Teacher in Development

I read a really interesting post over at
Cool Cat Teacher Blog: ePortfolio research

It made me think again of the whole issue of ePortfolio control. Does it belong to the school or to the student?  

Vicki raises a very important issue: Motivation. If the student loses their portfolio somehow, you can say goodbye to their ever wanting to do it again. And what happens after they leave the school where their ePortfolio was created, and I assume, hosted? Do they still get access? Is that access for life? 

Portfolios, I think, need to be student owned and generated. They shouldn’t be boxy. They shouldn’t look the same for all. They should be user generated. User designed, and user populated. The person using the portfolio should be able to build it, however they want.

I do think, as a teacher, that I can ask for certain things to appear in my student’s learning space, but over all there needs to be autonomy here. I’m no expert, but I think that’s a real key to engagement. Is there a strong sense that "This is my space?"

All the institutional ePortfolio solutions that I’ve explored have all failed there. Miserably. They tell you what you can and should include. They don’t flex.

Vicki ends her post with this statement: "We need best practices (not just best software) amidst the maelstrom of Web 2.0 educational apps." I can get behind that easily.

A best practice would be teaching about portfolios and what they are for, and how to use them. A best practice would be showing how the teacher uses his/her own portfolio - become the model. A best practice would be opening the classroom to the wide wide world of 2.0 technology that is out there, and showing how to use this technology to reflect on and track learning in a responsible way. A best practice would be helping students find and choose their own tools to use in their portfolio creation - blogs, wikis, delicious, podcasting spaces etc. Best practice would not be boxing the student in by telling them what software to use, and it’s not forcing institutional portfolio software on them either.

The best practice that I’m thinking about here is pretty messy. Messy in the eyes of an institution that is. Boxy is predictable and easily measureable, but is that what teachers should be looking for? Can/should authentic learning be predictable and easy to assign a grade to?  

The portfolio I’m thinking about would be a user generated link: A conglomeration of content taken from a possibly wide variety of locations. (Built by, and decided upon by student.) At the moment, I’m personally thinking/playing with this idea on a superglu account, and what about netvibes.com?

My idea is to patch together all my online spaces, well the spaces that I would use in my professional development, and display them all in one place.  If you visit my glu site, you’ll notice that it’s very messy still…and not well organized. But the idea is there: to bring together multiple sources of content to act as my dynamic portfolio. 

The For Who Question:

A few months ago, there was a great discussion around the net on who the portfolio is for. Employer? Teacher? Institution? Student? I say it’s for the latter. The portfolio MUST be for the student if it’s to succeed as an continuous personal learning environment. But what if you could, at a click of a button, dynamically change the content on your portfolio page? In my case, superglu? 

I got this idea from delicious. Here, you can organize your account by keywords or tags. With one click, and a little bit of typing, you can instantly move entire strings of links from one category to another. I was wondering, what if you could do the same thing in an ePortfolio? Electronically tag your work so that it appears say under an Employer category - which would include all the items in your portfolio that would be important to show to a prospective employer, and that you have tagged accordingly, would dynamically appear when you send them the link. All from a simple tag. 

At the same time though, all these items are available for other uses as well. You don’t just get stuck with a one sided, single purposed portfolio. The student says: This is my portfolio. I can morph it as I please, to suit my own purposes. Today I can use it to help me get a job. Later tonight I can use it to reflect on something I learned.

But it’s not entirely digital. This idea came from Vicki as well. She wisely encourages students to plan for the worst to happen: things digital can vanish. We’ve all had that happen I’m sure. So as she so wonderfully explains here, I think a well rounded portfolio is both digital, and paper based. Perhaps paper based will be harder to customize, but I totally agree with Vicki’s reasoning - back up, back up, back up. If done properly, a portfolio could become a priceless possession.  

This post is messy, but it is what tumbled out of my head as I prepare to go deeper with portfolios with my students. As always, if you could follow my ideas, your comments are welcome!