Diverse Digital Portfolios

Assessment is a critical element of learning. To be most effective, assessment should be ongoing and differentiated. By differentiated, I mean learners should be provided with multiple options and pathways to “show what they know.” It can be helpful to think of assessment like a menu of windows. Good assessments function as effective windows into the minds of learners, providing insights into the perceptions / understandings which learners have about different topics, their skills to complete specific tasks with quality, and their dispositions to think and act in different ways.

Dr. Scott McLeod created a short video in the summer of 2008 to challenge educators to think about their own perceptions and beliefs regarding assessment. Scott’s essential question in this video was, “What’s the best way to ensure mastery of low-level content?” The ISTE NETS highlight the importance of not only mastering lower level content today, however, but also a diverse array of higher order thinking skills and problem solving skills using digital as well as analog tools. To effectively assess student learning, I’m convinced we need to not only utilize “traditional” evaluation tools and methods, but also more creatively utilize a diverse array of “web 2.0″ technologies and services which can provide larger and clearer windows into the perceptions, skills and dispositions of learners.

Digital portfolios take many forms, and we should embrace diversity when it comes to assessment. In the 19th and 20th centuries, “standardized learning” was a mantra of educational advocates promoting workforce readiness for the industrial age. Today in our networked economy, however, standardized approaches to learning as well as assessment are as outdated as the horse and buggy is to interstate commercial transportation.

The English Wikipedia today defines “electronic portfolio” as:

a collection of electronic evidence assembled and managed by a user, usually on the Web (also called Webfolio). Such electronic evidence may include inputted text, electronic files, images, multimedia, blog entries, and hyperlinks. E-portfolios are both demonstrations of the user’s abilities and platforms for self-expression, and, if they are online, they can be maintained dynamically over time. Some e-portfolio applications permit varying degrees of audience access, so the same portfolio might be used for multiple purposes. An e-portfolio can be seen as a type of learning record that provides actual evidence of achievement.

A wide variety of commercial organizations have created and continue to offer for sale proprietary digital portfolio solutions. Some of the customers who have found these products most appealing are Colleges of Education at larger universities. To meet the accreditation standards for U.S. organizations like NCATE and SACS, for example, some colleges require their students to complete a battery of tasks using an online portfolio system which can then be shown to organizational auditors who periodically conduct programmatic reviews. While these commercial electronic portfolio solutions certainly can offer benefits to an organization from an accreditation standpoint, these solutions may offer relatively fewer benefits to individual teachers interested in not only demonstrating their professional competencies but also in showcasing the work and capabilities of their students.

I am admittedly enamored with the potential for web 2.0 sites and services to provide deep and authentic windows into student learning. At the 2008 COSN conference, I heard Harvard professor Chris Dede exhort educators to utilize more web 2.0 tools with students today so researchers tomorrow could benefit from a richer documentary record of their learning. My thought at the time was, parents TODAY (myself included) should want educators to use more web 2.0 tools as digital portfolios so teachers, students, and parents alike can all benefit TODAY from the potential power of these digital documentary records.

Blogs, wikis, and video sharing sites are three web 2.0 platforms being effectively utilized today by educators around the world to document student learning. The digital learning artifacts included in these websites are providing, in many cases, the types of robust windows into student learning I think should become a “best practice” for digitally connected educators and learners everywhere.

The Support Blogging Wiki includes one of the most extensive lists of classroom blogs I’ve encountered to date. One of the first classroom blogs I started reading several years ago was Bob Sprankle’s “Room 208″ blog from 2005-2006. To me, this blog exemplified many things which should personify classroom digital portfolios. Each student had their own “space” on the blog to share their work and their own ideas. Content was published openly on the web, NOT behind a login and a virtual wall. Commenting was left open to not only peers and parents, but also others outside the traditional four walls of the classroom. While some of the published work by Room 208 was polished and refined, some of the work was published in a more “raw” and authentic format. This was and is GREAT. As a parent myself, I find it frustrating when my own children’s writing in their analog, paper-based portfolio at school is so heavily edited by others that the writing pieces fail to authentically reflect my child’s independent abilities to think and communicate.

When I was in New Zealand at the end of February, I was delighted to learn (via an “unconference” discussion session) about teachers who are maintaining two different blogs for their classes with this exact dichotomy of publishing in mind. Mrs Dell, teaching in “Room 6,” maintained a class writing blog last year which included her students’ writing DIRECTLY published to the web. These writing pieces were not heavily scrutinized and edited by the teacher or other adults, so they reflected the students’ independent thinking and communication skills quite authentially. In addition to an independent writing blog, Mrs. Dell also maintained and maintains this year a “class blog” to which she publishes more “finished” products and representations of student learning. In a primary-age classroom, utilizing two blogs for these two different purposes strikes me as a “best practice” for assessment and digital porfolios which provide an ongoing “running record” of classroom learning.

At the secondary level, it makes sense to not only maintain a class blog but also utilize a wiki as a portal to student-created content on a variety of websites. New Zealand educator Erin Freeman is doing this in the current academic year with a class blog on Blogger, as well as a class wiki portal on Wetpaint.

In her 2008 presentation “ICT In My Classroom,” Kiwi primary teacher Rachel Boyd highlighted the way she uses a wiki as an “eLearning Hub” for her students, as well as a class blog and separate student writing blog. I wish we had more educators where I live in Oklahoma following the innovative lead of educators like Rachel Boyd, utilizing blogs and wikis as powerful tools to help document and share the learning of students inside and outside the classroom.

Two of my other favorite examples of schools and teachers using digital media for digital portfolios are Willowdale Elementary in Omaha, Nebraska, the authors of “Radio WillowWeb,” and Kathy Cassidy, a 1st grade teacher in Moose Jaw, Canada, who uses a classroom YouTube channel to provide a rich window into classroom learning for parents and others. (Hat tip to Dean Shareski for sharing Kathy’s channel with me several months ago.)

The web 2.0-powered digital portfolio examples I’ve cited in this post are certainly “messier” than most of the “clean,” often uniform commercial digital portfolio examples you may have seen in college or university settings. As Nevada educator Brian Crosby often reminds his blog readers, however, “learning IS messy!” We should not shy away from the use of web 2.0 tools in our electronic portfolios because they may not lend themselves to be uniform and “neat” in the same way a scantron or a multiple-choice examination summative graph can be. Our students are diverse, and they deserve diverse opportunities to both learn and “show what they know.” Digital portfolios should reflect this diversity of assessment methods and dynamically provide, on an ongoing basis, clear windows into the classrooms and the minds of both students and teachers in our schools.

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