Hot off the wire is his current thoughts around eportfolios, discussing such questions as these:

Is an e-Portfolio intended as a space for learners to record all their learning – that which takes place in the home or in the workplace as well as in a course environment or is it a place or responding to prescribed outcomes for a course or learning programme?

How much should an e-Portfolio be considered a tool for assessment and how much for reflection on learning?

Can one environment encompass all of these functions?

And such technologies as OSPI, Elgg and Mahara. Further discussion involves Mash Up Personal Learning Environments and research looking at the value of light weight widgets for promoting reflection that can be embedded in existing e-learning programmes.

All interesting stuff and worth a couple of minutes of your time.

Electronic Portfolios have been with us for more almost two decades, used primarily in education to store documents and reflect on learning, provide feedback for improvement, and showcase achievement for accountability or employment. Social networks have emerged over the last five years, used by individuals and groups to store documents and share experiences, showcase accomplishments, communicate and collaborate with friends and family, and, in some cases, facilitate employment searches. The boundaries between these two processes are gradually blurring. As we consider the potential of lifelong e-portfolios, will they resemble the structured accountability systems that are currently being implemented in many higher education institutions? Or are we beginning to see lifelong interactive portfolios emerging as mash-ups in the cloud?

ePortfolios 101

There are 11 breakouts that have a major focus or have reference to the use of eportfolios:

• Earlybird: ePortfolio’s made easy! Brendon Muir
• Earlybird: Dancing on the Same Page. Chrissie Butler
• Breakout 1: e-Portfolios: A Case Study. Belinda Johnston
• Breakout 3: ePortfolios 101. Nick Rate
• Breakout 3: The Three aspects of an effective School Website that increase 21st Century Pedagogy. Tim Berends
• Breakout 4: ePortfolios – A Showcase of Practice. Nick Rate
• Breakout 4: Powerful Learning Journeys – Using Digital Story Telling within an ePortfolio to show the learning process. Ian Fox & Lenva Shearing
• Breakout 5: Room 17 Voices: Eportfolios and the Online Classroom. Erin Freeman
• Breakout 5: The LMS Gateway to learning and Assessment. Mark Treadwell
• Breakout 5: The Open Source School. Mark Osbourne
• Breakout 6: Laying the Groundwork: producing a realistic and relevant strategy for online learning. Stuart Armistead

Doing a bit of self promotion, I am really excited about the ePortfolios – A Showcase of Practice breakout. I have managed to bring together 5 current practitioners of eportfolios who will be sharing their experiences, beliefs and examples of implementing eportfolios in their schools. They are:

1. Deb Cowan. Director of eLearning & Teacher, Russell St School, Palmerston North.Chrissie Butler
2. Ministry of Research, Science and Technology Teacher Fellow 2010, and former BLENNZ (Blind and Low Vision Education Network NZ) cluster facilitator.
3. Sharron Eagle. Teacher, Rotorua Girls High School Childcare Trust.
4. Belinda Johnston. Facilitator/Director, EastNet ICTPD Cluster, Elm Park School
5. Jamin Lietz. ICT Lead Teacher, Bethlehem College, Tauranga

You guys are awesome! Thanks for agreeing to share your experiences!

The aim was to represent a cross section of schools, tools and beliefs. Unfortunatley, was not able to get a high school represented but am aiming to repeat this breakout or one very similar at ULearn10 so here is a call out to a high school who would be willing to show and tell! All suggestions welcome.

I noticed a new incoming link to my blog this week which comes from the Halfdone NZ Blog Stats.

This site is listed there as the 389th most popular blog in NZ. Which equates to the 12th most popular education blog.

I hear you ask, what about widely read blogs such as Derek’s Blog and others? Well to qualify for these stats, amongst other things,  your blog needs to be listed in Alexa or Technorati and you can’t be paid to complete it. Not sure if it is part of Derek’s JD or not…

More info on how these ratings are compiled are here and if you think your blog should be, let the post author know, politely.

Here are your top educational blogs, including three that have not been updated in a while but still must be pretty popular.

133: Leading and Learning

177: Artichoke

190: PPTA

245: Hey Milly!

250: Manaikalani

265: ICT U Can

297: The Educated Kiwi *

312: ICT in Early Education*

325: Toni Twiss Mobilising Education *

341: SLAB

379: Dragonsinger

389: Elearning Infusion

393: Subversive ICT

* = noted as a ‘defunct’ blog

The pyramid diagram helps to illustrate these thoughts. At the bottom of the pyramid are the building blocks of effective teaching and learning. These inlcude but are certainly not limited to:

• effective leadership
• evidenced based practice
• home/school partnerships
• effective professional development
• purposeful learning

The top of the pyramid are the desired outcomes. For example:

• improved student achievement
• empowered and knowledgeable teachers
• motivated/engaged students

We enter into the age old debate of the top down or bottom up approach, but I believe in the case of the National Standards and the haste at which they are to be implemented, that unless the building blocks are in place then the desired outcomes of the Standards, which I have no problem with, will never actually be realised to their full.

A quote yesterday from one of the hui speakers

…a repertoire of pedagogy rather than a recipe or prescription…

sounds great and few would argue we want this for all of our teachers regardless of if we are talking about the Standards or not.

The Standards themselves will not give teachers a repertoire of pedagogy but effective leadership and professional learning will, there is not one without the other… right?

“…Your example of scanning learning and now moving towards HTML templates illustrates this. Over time you also want or need to readdress your criteria, purpose and vision, especially if you are in a scenario where other classes are using paper. It is more than likely that your views and thoughts are expanding at the same time as your understanding grows due to an increased awareness of the technology capability, student/teacher capability and allignment to learning, and much more rapidly than for those with paper based portfolios…”

The attempt to visualise this into another eportfolio graph is below. The basic idea being that the more experienced you are in implementing eportfolios the more dynamic they are due to the teacher continually refining and developing the implementation.

Not rocket science really. The second graph below includes a reference to paper based portfolios. There are probably a few people who don’t agree with my view here that there are generally a static document in terms of how they change over time…

The graphs aren’t perfect and the terminology is not quite right. As with most posts in this blog I am just unpacking and reflecting on ideas running around in my head.

It is pretty full at the moment as there are two more graphs brewing. One is to try and show the relationship between the ownership and formative nature of an eportfolio and the other the place of feedback in a portfolio within the bigger picture of learning.

I get a lot of inspiration from Jessica Hagy who’s site thisisindexed.com is full of great visual representations of life and thinking relationally. I would love to be able to create such simple graphs that are yet so informative. Here’s an example:

He notes the purpose of the group:

It is my desire to establish a network with those who are using ePortfolios this year as a tool to enhance teaching and learning. I hope that together we can share good practice, research findings, our  journey, etc.

I would encourage anyone to dive on in there and participate in the ongoing discussions.

Some notable eportfolio personnel have participated already including Dr Helen Barrett, the global eportfolio guru, and Ian Fox the local NZ portfolio legend.

Thanks Jamin!

But to function effortlessly in the 2010 environment we WILL presume the following:

All our teachers are able to:

• check an email account daily and manage it efficiently
• use a computer or laptop and trouble shoot basic functions ie on/off, connect to printer, connection to internet
• use the internet to search, find information and to communicate
• particpate in online environments eg blogs or forums or Nings or Trademe or Facebook etc
• manage music files in software eg in iTunes
• manage photo files using software
• download photos from a camera
• use a word processing document efficiently
• store and retrieve data from a hard drive eg your computer
• access Google Docs
• edit a short video clip using simple software

Dorothy continues on with of a list of skills teachers would need to learn, with support, as quickly as possible. Included here are such things as using presentation software, administering a blog, using Google Apps… the list continues.

I would encourage you to read this post and apply it to your own situation in your school. What would your non negotiable elearning requirements be?

Soon after reading Dorothy’s post I read this one from Kim Cofino titled Making the Implicit Explicit. Kim (who is soon to begin a new position at Yokohama International School where I coincidentally used to work), describes skills that are often taken for granted but are incredibly important, yet as she mentions often unidentifiable:

knowing to hold your mouse over an icon or a link to see what it does.

understanding that the menus for any program are at the top of the screen, that they are usually very similar, and generally what you find within them (for example: “view” usually means how you see things on the screen and that menu is found in almost every program).

recognizing when something is lit up (or underlined) on a website, you can click on it.

knowing that the cursor changes when held over different parts of the screen and what that means (the little arrow turning into a hand over a weblink for example, or being able to stretch out a picture when it turns into the double-sided arrow).

using tab to move from cell to cell or box to box on forms or websites.

being able to recognize drop-down menus – and that they hold additional features.

understanding that right clicking on things brings up more options.

We don’t need a list of skills for each application, or checklist that ensures we have taught how to change the font in Word or add a transition in Powerpoint. What we need to be doing is to reinforce these elearning operational concepts. In other words, arm teachers and students with a transferable skill set that enables them to better navigate their way online and in applications to solve problems and perform tasks independently. I still have conversations with teachers who want checklist of what skills students should know at the end of a particular school year. I have always been opposed to a prescribed list of skills that end up dictating what is taught to students rather than the learning driving the use of the technology. I remember buying a computing skills checklist back in early 2000, developed by another school in NZ. I came across it just the other day, unused, but such an interesting read!

Jill Hammonds, one of my colleagues at CORE, often discusses the need to do aware with a lot of the how-to workshops that are often prevalent in ICT professional development. These instead are replaced with 2 or 3 sessions that teach the operational concepts/skills required in order for teachers and students to successfully explore, problem solve and teach themselves. It makes sense really and as Kim mentions in her initial list, menus in screens are very similar in all common software packages.

Having an hour long PD session on learning how to use an application or online tool is an overkill. I would be the first to admit that I have done this myself many times. Instead, giving taster sessions to teachers on various etools, showing them what can be possible, combined with the focused teaching of computer operational concepts and skills that are transferable across applications and platforms, is time better spent. Quality time can then be spent on the pedagogy required to integrate these tools effectively into teaching and learning.

For all those little tricky bits and time saving short cuts in applications, nothing beats the the notion of just-in-time learning and ongoing networking of ideas between the staff and in their PLNs.

The follwoing flowchart cartoon, embedded into Kim’s post, reinforces this notion beautifully.

Thanks Dorothy and Kim for both of your respective posts. The combination of the two will initiate many good discussion amongst the principals and facilitators I work with.

Checklist photo courtesy squeaky482 on flickr.

]]> http://nickrate.com/2010/02/03/the-non-negotiables/feed/ 3 http://nickrate.com/2010/02/03/lenva-shearing-on-eportfolios/ http://nickrate.com/2010/02/03/lenva-shearing-on-eportfolios/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:00:24 +0000 Nick http://nickrate.com/?p=779 Anyone in NZ investigating eportfolios will know the name Lenva Shearing, DP at Bucklands Beach Intermediate School.

Watch her discussing the eportfolio as a personal space for learning on Edtalks:

More eportfolio Edtalks can be found below:

• Ewan McIntosh
• Nick Rate
• Ian Fox
• Sue Genefaas