Tech Talk on Learning Portfolios at BBI

I just listened to an Eluminate session conducted by LearnCentral and TechTalk Tuesdays. The guest presenter was Lenva Shearing, Deputy Principal at Bucklands Beach Intermediate School (BBI), in New Zealand, where I was privileged to spend a couple of weeks last March. A summary of the webinar:

Look at the pedagogy, vision, implementation and effects on learning that personal reflective portfolios can provide. This session will not discuss the tools that might be used, but the pedagogoy  behind personal reflective portfolios.

It was fun to see how the ePortfolio process at BBI has evolved over the last few months. What I appreciate about their approach is the emphasis on goal-setting, learning and feedback, and their inquiry model of teaching, based on the EYP philosophy. Even though there was not an intention to discuss the tools used, questions can't be avoided when ePortfolios are being demonstrated. I see that BBI has moved from the Ning platform to store their video, to using divShare, one of my favorite online storage sites. Lenva demonstrated how teachers are using this tool to store and embed their audio feedback on student work. Even though the demos of student portfolio videos were difficult to follow, Lenva's description of BBI's philosophy and practice is a worthwhile contribution to the larger ePortfolio dialogue.

Top 5 Back-to-School Tech Tools

Read Write Web published the results of a survey: Teachers Pick Their Top 5 Back-To-School Tech Tools

1. The iPad: Mobile Learning (or tablets/netbook mini-lab) bringing mobile hardware in the classroom for 1-to-1 learning
2. Twitter: Real-Time Information (a microblogging tool in the classroom, to communicate with parents and the community, and as a part of a teacher's own professional development and personal learning network)
3. Google Apps for Education: Cloud-Based Collaboration
4. Blogs: Student Portfolios
5. Sharing and Collaboration Tools: 21st Century Teaching and Learning (i.e., Wikispaces, VoiceThread, and SlideShare)

Not surprising results, since the survey was widely re-tweeted.  I will be teaching an online course for Seattle Pacific University this fall, entitled "Issues and Advances in Educational Technology" for teacher candidates in their graduate program. I team-taught the class last fall, and I learned a lot about this state's technology standards, and some of the emerging technologies. We chose not to use Blackboard, but the Web 2.0 "open" tools that are available to everyone: Google Sites, GoogleDocs, Google Groups, Etherpad, delicious.com, etc. Each graduate student at SPU uses Wordpress.com as their bPortfolio, so they wrote a weekly reflection on their learning in each class. The students will also produce a digital narrative, and collaboratively develop an online resource on some element of integrating technology into their teaching specialty. I am looking forward to updating the course with some of these current findings, but I think the course design from last fall needs only a little tweaking.

ePortfolios: Concept, Process, and Product

I believe ePortfolios are CONCEPT, PROCESS, and PRODUCT.

I have lately been presenting about the CONCEPT of "Balancing the Two Faces of ePortfolios": (process vs. product, workspace vs. showcase, learning/improvement vs. accountability). The international community is recognizing this perspective, since my concept map/diagram has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, Japanese and Mandarin! Unless we recognize the importance of both approaches to ePortfolios, I believe it will be more difficult to realize the practical contribution of ePortfolios for supporting reflection and lifelong learning. As an ePortfolio community of practice, we need to be clear about the multiple purposes for developing portfolios, and the multiple strategies that can be used... and not constrain our thinking by specific tools or products or narrow purposes. The development of ePortfolios can help build lifelong habits of reflective practice, but I fear that the process is in danger of being hijacked for accountability purposes (see The Accountability/Improvement Paradox:  --a higher education perspective, but there are comparable viewpoints in K-12).

My working portfolio, that documents the PROCESS of my learning/growth over time, is my digital footprint through my website, my blog, my Facebook account (mostly "friending" my family members), my Twitter posts (@eportfolios), etc.: my personal learning environment (PLE) that I contribute to and learn from on a regular basis. This "portfolio-as-PROCESS" is a powerful environment for lifelong learning and reflection, with digital media adding a contemporary boost to an ages-old process. I also agree that smart phones and other mobile technologies (i.e., iPad, tablets) are going to be an important direction for more widespread adoption. This aggregation of my online presence is how I construct my digital identity, using tools across the Internet, where I store videos in YouTube or blip.tv, images in Picasa or Flickr, presentations in slideshare.net, documents in scribd.com or googledocs, etc. (What I am missing is some type of database or tool where I can keep a record of links to all of these resources with meta-tags -- right now, I use a googledocs spreadsheet.) It is this process paradigm that constitutes the "everyday-ness" of ePortfolios in a highly interactive environment.

Every once in a while, I add an entry to one of my presentation portfolios (organized in one of many tools that I have explored) which represents a significant accomplishment in my professional life. This "portfolio-as-PRODUCT" has a specific purpose and audience, organized thematically using a specific authoring tool, such as Mahara, Google Sites, eFolio, or any one of the commercial tools. I spent years studying many of these tools for creating presentation portfolios, and I came to the conclusion that many of these systems are often institution-based, created within a finite time frame (i.e., a school or university program). Once a learner leaves the institution, with a few exceptions, the presentation portfolio remains behind or unchanged in an HTML archive: frozen in time as an artifact of that institutional experience (much like my tenure portfolio in PDF on a CD-ROM from 2002). I wish I could find data on the percentage of students who continue to pay subscription fees on commercial systems; my assumption is that it is fairly low. That is why I am an advocate for learners to own their own online spaces to publish their own presentation portfolios (i.e., Google Sites, WordPress, Weebly), or for the commercial providers to adhere to one of the standards, such as LEAP2A to allow portfolio content to be migrated between compatible systems... another argument for open Web 2.0 systems.

I am trying to finish my book over the next two months, so these ideas are front and center in my consciousness. I am looking for more stories of using Web 2.0 tools to create ePortfolios across the lifespan, in and out of formal education. I also maintain a couple of Google Groups that focus on Researching Web2.0 Portfolios and Using Google Apps for ePortfolios in K-12 Education.
(My post to eportfolio_conversations@googlegroups.com, facilitated by Coach Carole in Australia)

Another digital storytelling workshop

Back from my European vacation (Amsterdam and a Baltic cruise with my mother and daughter... three generations in a standard stateroom... at least we had a veranda for extra space!). On Monday and Tuesday this week, Erin and I conducted a digital storytelling workshop with more than 20 teachers, counselors and the principal of a middle school/high school in a small town in Washington state as part of their Navigation 101 program. This is the third Nav 101 school in Washington where we have provided this training. The size of the workshop, and the diversity of the group meant that we were training on Macintosh (iMovie6HD), and several versions of MovieMaker (XP, Vista, 7). Erin took the Mac group and I stayed with the Windows group, who were actually using iMacs that booted to Windows XP (as Erin said, it just didn't seem right!). But the tech person said that the Mac hardware was the most reliable!

Despite the fact that the teachers accounts were blocked from access to Flickr and websites for royalty-free music, they were able to produce some very moving stories, many of them about family or friends. I was most impressed with their very tech-savvy principal who was a full participant in the workshop at the beginning of a very busy school year! She shared her story in her blog. I hope they will get students producing digital stories during this school year to support their student-led conferences. Here is the blog of a teacher in the school, with his digital story about the life cycle of a salmon! This is the first digital storytelling workshop that I have conducted where not only one but two of the participants posted their stories to YouTube on their own, even though I encourage individuals to publish their own stories when the workshop is over.

Assessment in Race to the Top

On July 29, President Obama made a major speech on education reform to the National Urban League. One comment that he made stood out for me as I listened to the speech:

Because of Race to the Top, states are also finding innovative ways to move beyond having just a snapshot of where students are, and towards a real-time picture that shows how far they’ve come and how far they have to go.  And armed with this information, teachers can get what amounts to a game tape that they can study to enhance their teaching and their focus on areas where students need help the most.

He didn't use the word "portfolio" but the description of that "real-time picture" sure sounds like Assessment FOR Learning to me.

Assessment for Learning is the process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there.

I believe ePortfolios are one powerful strategy for this purpose, and I have written and talked about these issues extensively. I am wondering what states are working on...

The Future of mPortfolios

I just finished my last presentation at the AAEEBL ePortfolio conference. Eight people joined me in a conversation about the use of mobile devices is ePortfolio development. This was the first time I presented with the iPad (and not quite what I expected). The Keynote slide show had only a few slides, where I showed a few samples of apps available for the iPhone. The discussion focused on the immediacy of access to technology, through these mobile devices, which may let students slow down to reflect within the context and time of a learning experience... Not at a time removed when memory is less fresh. In the near future we may have opportunities to implement these strategies when emerging tools, such as iPads, iPod Touch/iPhone devices, Android tablets, including the XO-3, become affordable and available in schools.

I posted the slides on my iWork account, but was not able to attach a PDF to this message, which is the only way that I can post to my Blogger blog from my iPad. So I will need to add the slides once this entry is posted to my blog.
Sent from my iPad

M portfolios

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AAEEBL Conference - Days 1 -3

I've been participating in the AAEEBL Conference (the Association of Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning -- a community of ePortfolio practitioners). On Monday, I led a day-long workshop with a small group of educators from the U.S. and Australia. Our focus was "Your Digital Self: Web 2.0 as Personal Learning Environment and ePortfolio" and we had a wonderful discussion. Here is a sample of tweets from the session:

• Going to get some breakfast before my session w/Helen Barrett on Web 2.0, PLEs & ePortfolio. Hear she rocks #aaeebl
• Fabulous workshop w/@eportfolios (Helen Barrett) at #aaeebl. Great group and lots to think about. Thanks!

I agree! It was a great group and we had some very in-depth conversations. On Tuesday, I led a 50-minute presentation that summarized the content of the day-long workshop. Here are my slides:

AAEEBL2010 web2

Today, I gave a keynote address with the title, "Blurring the Boundaries Between ePortfolio Development and Social Networking." Here are my slides for my keynote address:

AAEEBL 2010 Keynote

At the end of the presentation, I shared an example of a digital story (my daughter's letter to her students). Several people came up to me to say how much they were touched by her brief story.  Here are a few pertinent tweets after my keynote:

• passion and purpose co-exist #aaeebl
• Eportfolios document mastery (pride in the process) #aaeebl
• "flow" is there in social media and open source creativity-we must create "flow" in eportfolios. #aaeebl
• I recall Dan Ariely's TED talk: any creative or critical thinking task was more successful/productive when intrinsically motivated. #aaeebl
• Two faces of eportfolios : workspace vs showcase,or, process vs product. Lightbulb moment! #aaeebl
• Eportfolios and social media: are ppl organically creating eportfolios outside of higher ed by using facebook, picasa etc? #aaeebl

I'm glad there was at least one "light bulb" moment in the room. I had some great discussions afterward over lunch. I also met a graduate student I worked with in 2004, who created a wonderful story that I often use in my presentations.

I have a lot of feedback for the conference organizers (not enough time for reflection between sessions, no organized interest groups, too expensive for most K-12 participation, etc.). But for the first AAEEBL conference, it is a good start, giving higher educators many opportunity to hear a lot of points of view. I am still concerned that there is too much of an emphasis on ePortfolios for accountability, and little for K-12 in this conference, but I made my thoughts known.

Models of Reflection

At the closing session of the EIFEL Conference, we had an interesting discussion on reflection. I discovered two more models of reflection:
Gibbs Model of Reflection

Peter Pappas' Taxonomy of Reflection, based on the revised Bloom's Taxonomy. This blog entry includes more detailed scaffolding of reflection for students, for teachers, and for principals.

Keynote at EIFeL 2010

I am at my eighth European ePortfolio Conference, this year in London. Below are my slides for my keynote presentation.

Eifel2010

View more presentations from Helen Barrett.

It is fascinating for me to see the many presentations at this conference from the health care field and from other countries, including Japan and Australia. The interest in ePortfolios is truly becoming worldwide. The first keynote of the morning was from the health care field, and the last presentation was about 21st Century Skills. There weren't many participants from K-12, though.

ISTE 2010 Presentation

ISTE 2010

View more presentations from Helen Barrett.

I just did my presentation at ISTE 2010 today. It was scheduled to start at 12:30, and I went to the room at noon, walking past a long line (wasn't sure what they were waiting for). It turns out, they were waiting for my session! The room was full at 12:15 and they closed the door, so I spent the first 10 minutes just fielding questions. Then I did my presentation during the normal time (slides above). I forgot to audio record it, but the slides pretty much cover the content. I incorporated a lot of the content of my TEDxASB talk.

I would love some feedback from the participants.

Google Announcements

Google announced today at ISTE 2010 two more states, Colorado and Iowa, are joining Oregon to make GoogleApps available to all schools. In my opinion, soon schools in these states will have a ready-made environment to support e-portfolio development using this rich toolset.

Google also announced a set of training solutions for schools through a new online Google Apps Education Training Center.  They also announced a new Google Apps for Education Certified Trainer and Partner program to "provide a formal structure for certifying individuals and partners who lead workshops or trainings about Apps, and provides schools with an easy way to find the best partners in their area."

iPhone ePortfolios?

From a listserv post by Trent Batson, founder of AAEEBL, a professional organization supporting electronic portfolios primarily in higher education:

See this URL: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/eportfolio-for-iphone/id361277520?mt=8
From the person, Paul Treuer who was IP owner for the first OSP code set which is now -- a few new code sets later -- part of Sakai.

My response:
The UMN software only uploads pictures to a UMN portfolio, so far, although a comment in iTunes said, "Soon to follow, I've heard a voice recognition-to-text feature will allow you to dictate into your ePortfolio. How cool is that!" I agree. It would be powerful to be able to reflect by voice, and have it go directly into my reflective journal/blog. I can do that using Dragon Dictate in my iPhone and send the text online by email.

There are several other portfolio tools in the iTunes store. PebblePad has an iphone app. Also an app for physicians in U.K. for "Effortless recording of learning and reflection and access to reference materials." Right now, it is only by typing, but these are a start!

There is also a WordPress App. I just can't really edit my GoogleDocs artifacts or my Google Sites portfolio from my iPhone/iPad, and I can only blog by email. But, it's beginning to happen! Anyone have other examples?

Sent from my iPad

EduBloggerCon at ISTE10

I made it back to another EduBloggerCon prior to ISTE 2010 in Denver. It is very important for me to listen to teachers who are working with K-12 students and implementing Web 2.0 tools, although these were very advanced users! Lots of discussion of the iPad, and quite a few of them in the room. I took both my iPad and my laptop to the workshop, because I wasn't sure which one I would want to use. During the Smackdown (showcase of new Web 2.0 tools), I ended up using my laptop. Also, editing my Google Site... not possible with the iPad.

There were several sessions on the iPad: one led by a teacher who was really pro-iPad, another led by Scott McLeod, who brought up some serious questions about the trade-offs between consumption of data vs. production capabilities of the iPad. Lots of great discussion, documented in tweets using #ebc10ipad tag. No conclusions, because it is too soon, but some schools may be ready to replace laptops/netbooks with iPads, perhaps a premature decision. I said to wait until the Android tablets come out, and then compare the capabilities. I can still do more production on a laptop/netbook than my iPad. But there are advantages with battery life and instant on. Some educators are also impressed with the engagement of young students with reading on the iPad.

There were also good discussions on blogging with students, including Blogs as Web-Based Portfolios (PDF) from Jeff Utecht, International School of Bangkok. I also figured out how to organize my apps on my iPhone with iOS4, and touched an iPhone4. I'm trying to figure out when I will be home long enough this summer to buy mine. I want multitasking and iMovie for iPhone! (After updating my iPhone 3G to iOS4, it seems to run slower.) Dinner out with some teachers and more great discussion! Great Day!

Barcelona Beginnings

Today, I began a 2.5 day ePortfolios with GoogleApps workshop with secondary teachers at Colegio Montserrat in Barcelona, Spain. To help me adjust to jet lag, we started today's workshop at 3 PM. For the next two days, we will start at 9 AM.

Today, we started with a version of the presentation that I did at Castilleja School in Palo Alto two weeks ago, but because I only had a half day in that workshop and here I have 2.5 days, I only covered part of the presentation today...  I was conscious that I was being simultaneously translated, so I slowed down my pace. After our coffee break, all the participants logged in to their brand new Google Apps Education domain and I introduced many of the teachers to GoogleDocs for the first time. They wrote up a few notes about what they learned from my presentation, and then I showed them how to share their document with a partner. Their assignment before tomorrow: upload some of their professional teaching documents into GoogleDocs to build their digital archive. I discovered that now GoogleDocs will convert .docx and .xlsx files from MS Office 2007+, but not .pptx. You are still able to upload those newest Powerpoint file types, but they were saved in the original format, not converted to GoogleDocs.

I thought it was a pretty successful short first day. Tomorrow we will begin to use Google Sites to build their professional teaching portfolios. All of the teachers have laptops (mostly Windows Vista) and the secondary students will have netbooks next year. For the school this is the ideal time to convert their existing student Powerpoint portfolios into an online format. The school received training from my colleague Evangeline Harris Stefanakis several years ago, so they have a good grounding in portfolio theory. Tomorrow, I will be sharing strategies for developing Interactive Portfolios using GoogleApps. It was good to start with GoogleDocs today, since it follows my three-level process, beginning with a collection of digital documents. (A version of a journal article discussing this 3-level process was just published in English in a Portuguese Educom journal in PDF.)

Working in two languages is interesting... slows me down and simplifies my vocabulary. The translator told me I was doing fine. Reminds me of the workshop I did in Japan over 3 years ago... the first time I used GoogleDocs to develop ePortfolios. Since that time, I have seen major changes to GoogleApps, into a very rich toolset for developing student-centered ePortfolios, especially in schools and colleges adopting GoogleApps Education Edition for GMail. I can hardly wait until Google releases additional tools inside all versions of GoogleApps. I am hoping that Picasa, Reader and Blogger are available by September; I am also hoping that a protected version of YouTube will also be available soon, since video storage is a major issue in schools. Through the GoogleApps Marketplace, there are other great add-ons inside GoogleApps, some of them free, such as the Aviary Tools for image editing, voice recording and music creation. I wonder if Aviary is also working on a video editing tool? That would almost complete the toolset!

Part 2 of the workshop tomorrow. Should I introduce these teachers to digital stories in ePortfolios? I'm told they all know MovieMaker. Hmmm... Erin, my workshop assistant/daughter, isn't with me. I'll have to ask them tomorrow after we get through Google Sites. I'm not sure I can handle more than 20 teachers doing digital stories, while I am fighting jet lag! Stay tuned!

UPDATE: I introduced them to Digital Storytelling for two hours in the late afternoon, using my hands-on activity using seven images and a single audio file. They were excited to explore further on their own! On the last day, we explored more on reflection and feedback, and I introduced them to ietherpad. Then they used that tool to begin writing a vision statement for ePortfolios in their school.

Fruits of my Work

Today, I received the following email from Scot Hoffman, a teacher I worked with in Mumbai:

... I’ve been reading your blog and can see that holding space for a ePortfolio to be a student owned space is becoming important to define.  We had a great year with the ePortfolios.  They were so successful that we couldn’t really get away from them all year.  We ended up the year showing 35 teachers how to start their own professional portfolios.  I’ve also been busy with a Master’s Program through Boston University.  Hopefully my involvement in the program will give me opportunities to continue to build my practices and maybe even do some research to find out their effect.  Here is a blog post on Shabbi’s new blog that I wrote about ePortfolios.  Shabbi’s new blog is going to be worth following. I suppose that you’re probably the last person in the world who could get anything from it, but I did want to share it with you as a fruit of your work with us.  http://paradigmshift21.edublogs.org/2010/06/16/eportfolios-a-thread-through-the-21st-century/ 

...it seems like you’re continuing to gain momentum, reach, and foment in pursuit of giving students the keys to their futures.

I was very impressed with the work of the 3rd Grade Teachers at ASB in Mumbai. As you can see by this posting, they are preparing their students for the future in very profound ways using ePortfolios. They will be the third grade/primary case study in my book.

Japanese & Portuguese version

I just received a copy of the Japanese translation of my Balancing the Two Faces of ePortfolios diagram.

Translated by Junko NEMOTO, PhD, Kumamoto University, Japan, who told me:

It helped us when we talked and decided our portfolio concept.
I also would like to use sometime to explain the portfolio to the students.

That makes three translations: Spanish, Catalan, and now Japanese. This conceptual model seems to make sense in multiple contexts.

The paper was just published (in English) in a Portuguese Educom journal in PDF.

UPDATE: Now I have a Mandarin version of the diagram, thanks to Andy Birch and Mei Ding, Hong Kong Academy.

Corporate e-portfolios

From the newsletter I received today from Eliot Masie's Learning TRENDS:

Learner Portfolios Emerging - Win for Instructors & Learners: I have been tracking an increase in interest by Corporate Learning leaders to experiment with the use of e-Portfolios for their learners. These are used in Universities, creating a sharable file for each student with an updated resume, personal statement, examples of work and other assets that would be of interest to future employers and current teachers.  A few companies are now conducting experiments with e-Portfolios, allowing learners to build a profile that is of high value when they enroll for internal corporate training programs.  Imagine being able to see profiles of each learner in a leadership development program, with their backgrounds, perspectives, work samples and more.  Some LMS systems are adding e-portfolio options and there are a number of robust open source projects detailed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_portfolio

Sent from my iPad

My Presentations at AAEEBL in July

I am doing three presentations or workshops at the ePortfolio Conference hosted by AAEEBL in July in Boston:

• Workshop on Monday, July 19, 2010: Your Digital Self: Web 2.0 as Personal Learning Environment and E-Portfolio
  Web 2.0 tools facilitate self-expression, reflection, online interaction and feedback. This hands-on workshop will focus on Web 2.0 tools that can be used to construct a PLE for a variety of purposes, and provide a broader look at using these tools within the context of ePortfolios and Digital Identity Development: Web Aggregators/AJAX Start Pages, Blogs & RSS Feeds, Social Networks/Twitter, and Interactive Productivity Tools/GoogleApps. Bring your wireless laptop!
  
  
• Keynote Address on Wednesday, July 21, 2010:
  Blurring the Boundaries between ePortfolio Development and Social Networking
  Electronic Portfolios have been with us for 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 Web 2.0 cloud?
  
  
• Presentation TBA: 
  The Future of mPortfolios (m=mobile) for Lifelong Learning
  Most people are carrying powerful computers in their pockets, whether a smart phone, iPod Touch or the emerging iPad/tablet/XO3 market in schools. Combined with web-based portfolio tools, learners have the potential to create/maintain a working portfolio anytime/anywhere. Explore the current status and future possibilities. This session will be more of a conversation/group brainstorm than a presentation.

All of my presentations will be appropriate for both a K-12 and higher education audience.

Another misunderstanding of term "electronic portfolio"

Thanks to Kathleen Wilbanks' tweet today, I read Michigan’s Public Policy Reaction to The Race to the Top. Here is the third paragraph, referencing electronic portfolios:

The increased availability of data to teachers, parents, students, administrators, colleges, and employers is hoped to improve instruction and heighten learning experiences for students. These reforms could include but are not limited to the creation of an electronic portfolio containing the test scores, performance records, and grades of each student and teacher as well as the amount of access to the system (with proper privacy settings) to researchers in order to quickly evaluate and replace failing systems. These reforms also focus on linking individual teachers and individual students regardless of their spatial proximity. In Delaware, a state discussed further later on, The Education Association placed a significant amount of value on the development of a data system that would track student performance from pre-school to college and/or career. The hope is for teachers and administrators to become aware of at-risk students before the student drops-out or becomes "unreachable".

The goals as stated here are very important. However, in my opinion, what is described here, this tracking of performance ("test scores, performance records, and grades of each student"), is an assessment/accountability system, that they are calling an electronic portfolio; but this model is far different from a student-centered electronic portfolio that is a learner's own digital footprint, or their story of their own learning over time. I wish we could be much clearer about the difference between these two paradigms. When "electronic portfolios" are define with institution-centered terminology, the importance of a student-centered process (collection, selection, reflection, direction, presentation) seems to be ignored. How do we raise the awareness of the larger community that there is another side to electronic portfolios? How do we show that an electronic portfolio can be a space for students to explore and showcase their interests, purpose and passions? In the U.K., an electronic portfolio can also include a learner's personal development plan (PDP). I am just asking for a balanced perspective when using the term, or to at least recognize the multiple purposes.

Training in Brooklyn

I just finished four days of ePortfolio training in South Brooklyn and Staten Island. This was my third trip to do training for the New York City Schools under their Title IID grant. It has been refreshing to see a large school district approach ePortfolios from a learner-centered perspective (we started with teachers developing their own professional portfolios using Google Sites) and then transferring that experience to their students. In the second trip, we added digital narratives to the portfolio training (a very intense two days!) but the examples that I saw last week were quite inspiring. This week, we focused on a planning process to implement ePortfolios in a school.

When I think back over the teachers I have met this spring, from the International Schools Conference at the  American School of Bombay (ASB), to Bucklands Beach Intermediate (BBI) in Auckland, New Zealand, to the teachers in New York City, I saw some of the extremes in opportunity in our worldwide education system.  In the private International Schools, the use of technology was assumed... every student had a laptop, or there was a very low student-to-computer ratio. BBI is a public school in a relatively affluent neighborhood, where more than 10% of the students have bought a laptop and bring it to school every day, in addition to the sets of laptops that are available to use in classrooms. In NYC, I worked with both private and public school teachers. Yesterday, I was meeting with high school teachers, and I was corrected about my erroneous assumption that high school students created most of their written work with a computer. We didn't talk about access to technology, although it didn't seem to be as high a need as expressed by some of the teachers at BBI.

My impressions, as I think back over these three examples, is that the "haves" (affluent students) are getting a technology-rich education, but the "have-nots" (low income students) are not reaping the constructivist/creative/collaborative benefits of educational technology that have emerged with Web 2.0 (as contrasted with 1980-90s models of direct instruction/LMS). That is why I am pleased to introduce a student-centered constructivist approach to electronic portfolios to schools in New York City. I've seen this approach successfully implemented in schools from Mumbai to Auckland to rural California (my trip next week). Electronic portfolios should not be just for students in affluent schools; we need to implement this student-centered strategy with all schools. That raises issues of sufficient access to networks and tools, but I think these problems will be solved in the next few years, especially as tablet/iPad-like devices become more affordable. Or until schools allow mobile phones to be used for educational purposes. But that is the subject of a future reflection.