Digital Portfolios - How

Recently some colleagues and I got together to talk about Digital Portfolios. Here is what we came up with . Stay tuned for a video on all this :)

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We’re here today to talk to you about the “how” of reflections within Digital Portfolios.

Digital Portfolios allows your students to show you their continuum of learning; including what they know going into the lesson, what their progress is mid-way through and at the end of it  what they know now and where they may go next. This communicated through reflections.

From here on out I will be discussing what has worked well for me.

Initial Major Reflection:

This is where we hook them and determine the initial baseline of their knowledge. This includes what they already know, what predictions the can make about the upcoming learning, and potentially some strategies they may use.

Midway Major Reflection

This occurs partway into your project or assignment. This stage is where you provide opportunities for student to reflect on their current learning including: weather their initial predictions have been corroborated or rather their learning has gone off on an unanticipated direction. Students can also highlight any initial successes and discuss current difficulties.

Final Major Reflection:

At this point students will summarize their learning journey [cue don’t stop believing] They will describe what they thought they knew, what they actually knew, and what they learned. Hopefully students will also reflect on  what is yet to be learned as well. [Remember, this is just what has worked well for me]

They will also describe their skill development - The strategies they thought they would deploy, the strategies they DID deploy, and how effective they were. Effective reflection should also include where they struggled, how they coped or how they should have coped.

As the learning facilitator, your role in the reflections is to provide guiding questions, examples of your own reflective practices, as well as formative feedback on their reflective abilities.

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What you as a teacher do:

Before they start:

Give them an outline of what the assignment is about both topic and skill development.

Give them formative feedback on their plans and predictions.

(e.g. So you know romeo and juliet is going to be about teen suicide? Interesting, why do you think that? ~Or~ You are going to try and solve this problem by making a graph? Why do you think that will work? Have you tried that with a similar problem? ~and~ You think we will work on gathering, interpreting, and analyze ideas about the bubonic plague and communicate what you learned and some decisions about that? Do you think your plan addresses all that, or are you missing something?)

Middle:

This is still the realm of formative assessment / feedback. And it should still be on both their acquisition of knowledge, and the development of skills.

(e.g. This sentence in [insert language here] of your story seems like it is missing something. If it were in english, what would you say could make it better? ~OR~ Your hypothesis seems to be missing something, compair it to the examples from your notes and see what is different ~and~ You said you were going to collect information about settlers when discussing the impact of the colonization of canada, but you decided to switch to the Cree in Alberta. You went from a huge topic to a much smaller, totally different topic, that is an interesting choice, what made you make that choice?)

End:

Here is where the forces of formative and summative collide. With the feedback from the middle section, we assume the student has made the best iteration of this assignment that they can. We are saying they have squeezed as much juice out of this apple as possible. Assess their learning, how well have they shown you that they have learned what you wanted them to learn? But help them for the future as well, tell them what they could have done better, where you saw promise etc.

“Everybody has a plan until they are punched in the face” - Mike Tyson