day 10 readings

The Digital Portfolio: A Richer Picture of Student Performance

This article is an interesting picture of what implementing student portfolios might look like with all the benefits and challenges included. It was generated in the early 1990's when technology was just beginning to make digital portfolios possible. Today we have the necessary technology, and storing these huge works is more practical. I wonder if there would need to be a team of people dedicated to maintaining the database both in its content and technically. The idea of being able to get a picture of a student that is more complete than some numerical figures is brilliant. I can't tell you how often I felt like I was misrepresented by the numbers when I was in school. The analogy of judging a baseball player by his stats verses by what the fans and team mates would say was a perfect analogy. What if there was a place in the portfolio for peer feedback. It would have to be done in a way where the peers were honest and detailed.

Collaborative Planning for Electronic Portfolios: Asking Strategic Questions

As the title suggests, this is about addressing questions when implementing digital portfolios in a school. Any school looking to get into digital portfolios need to ask many questions. One that impressed me was about what kind of program the school should use. It was limited by the skill of the teachers. The more that teachers computer skills were developed the greater power the school would have to make a student centered portfolio. One of the realities of our schools is that, for the most part teachers are behind the students in tech skills. This is sad, especially because if you were to set the bar of competency in tech skills even the students would fall short. The issue here is that teachers need better training and support in technical skills.

Developing Student Electronic Portfolios

This is a great hub of information for anyone interested in getting into digital portfolios. There are a wealth of links here that cover all of the bases form types of portfolios and assessments. I particularly liked the assessment page. Anyone interested in making this work needs to have clear objectives and standards or else there will be misery and failure. Students need structure and concrete goals to help guide and motivate them. When they feel secure and motivated they will grow exponentially in the are of creativity and then drive their own learning.

Susan Silverman's electronic portfolios for her students

Here is another rich resource. What impressed me was how many ideas and activities are archived here. If you need ideas on how to build a portfolio system online then there are a lot of ideas. In a way this is a portfolio for Silverman. On her site you can see where she had less web skills and other areas where she excelled. This gave me inspiration in that I want to put my best foot forward when applying my web skills to this end. Your product should be functional and professional.

Dr. Alice Christie's Examples of Electronic Portfolios

Most of the links here were broken. I was impressed by the creativity and the skill of the student work. I was especially impressed with kid Pub there were some poems here that were excellent and communicated a lot of feeling and passion from the students who wrote them. Other sites had reports done by the students with pictures collected from the web. Something that was a little disappointing was that none of these portfolios seemed to come close to what has been envisioned by all of the authors in our previous readings.