During this project I am working to create digital portfolios for students.  This journey began in conversations with Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano.  Silvia helped me on my first big collaborative project with her students in Florida and my Grade 1 class during the 2010 Winter Olympics that were hosted in Vancouver.   She started me thinking of ways to capture student progress using technology.  KathyCassidy also spent a far bit of time talking with me about this project – Thank you Kathy!  After discussions with these ladies and others (many through twitter – did I mention I love the educator community on twitter )  I decided that I would have 2 types of portfolios.

The first portfolio  highlights student’s work that they choose.  This portfolio will be comprised of the child’s Kidblog.   My hope is that students will post writing, post photos, projects and audio recordings of the student’s choice and begin to reflect on their progress.  These blogs have been started and we are getting there, it is not as simple as I had anticipated it would be, but that is what this project is about – learning.

The second type of portfolio is an assessment portfolio that will be for my evaluation purposes and shared with parents as an evidence of their child’s progress.  This portfolio will be hosted by Evernote.  These portfolios are also coming along nicely, the sorting of notes is becoming easier because I am getting better at tagging and naming notes.  I love the ability to email myself notes, recordings or pictures from other devices and  I have also been trying to use googledocs forms to collect data on students quickly and easily.  It is also nice that the notes and recordings made with the livescribe pens can be sent quickly & easily to Evernote.  Currently these portfolios are more summatize than I would have liked and I had hoped that this digital collection would help to guide my teaching more.  I think that more familiarity with the tools I am using for collection will help to make it easier for me to think of ways to use them for collection of students’ progress.

There have been other unexpected pieces that have proved to be very beneficial during this project.  The personal reflection on my teaching during recordings and I also like that I can have support workers make notes/recordings in Evernote on the students in my class that they are working with.  These notes are easily accessible to both the support worker and me, easily reviewed and discussed when needed.

These portfolios provided a strong reminder to me this last month.  While I know the importance of student choice for motivation this note provides me a clear and immediate reminder of this.  This reaffirms my belief that children need to be  given choice about their learning and when they are given the freedom to feel in control of their learning they are excited and motivated to learn.  This note will remain in this child’s portfolio as a reminder of how I need to appeal to his interests and engage him.

These photos are worth a thousand words.

What suggestions do you have for simple ways to have students record their learning?

How are you using portfolios to show student progress?

How do you make use of portfolios as formative assessment?