Creating Meaningful Digital Portfolios

It's time to really think about digital portfolios. They are a place for students to archive work, reflect on their growth as a learner and publish their best artifacts of learning. This is their learning journey in the era of Common Core.

Blog Posts on Portfolio's

The How and Why of Digital Portfolios 

8P’s of Education

On Demand Webinar
Digital Portfolios

More Resources and Example Blogs and Sites
James Sanders
Karen McMillan
Jen Robert
9th Grade English Blog
Megan Ellis
Ramsey Musallam

Portfolio's must also provide a feedback loop from teachers, peers and parents. This helps create student ownership. Clearly this leads to concerns regarding social media and digital citizenship. However the portfolio can be like the "training wheels" for other media platforms that exist. Students will have years of work archived, and  it can help develop social media maturity as they will need to constantly make decisions on what they are adding to their digital footprint.

The portfolio belongs to the student so it is important to have a simple platform that easily allows them to use it across content areas. This requires some type of consensus about what platform to use. It should be easy to organize all subject areas, allow embedding of other work, and provide an audience for the published pieces. In addition, the portfolio needs to easily transition from year to year. As with all technology, there are a million ways to accomplish this. The most obvious being sites, blogs or digital portfolio sites. All have pros and cons.

Sites

• Google Sites 
• Integrates Well With GAFE
• Easy to post digital content
• Free
• Privacy Settings 
• Easy to create templates

Blogs

• Blogger 
• Integrates Well With GAFE
• Creates A Chronological/Thematic Log
• A Public Forum (Kidblog and Edublogs have paid subscriptions that allow privacy settings)
• A Clean Appearance

Digital Portfolio Sites

• Nureva Troove - subscription based digital portfolio site.
• Not Free - An ongoing cost to maintain every year
• Built In Features Like Rubrics
• Software designed for Digital Portfolios

Think about the big picture of digital portfolio's and share your thoughts on this post. What concerns, ideas or suggestions do you have when considering creating a place for students to archive their work for the remainder of their school career?

Readers Theater and Student Created Book Recommendations #ELA

Have you ever thought about having students digitally review novels they have read and cataloging their comments? Ask students to review their books by creating a digital presentation or video, collect their links on a google form and share the results with your class. Students can then use that resource as they decide what book they might be interested in reading next. 

A Pi Day Math Activity! #Pi #π

Not only is it Pi Day, but it is 3/14/15. In Math Terms that is 3.1415. If you want to get really geeky at 9:26 it will be 3.1415926 or π. This week I was invited to watch a math Lesson where students measured the circumference and diameter of objects: A Quarter, Cup, Plate, Bike Tire and several other objects. Then, students entered their information on a class Google Sheet. Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter Circumfrance of a circle divided by diamater = π.  The Google Sheet calculated Pi, the better the students measured, the closer to 3.14 they got. 

Students Measuring the Circumference of a Tire

Collaborative Q & A Slide Deck

I'm finishing preparations for a workshop with middle school teachers that are preparing for a BYOD Classroom. In addition to BYOD the School is Providing Chromebooks at a 3:1 ratio. Naturally, there are common questions and concerns that teachers are asking at each site. To encourage collaboration, teachers will be working together on a  collaborative Q & A slide deck. Questions will be posted in the header of the slides and Answers will be posted by teachers in the body portions. Once all three sites have contributed, I'll add my comments to any questions that have been left unanswered. This can easily be modified for students to ask and answer questions during their units of study. 

Follow Along As We Start Next Week.

Math Scavenger Hunt

One of the more interesting math projects I have seen done this year is the "Real World" Math Scavenger Hunt Mrs. Kondrick's Middle School classes created. The whole purpose was to do exactly what it sounds like, find examples of math in the real world. Students shared their pictures on a Google Presentation.

Class Instructions