Where to share?

I have a lot of student work that I'd like to share. 

Of course, I want to share it with parents. 

I'd also like to share with interested people in the education community. I know that for me, one of the best ways the Internet has completely made teaching easier and more enjoyable is by giving me access to what other teachers and students are doing. When I see student work that I like, I am quick to think of ways to adapt it to my students and my school. 

While I want to share, I also really want and need to be efficient. Share smarter not harder.

I'm here to tell you that I have tried several strategies already including blogs, nings, wikis, a password-protected site called edline for which our school pays a yearly subscription fee...

I'm starting to feel like an online litterbug of sorts, putting my things all over and not keeping them neat and organized. That is one issue for me, being organized and having things make sense in terms of navigation and layout, as well as being visually appealing. The other issue I face is that no matter where I share their children's work, very few parents take the time to go look at it. I think that this is because technology is not yet fully integrated at our school; it is seen as an "extra." That is a topic for another post, though.

I decided to ask my PLN on twitter what they do.

Here is what they said:

It looks like everyone is finding different things that work for them. 

Here are some examples I like. 

Langwitches    I like how organized this site is. Everything in one place and easy on the eyes. Silvia has multiple blogs and places she shares, but they are all linked here to the main site. You could probably spend days reading this amazing blog and following links, and get yourself a thorough education in technology integration at the elementary level. 

Cliotech's wiki This wiki impresses me with the way it is organized. It also seems to be a really complete site with so much in one place.

A table of contents Here's an idea. Put all your stuff all over the place, but then catalogue it with links in a "Where's all your stuff?" place. 

Vicky's wiki Another excellent example. She really uses the wiki and linked blog to communicate to students and parents as well as to show what they're doing. It makes sense and is all in one place and easy to navigate. This is the idea I was trying to emulate when I started my school wiki this year.

All of these examples represent an amazing amount of work!

I have this blog, which I really want to keep as a professional space. Obviously it is public and any parents can easily find it, but its purpose is not to communicate to parents. I also started a blog (which I will not link to because I haven't kept up with it)to share lesson plans and projects with students/parents, as well as a wiki in progress(with the same intended audience- students and parents). I also post work on edline and share samples on various nings. I suppose it is part of my desire to focus that I want to have all of my work in one place or at least all linked to one place. Or maybe I should just let go and post things all over the web and let google take care of it for me.

Where do you share?

FETC Session: Digital Portfolios

Digital Portfolios

Kati Searcy

One of the concurrent sessions I attended at FETC was a session on Digital Portfolios. I'm not sure of the need to actually blog notes from the session, as any good presenter shares his or her session online. But, since I sometimes enjoy taking notes, I figured I'd share them here. Here are Kati's presentation slides as well as samples and additional resources on digital portfolios. 

Traditional Assessment:

•Recall or Recognize

•Meets need of teacher

•Multiple choice, fill in the blank, true/false, matching (forced choice)

•Summative, not formative

•Teacher-structured

•Indirect Evidence

People in room asked to discuss what %age of assessments at their school are traditional assessments, answer is 60-80% or more. 

Authentic Assessment

•Measures ability using real-world challenges

•Students construct own responses rather than select

•Students choose task/student-structured

•Direct evidence

Selecting your portfolio medium: 

•paper-based vs. digital/online

lots of reasons given why it is better to move away from paper-based portfolios and move toward digital portfolios:

-minimal storage

-easy to create/back-up

-can be reproduced, shared

-interactive

-long shelf life

-increases tech skills in a meaningful way

Disadvantages of digital

-access to equipment

tech skills with younger students

can be difficult for one teacher to orchestrate esp. w/younger students (process not usually as much an issue as tech troubleshooting)

Ultimately, we want the best of both, traditional and authentic. 

What is a portfolio?

A collection of student work over a period of time

purposefully selected by student

demonstrates how and what student has learned and how they feel about it

conveys a students abilities, experiences, achievements, etc.

A portfolio is a creative means of -

organizing 

summarizing

sharing artifacts

sharing information

sharing ideas about learning

reflecting

evaluating

setting goals

What can be in a digital portfolio? 

EVERYTHING!

-scanned handwritten work

-Photo documentation of activities, field trips

-games/products students have created

-written reflections

-document science experiments (video, photos, etc) [here she showed an example of a science experiment her students did with potatoes, they took pictures and made a video w/animoto showing all the pictures of the experiement--very cute!]

wiki- set up teacher account, give student access 

Advantages of web-based:

-read-world audience

-motivating

-continue documenting learning outside of school

Disadvantages of Web-based portfolios:

-maintaining student anonymity

-if you have inconsistent access to Internet at your school

she recommends Inspired Classroom (said to google it - I did, but couldn't figure out which of my google results had to do with web portfolios?)

My note: I don't see these as disadvantages. I am lucky to have consistent Internet access at school, and I think this is yet another way to teach students 21st century skills, how to represent themselves safely and appropriately online.

Types of portfolios:

Working portfolio - work in progress

Showcase portfolio -students favorite pieces

Evaluation portfolio -used to document progress, used for grading

Reflection Requires:

Instruction and modeling, 

feedback

practice

Questions--

What are the strengths of this work?

What are the weaknesses of this work?

What did you learn from this?

What could have made this better?

TGIF

This was my day at work today:

Kindergarten: Pixie, "I like" activity, one of the pre-made activities in Pixie. It's a page with a big heart and the words "I like" above the heart. The kids write their name and draw and/or add stickers to the heart to show things they like. 

I reviewed some of the pixie tools, taught (for the first time to the whole class) using the shift key to capitalize first letter in name, the word "text." There is lots of learning and practice in this activity: moving and resizing objects, using draw tools, etc.

In between classes prepared for Kaleidoscope Day, a big event happening on Monday. The theme is "Learn about yourself through art" and all 134 students will be coming into the computer lab to do a digitally manipulated self portrait. I will post some of those on my blog next week (with student and parent permission, of course). I also went to my 3 y.o. son's class performance. Packaged up some keyboards to send back to apple and an hp toner to be recycled. Checked email.

First Grade: Introduced the Tooth Tally project to the students. The tooth tally project started today and is a little online share with other first grade classes based on that all-important milestone, losing baby teeth. We will be counting and tallying our lost teeth for three months and sharing the information with the other classes in our group on the tooth tally wiki. I had already written an introduction and uploaded a picture of our class on the wiki, which I shared with the class. We read the other classes' introductions. Then we put on our imagination wings and, using google earth, we flew around the world to visit the other classes in our tooth tally group.
In the fifteen or twenty minutes we had left, we had lots of fun and giggles with the website build your wild self.

Fifth Grade: Introduced the one-click mitzvah wiki. It didn't go as well as I hoped. The kids have a few ideas, but they need more guidance. I don't think the wiki was the best idea for this. I am not ready to give up on this project idea, but I need to figure out how to properly guide them. Suggestions very welcome! They played Karma Tycoon again. They really like this game, and are great at it. I think it was a valuable learning experience, but now it is time to process what they learned from it and move on to the next step.

I had a wonderful, inspiring visit from Silvia Tolisano, tech integration guru from SJEDS. She has a great blog/website, Langwitches. I met her briefly at FETC, and she came to see our SMARTboards. She is such an inspiration. I am so excited to have made this connection with her and look forward to going to visit her at SJEDS. I can learn so much from her.

I am tired. Good night.