and concepts they may not have had time to fully develop in the beginning of the school year. They periodically receive grades on their progress and reflection. I am sure none of this process is new to my fellow colleagues. Yet at the end of each academic year, I find I have a multitude of hanging folders with no home. They become dust collectors. Although the students are more than welcome to take their hard work with them to their next course, I guarantee that their work rarely finds its way to another educator's desk.

If students create a blog with the sole intention of showcasing their learning to a broader audience, they can take their portfolio with them not just to another class, but to another school or as evidence of their growth as a learner to college admission counselors. In some ways, it is the ultimate transportable gift. Students will come with a wealth of information at their fingertips. As an English teacher, I wish I still had my notes from the two semesters I studied Shakespeare's plays. Instead of doing a preliminary search on google, I could look up ENG 610: Studies in Shakespeare and refer to the 40+ page paper I have already researched regarding one of his sonnets. Where is that now? It is probably on an old floppy disk from 1994. If I could even find that disk, my laptop and desktop are incapable of loading that information. Yet if those papers existed on my blog (which I am well aware did not exist in 1994), I would have them at any point I needed them throughout my career. I wouldn't need my flash drive, my desktop, my hard drive . . . just one Internet connection. This is my goal. It is what I would want now and wish existed 10-15 years ago.

We now have the opportunity to provide the students of tomorrow this first step toward becoming a life long learner. To begin this process, we did a simple Google search on online portfolios and e-folios. We realized that Jeff Utecht (from ISB) had already set this concept up with his colleagues at Shanghai American School. Now through the inside.isb website, Jim and I have begun the process of creating a blog for the High School English Department. From there we have created our own teacher blogs (The World of Fitz and D Watts) for our classes next year. From these teacher blogs, we intend to set up student blogs for our students (this technology will be available in approximately one month at ISB through word press). Our hope is that these blogs will begin to serve as their online portfolio (e-folio) for the remainder of their years at ISB. More details on how we intend to do this and how you can do this will be in my next blog "Turning a Blog into an E-Folio: Part 2."