Multimedia Representations of Students Work Over Time

Tips & Reflections

 

I could write quite a bit about my experiences with digital portfolios, but I realize this is not the medium for a lengthy bit of text. I will highlight only a few recommendations and thoughts and will address any questions in Questions & Comments.

Frankly, we have varied success with the portfolios but for a number of reasons we persist.

First, the time to develop the portfolios is tremendous. We have been fortunate to have release time three times a year in order to work on the portfolios but much of the work is still done after school or at home.

I chose to use Tevin as a sample for some of the portfolio work in this presentation because the digital portfolios have proven to be somewhat of a successful vehicle for demonstrating some of his growth. Tevin obviously has oral language issues and audio and video are mediums we have used to help capture his growth over time and reflect on what we need to do to enhance his learning experiences. I think digital portfolios can be beneficial for students like him -- students that demonstrate their learning in ways that are not easily captured in traditional ways.

The work with digital portfolios, especially ones such as Tevin's, has prompted some deep conversation between some teachers and grade levels in our school. We have questioned whether there is a relationship between race, class or gender and language development; whether our suburban, predominantly white middle class school system can fully address the needs of some students with more diverse backgrounds; and how we can balance the need for a formal school curriculum with some student's obvious need to play and have opportunities for social interaction.

In part, these conversations have been brought out by the work with portfolios, and for this reason alone some of us continue to construct them.

Other thoughts:

• Start the process of creating portfolios with a small group of teachers, perhaps one grade level or a group of teachers across successive grade levels. Some of the first grade teachers have been frustrated with the knowledge that the work from kindergarten and first grade may not be followed up in second grade. And, moreover, if this small seed does not flourish it can die more easily. 

• Use familiar programs to develop the portfolios. We initially used a commercial software that purported to develop digital portfolios but found it too restrictive for teacher's varied purposes and design preferences. We then used another multimedia production tool that seemed too flashy for our needs. We finally resorted to using FrontPage, a web based authoring software. Although this software can certainly do everything that we want it to do and more, the learning curve for some is steep. Recently, however, I have shown other teachers in other schools how to use Word 2000 to do much of what most teachers want to use a digital portfolio for (insert images, key in text, insert simple audio and video recordings, save as a web page, etc.). Working with multimedia will not be as robust with Word 2000 but it will serve many portfolio's purposes and most teachers are already familiar with it.

• Use multimedia. I have used the portfolio samples of Tevin because audio and video have provided a piece of his growth which could never be fully captured by traditional means. Although viewing his written pieces are beneficial and a digital portfolio has merit as an archival medium, multimedia will make the work resonate over time.

• Consider having the students take ownership of the portfolios as much as possible. The fifth grade sample was done by a student and, frankly, many more students learn the technical requirements of digitizing faster than teachers. We have recently realized that the template created for the fifth grade sample has also been too restrictive. Looking at the sample you will notice that the art section is more rich than the others. Some students simply dropped in work to fill a section even though they had no commitment it. Can the students create their own portfolio beginning with a simple blank page? And will the results still provide a clear lense in to their work over time?

• Consider having portfolios for all students or just certain groups of students. If the students are not directly involved with the digitizing it is too onerous a task for teachers to create portfolios for all students. The first grade teachers, for example, have recently decided to record all students in the Fall next year and then follow up with only the "at risk" students in the Spring. As stated above, I think portfolios can be more easily managed for all students if the students are the ones creating them.

• Standardize the portfolios over time. Our work with the Child Study Center (see Background) has helped us to consider the digital portfolio work "Collections of Work" rather than "Digital Portfolios." The connotations between the two are quite different. I think standards are inevitably addressed when teachers have opportunities to come together and discuss student work. And, as alluded to above with the first grade template, standards imposed at the beginning can sometimes make the work stale.

 

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