EDUCA 2010 Conference in Lisbon

It is always interesting to get another perspective on my work from another country. I provided the opening keynote for EDUCA 2010 sponsored by the University of Lisbon, Portugal, their First International Meeting devoted to the problems of using ICT for learning. It was literally standing room only during the opening session... the largest group I have addressed in years (including the AAEEBL conference in July). By a show of hands at the beginning of my keynote, about half of the room were K-12 teachers, the other half were from higher education. The meeting had one distinction: the hashtag #ticeduca2010 (ICT and Education Conference)  was tweeted more than the Summit Meeting of NATO at Lisbon being held at the same time. I guess the followers of the NATO conference are not active on Twitter, like these educators are! Their blog points out the highlights of the conference. I left the social dinner prior to the music! Jet lag overpowered me in the middle this four day trip!

Here are a few of the comments about my presentation tweeted with my Twitter ID while I was presenting:

• Helen Barrett @eportfolios keynote about e-Portfolios was very effective and passionated about their key goals, functions #ticeduca2010
• Apresentação de Helen @eportfolios Barrett terminou. Tempo para café. Até já...
• Everyone in education shoud check Helen @eportfolios Barrett blog - http://blog.helenbarrett.org/ #ticeduca2010
• Helen @eportfolios 3 niveles de desarrollo de eportolios #ticeduca2010
• #ticeduca2010 - Helen @eportfolios Barret http://electronicportfolios.org/balance/
• Engaging slides and some key discussion points for attendees of #CILT2010 via @eportfolios http://slidesha.re/dbuyaz
• #ticeduca2010 @eportfolios RT @jlramos1957: Helen Barret presentation in slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/eportfolios/necc2010
• Helen @eportfolios Barret RT @grahamattwell: Standing room only for @helenBarret at #ticeduca2010 conference in Lisbon
• #ticeduca2010 Helen @eportfolios Barrett explora este link http://ow.ly/3co83
• "O que é um Portfolio em Educação?" Helen @eportfolios Barrett
• #ticeduca2010 Balancing the Two Faces of ePortfolios @eportfolios a iniciar...
• #ticeduca2010 Sessão inicial encerrada... a seguir Helen @eportfolios Barret

Here are my slides:

Lisbon nov2010

At the end of the presentation, I showed Erin's Digital Story:


I am amazed at the number of graduate students who came up to talk to me about their research on e-portfolios... and who are referencing my work. I also have offers to translate some of my diagrams into Portuguese! I also have a pending request from the U.S. Department of Education to use one of my visuals, which I intend to adapt to the new GoogleApps environment.

I am also getting used to my new tiny MacBook Air. I missed copying some of my files (like a local copy of my website), but I have wifi access in my hotel and at the conference. I am still using my iPad for listening to podcasts, primarily because of its long battery life. I do miss my iPhone, though; I don't have an international data plan, so it stays in airplane mode while I am out of the U.S. I head home tomorrow. Because of the NATO Summit, I won't get to do much sightseeing today... all the tour companies have canceled their routes today. Time to get some needed rest.

vPortfolios from nick.com?

My colleague, Jonathon Richter, has been talking about ePortfolios in virtual worlds. He shared a website with me that looks interesting. It doesn't look like an interactive portfolio (collection of artifacts) with authentic feedback, but it includes an opportunity to "record your accomplishments" (reflection on learning).

Virtual reality meets real world education with Nick.com’s The Big Help. Start by creating your own virtual persona and personalized “Club House.” Then simply record your accomplishments to win special, limited edition prizes. Deck out your virtual room with a Legit Locker or hop on your Big Help skateboard and show off your avatar’s new Varsity Jacket. With activities ranging from stopping off at the library to starting a reading club with friends, the Club offers tons of ways for students to step up by “improving their bodies, mind, communities and planet.”

This website is part of Nick.com's Get Schooled Challenge, an effort to get people to step up in support of education.

PrPl and PCB: a new e-portfolio environment in the cloud?

Stanford University has been doing research on e-portfolios for more than ten years, and the latest article by Kim, Ng, and Lim provides the most interesting framework I have seen: PrPl Semantic Index and Personal Cloud Butler (PCB). It matches my concept of the Digital Archive for Life (2009)

This article (in the British Journal of Educational Technology, Volume 41, Issue 6, pages 1018–1028, November 2010) is pretty exciting: "When cloud computing meets with Semantic Web: A new design for e-portfolio systems in the social media era."  The abstract:

The need, use, benefit and potential of e-portfolios have been analysed and discussed by a substantial body of researchers in the education community. However, the development and implementation approaches of e-portfolios to date have faced with various challenges and limitations. This paper presents a new approach of an e-portfolio system design based on Private–Public (PrPl) data index system, which integrates cloud computing applications and storages with Semantic Web architecture, making semantic web-based visualisation and advanced intelligent search possible. It also discusses how the distinctive attributes of the PrPl-based digital asset management system can serve as a large-scale robust e-portfolio system that can address issues with scalability, sustainability, adoptability and interoperability. With such a new distinctive design, a large-scale deployment at a state or national level becomes possible at a very cost-effective manner and also such large-scale deployment with intelligent digital asset management and search features create numerous opportunities in education.

The following article about the Personal Cloud Butler (PCB) is referenced in the document, "A Distributed Social-Networking Infrastructure with Personal-Cloud Butlers."

The PrPl/PCB system uses the mobile phone number as the unique user ID, which restricts its use in K-12 schools, since students don't often have phones until they are in high school... but there are also Google Voice numbers!

I recently started using Mint.com. It is an aggregator for a person's financial data. In my mint.com account, I see all of my financial data aggregated in one window: my TSA, checking and savings accounts, mortgage balance, assets, loan balances, and my brokerage account (if I had one!). The system pulls data from these different accounts (with my permission, of course) to provide an overall picture of my financial capital or monetary assets. The system is created by the makers of Quicken, and uses an email address as a unique user ID.

We need a similar system for human capital or intellectual assets of knowledge workers. Some think that tool is an online vita with hyperlinks. Others think it is an e-portfolio, although I believe an e-portfolio goes beyond the "accounting" function, and the portfolio process supports the development of these competencies (knowledge/skills/abilities). That's why I think this article is so interesting. We can store our evidence in many places online (a federated cloud-based storage system); we just need a tool to aggregate that data for different purposes and different audiences.

Of course, there are a lot of e-portfolio systems which match evidence of achieving outcomes defined by any number of rubrics, aggregating faculty-generated assessment data. The challenge is that these systems impose a structure that often doesn't facilitate learner creativity and personalization. But other systems have been set up to "harvest" assessment data from learner-owned web-based portfolios, such as WSU's Harvesting Gradebook or BSU's rGrade system. Right now, these systems are server-based, and it would be great if they were converted into SaaS, available in the cloud.

I am doing a lot of training in using GoogleApps Education Edition for student portfolios in K-12 schools: artifacts stored in Google Docs/Picasa/YouTube (a PrPl database would be useful here); a reflective journal in Blogger; and thematically-organized presentation portfolios in Google Sites, especially for those states and institutions that have "gone Google." What is also missing from that whole environment is a system to collect evaluation data based on rubrics. For me, that is another missing link in using some of these Web 2.0 tools for learner-centered e-portfolios while assessing learner outcomes against rubrics.

Electronic Portfolios in STEM

In preparation for my participation in the STEMTech Conference next week in Orlando, I prepared a two-page definition of e-portfolios for use in round table discussions. It may be too late to make any changes, but I would love some feedback.
Eport Definition


Here are the source documents referenced in this definition document:

• Balancing the Two Faces of ePortfolios
  http://eft.educom.pt/index.php/eft/article/viewFile/161/102 
• Online Personal Learning Environments: Structuring Electronic Portfolios for Lifelong and Life Wide Learning
  http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dd76m5s2_39fsmjdk 
• Managing Oneself by Peter Drucker
  http://www.public.navy.mil/usff/Documents/managing_oneself.pdf 
• Effective Practice with e-Portfolios from JISC
  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/effectivepracticeeportfolios 
• National Educational Technology Plan
  http://www.ed.gov/sites/default/files/NETP-2010-final-report.pdf

ePortfolios for Managing Oneself and Portfolio Careers

On Monday and Tuesday, I attended a Conference on Advising Highly Talented Undergraduates, held at Notre Dame University. On the first day, Dr. Richard Light of Harvard University provided the opening keynote address on the Challenges for Advising Highly Talented Undergraduates. He mentioned an article by Peter Drucker entitled, "Managing Oneself" published in the Harvard Business Review in 1999. I found several copies of the article through an iPhone Google search, and downloaded it. The purpose for the article struck a cord with me:

“Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves
– their strengths, their values, and how best they perform.”

We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you've got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out. 

But with opportunity comes responsibility. Companies today aren't managing their employees' careers; knowledge workers must, effectively, be their own chief executive officers. It's up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years. To do those things well, you'll need to cultivate a deep understanding of yourself-- not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.

Here is where an ePortfolio can provide an ongoing environment where individuals can develop and manage their own personal SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). The article contains the following sections:

• What are my strengths?
• How do I perform?
• What are my values?
• Where do I belong?
• What should I contribute?
• Responsibility for Relationships
• The Second Half of your Life

I can see a powerful purpose for ePortfolios: managing knowledge workers' career development, from high school through late career. There is another opportunity: managing "portfolio careers." As I was preparing for my closing keynote at this conference, I explored websites that focused on Portfolio Careers:

• Portfolio Career and Professional Fulfillment:Flexible Working Patterns in the 21st Century
  http://www.suite101.com/content/portfolio-career-and-professional-fulfilment-a136379
  "A portfolio career offers flexible working arrangements to suit people and their personal and professional requirements during the 21st century"
• Portfolio Careers: Creating a Career of Multiple Part-Time Jobs http://www.quintcareers.com/portfolio_careers.html
• The Future Of Work: Portfolio Careers
  http://gigaom.com/collaboration/the-future-of-work-portfolio-careers/
• Portrait Of A Portfolio Career: Answer To The "Perfect Job"? http://www.successfromtheinsideout.com/e_letters/portrait.html
• The portfolio career: To find fulfillment try simultaneous careers http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2006/07/04/the-portfolio-career-to-find-fulfillment-try-simultaneous-careers/
• Portfolio Careers / Portfolio Lives
  http://ourfounder.typepad.com/leblog/2010/06/portfolio-careers-portfolio-lives.html

I also found this video that encapsulated some of the key elements of portfolio careers:

Next Generation Journalist: Nick Williams from Adam Westbrook on Vimeo.

"Today, security means being employable, even if you don't have a job." The speaker talks about the concept of personal branding: "everyone needs to know what they are uniquely brilliant at… what they're passionate about, what they love doing, and what they're good at doing, and then finding people who want to hire them at that.

Slides for my keynote presentation are posted on Slideshare.

Workshop Backchannel and Recording Audio Reflections

On Friday, October 15, I worked with faculty from Mt. San Antonio College in the Los Angeles area, with colleagues John Ittelson and Jeffrey Yan. The workshop was an Introduction to Electronic Portfolios, with John and I providing an overview in the morning, and Jeffrey conducted a hands-on workshop in the afternoon with Digication. It was fun to collaborate with two other ePortfolio colleagues. We set up a typewith.me document as a "back channel" for the workshop, used the page to post a lot of hyperlinked resources, and invited the participants to post questions throughout the workshop. While John and I were presenting in the morning, Jeffrey answered a lot of the questions that were posted. In the afternoon, I added more resource links. When we were through, the participants had a page of resources to use as a reference. It was the second time that week that I used that tool for group collaboration and feedback.

Jeff shared a great idea for doing audio reflections, that one of the users of his system shared: Google Voice. In the privacy of his car, this teacher called his Google Voice number and left, as a voice mail message, his reflection on his class. Google Voice saves the message in MP3 format, which can be download and included in his portfolio. Once recorded, if he didn't like what he heard, he would record another message. It took some practice, but it is an easy way to record audio for an ePortfolio reflection. Other tools we discussed for audio recording reflections: audioboo.com (includes an iOS or Android app).

High Tech High

I have spent the last two days visiting High Tech High in San Diego, talking with teachers, administrators and students, and visiting two different courses for teachers. I still have some more time to visit with a few more people and to debrief with their Director of Research, but I realize that I learned a lot more than how they are implementing DPs (digital portfolios) with their students; I also learned a lot about their philosophy of personalizing learning for a diverse student body. Since the school opened in 2001, every student has maintained a digital portfolio, which is used to support their POL (Presentation of Learning) twice a year and their TPOL (Transitional Presentation of Learning) at the end of the year as the student's rationale as to why they are ready for the next grade (or ready to graduate?). Even more important, every teacher has a digital portfolio, but some of them use these websites more like an instructional management system, as a resource for students. Some of the more impressive teacher portfolios showcase the project-based learning at the core of the school philosophy.

There is technical support in each building as well as a system-wide IT Director. The entire system adopted Google Apps over a year ago with over 4,000 accounts mapped to their Active Directory, and also has a WordPress server; these tools are used for different purposes in the program. Here is a school that matches my three-level model:

• Level 1. portfolio as storage (collection of artifacts)--Everyone has server space, with a folder called MyDP to store their portfolio, or a file that links to a portfolio developed on another server. The school also has three video servers, controlled by the teachers.
• Level 2. portfolio as workspace (collection plus reflection/metacognition, organized chronologically)--The school has a WordPress server and many teachers have their students use WordPress blogs for day-to-day assignments and reflections.
• Level 3. portfolio as showcase (selection, summative reflection and presentation, organized thematically)--Many teachers and students are moving from their original Dreamweaver-based DP over to Google Sites. These portfolios support student-led conferences (SLC)--which I observed--and the public Presentations of Learning

Four design principles underlie the work of High Tech High: personalization, adult world connection, common intellectual mission, teacher as designer. There are actually nine schools in the San Diego area; I only visited two of them. I will be writing up a more in-depth case study for my book, as the high school example. I asked one group of students how the public nature of their DPs and POLs impacted their learning. As one student said:

I want that work to be good. I know I'm up to it... It makes you want to understand what you're learning... My DP helps me self-reflect. I could update it daily. I self-reflect on how well I do. I learn from myself as well. I see my strengths; I see my weaknesses and how I can improve. I work harder to do better.

ISTE 2011 Proposals

In a late night writing marathon, I submitted three proposals to ISTE 2011 in Philadelphia:

• Presentation: Student-Centered Interactive ePortfolios with GoogleApps
  Create a comprehensive student-centered system supporting all three levels of ePortfolio development: Create/collaborate/store/share artifacts in GoogleDocs; Reflection/Feedback using blogging; Presentation Websites with GoogleSites. [this is my book adapted to the GoogleApps environment, similar to my 2010 presentation]
• BYOL Presentation: mPortfolios: Make ePortfolio Development Easier with Mobile Devices
  Bring your mobile device (iOS or Android) to explore mPortfolio development. Create/upload artifacts (text, images, audio, video). Download free apps for blogging, GoogleApps, Mahara, others.
• BYOL 3 hour Workshop: Hands-on mPortfolio Development with iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) Bring your mobile iOS device (iPhone, iPad, iPodTouch) to explore mPortfolio development. Create/upload artifacts (text, images, audio, video). Download free apps for blogging, GoogleApps, Mahara.

I only expect one of these proposals to be accepted. I set up a new Google Site to begin to develop the concept of mPortfolios. I was shocked that the Site name was still available: https://sites.google.com/site/mportfolios/

ePortfolio California Summit

I participated in the ePortfolio California Summit, co-facilitating a session on Workplace portfolios (First job and beyond). It was my role to establish a common definition for e-portfolios in this session, and to provide a few ideas about using Web 2.0 tools to maintain career-long ePortfolios. The participants were from higher education institutions from throughout California. I introduced the team to Etherpad (typewith.me) to replace flip charts in group brainstorming. In the afternoon, there were presentations from the Executive Director of WASC, and a report of the standards committee. 

E port California

View more presentations from Helen Barrett.

Oregon Apps Google Summit

I visited Sherwood, Oregon to participate in the first Oregon Google Summit. I set up a new web page with my presentations (in GoogleDocs) and links to my video. I also set up a page on their website. I enjoyed meeting some of the educators in Oregon who are leading this effort, plus a few people from Google who led technical sessions. My "aha" moment: the fact that Folders in GoogleDocs are really tags that can be used to classify documents; single Docs can be tagged to multiple folders without making multiple copies. This concept is different from how we manage files on our computers or server space, which will require a different level of explanation. But it allows portfolio artifacts to be tagged in folders for individual classes (collection), and then also tagged to a Portfolio folder (selection) which can be shared with a teacher. See this Google blog entry by a high school teacher.

My proposals to the Northwest Council for Computer Education conference in March 2011 have been approved:

• Presentation: GoogleApps ePortfolios
  Oregon was the first state to adopt GoogleApps for all K-12 schools. These powerful tools are ready-made for teachers and students to maintain electronic portfolios. Get an overview of creating artifacts using Google Docs and Picasa, a reflective learning portfolio using Blogger, and a showcase/assessment/presentation portfolio with Google Sites.
• 3-hour Workshop: Create ePortfolios using GoogleApps
  Oregon was the first state to adopt GoogleApps for all K-12 schools. These powerful tools are ready-made for creating and maintaining electronic portfolios by teachers and students. Learn how to create  artifacts using Google Docs and Picasa, a reflective learning portfolio using Blogger, and a showcase/assessment/presentation portfolio with Google Sites. (March 3, 2011, 8:30 AM)

New ePortfolio online publications

I have been collecting some new articles on ePortfolios in my delicious.com account. Here are some of the most interesting:

• The Complexity of Implementing e-Portfolios
  Lisa Gray (JISC) and Gordon Joyes (University of Nottingham) spoke about the complexities involved in implementing e-portfolios and the concepts that need to be understood to achieve a successful implementation. A model for e-portfolio implementation built around threshold concepts, misconceptions and pre-conceptions: The roles of Purpose, Learning Activity Design, Process, Ownership, and the Transformative and Disruptive nature of e-portfolios. Includes links to video of presentation at the Mahara UK 2010 conference.
• Effective practice with e-portfolios: How can the UK experience inform practice? (PDF) Speaking of the Disruptive Nature of ePortfolios, this paper documents research by Gordon Joyes, Lisa Gray, and Elizabeth Hartnell-Young (Victoria Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, Australia). This paper introduces the background to the JISC work within the e-portfolio domain in the UK and presents an overview of past and current activities and the drivers for these developments. This is followed by a review of JISC’s approach at drawing out the learning and implications for e-portfolio practice from this extensive collection of work and its dissemination. The analysis of twenty one recently funded projects involving the use of e-portfolios in the UK is introduced. The findings suggest that e- portfolio implementation is particularly complex in part due to the number of stakeholders involved, the contexts in which e-portfolios can be applied and the number of purposes they can have. This research suggests that there are threshold concepts related to e-portfolio implementation and that the journey in developing an understanding of effective practice is not straightforward. However a means of supporting this journey is suggested.
• The Accountability/Improvement Paradox- from Inside Higher Ed - "there is an inherent paradox in the relationship between assessment for accountability and for improvement."

I also found some interesting websites about K-12 ePortfolios:

• Column: Students' e-portfolios chronicle school year - 5th grade students using ePortfolios to support student-led conferences!
• K-12 Digital Portfolios - Oyster River School District's website on Digital Portfolios (NH)
• Reflective Practice by Carole McCulloch - a view of her research and think pieces on reflective practices.
• Plan to Implement - a page that I added to my Google Site on ePortfolios with GoogleApps. This page covers some recent work with school districts I have been working with to address five elements of the planning process: Vision, Skills, Incentives, Resources and an Action Plan. I will be using this website as the foundation for my presentation on Friday at the Google Summit in Oregon.

bPortfolios at SPU

Seattle Pacific University has adopted Wordpress.com as their students' "bPortfolio" system. Each student establishes their own account, and records their reflections in a blog entry. I attended a workshop yesterday that the faculty requested, to set up a WordPress.com account and see what the students are experiencing. Prior to a year ago, this university used one of the commercial ePortfolio tools. Since that time, although the transition has not always been smooth, they have provided good support materials, including video tutorials, and a good set of presentations on iTunesU on Reflective Learning with Electronic Portfolios recorded on March 23, 2010. I am especially impressed by the video on Metacognition: Reflective Thinking Strategies by Art Ellis, Director of the Center for Global Curriculum Studies, who discusses strategies for promoting student reflection on their learning process.

The students set up their WordPress.com site with Categories with represent the Standards that the students are required to demonstrate. All entries and a final meta-reflection are assigned a specific category. Students are also encouraged to assign their own tags to entries, and to include a Tag cloud in addition to the categories. The final entry is the meta-reflection or self-assessment of achieving the standard. Since the blog is organized in reverse chronological order, when selecting the category/standard, the meta-reflection is the first entry shown.

The question of accountability/assessment always comes up, and this institution is NCATE accredited. I have talked with the person at SPU who has set up an Excel spreadsheet template to share student portfolios with a designated assessor, who is paid separately to evaluate the student's self-evaluation.  I saw an example yesterday and basically it includes links to the students' bPortfolios, and space for an assessor to record evaluation of the students' self-assessment of their portfolio. The assessor opens the student's bPortfolio link in a their browser window, and records the evaluation in the Excel file. (I'll bet it could be done in a GoogleDocs spreadsheet, but I haven't tried to adapt it to an online format.) The rubrics are included in the spreadsheet document. The spreadsheet data from the separate assessors are then merged into a single spreadsheet and will be used for reporting and analysis.

Since I am teaching an online graduate course for SPU this quarter, I am able to see how this process works. All of the students had already set up their Wordpress accounts. My course requires them to write a weekly reflection in their bPortfolios on the weekly themes. So, I have an opportunity to see this process in action. There is lots of room for improvement, but as I said in an earlier blog entry last year,  "This Teacher Ed program has figured out how to balance the needs of the institution with the needs of their teacher candidates... who just might want to replicate the process with their own students... with tools that are free and available in schools."

Collaboration in Online Course

This fall I am again teaching an online graduate class for Seattle Pacific University, Issues and Advances in Educational Technology. Like last year, I am trying to use open/free tools that students could use with their own students. So, we are using delicious.com (to record and share weekly research of online resources related to the weekly theme), typewith.me (to collaboratively reflect on the links shared and the weekly theme), blogs maintained on wordpress.com (to reflect on the learning for the week and provide feedback), Google Sites (to develop a collaborative project), Google Docs (sharing documents for feedback, and forms/spreadheet for weekly grades), and one of the digital storytelling tools (to develop a digital narrative).

Last year, we also set up a private Google Group to communicate with the students and to maintain a record of communication for the students. This year, however, I was asked by the university to use their Blackboard server for communication and grades. I must admit it made the beginning of the class much smoother (not having to get the students to sign up for the Google Group). However, one week into the class, I am feeling like there is less collaboration: the email is from me to the class, but there is no online record of the communication; when the students respond to my emails it goes to me not to the group, so the students can't support each other. It puts me at the center of the process, which I don't want or like. In the third week of the class, our topic is "collaboration" and I think I will move the class email over to another private Google group. We have also set up a grou.ps "Ning-replacement" that we might use as an experiment. I might have the students use that site for discussions and my announcements in future weeks.

I have also noticed that the students' initial writing in typewith.me looks like a series of short monologues (very much like a Blackboard discussion) rather than like a collaborative discussion. Old habits of online discussions are hard to break. But it is fun to explore these new tools with these graduate students. Each week we cover one of these themes: reflection, collaboration, 21st Century Learning, critical thinking, online safety, copyright, productivity, change, innovation. These themes correlate with the new Washington state Educational Technology Standards for students. My goal is that these future teachers are aware of these standards, and the many free tools that are available. I am finding that there are many perceived barriers, so it is interesting to explore the opportunities as well as the challenges!

Blogging on Paper

I found the following blog entry:
Learning to Blog Using Paper - a 7th Grade Teacher's clever introduction to blogging (starting with a paper exercise) and using "sticky notes" as comments. Here are the instructions for students (provided in Scribd):
- Seventh Grade Blogging Rules
- The Art and Aspirations of a Commenter

These are great guidelines for reflection and feedback by adolescents. It also looks like a great PD activity for teachers who are not familiar with blogging. 

e-Portfolios in Developing Countries (using mobile phones)

I received this "feel good" email:

I am deeply grateful for the excellent articles you have posted on e-portfolio on your website.  You would not know the great service you are providing to less fortunate educators in Third and Developing World that are not as nearly as priveleged as people in the developed world.  At the moment I am doing a course (Masters in Instructional Technology and Design) with the Open University of Malaysia.  One of the courses, involves the preparation of a e-portfolio as a final project.  I was just about reaching a point of frustration, because I did not know exactly how to set about doing this project.  I clustermate of mine who is also involved in the program, referred me to your Website, and you took care of my problems.  You are really a genius, professor.  Your knowledge is vast.  What is even greater, is your unselfish resolution to publish make such a rish deposit available to us the less fortunate.  Words cannot expess my gratitude.  May I encourage you to keep up the good work, and never falter in the work you are doing for the less fortunate, for you shall reap a rich reward in due season.  You are truly a missionary to poor countries.

P.S:  Do you have anything on the use of mobile phone text messaging (SMS) to teach children who are functionally illiterate.  My final thesis is in this area, because the population of Jamaica is appox 2.7 million people, with 2.4 million Mobile phone users, yet they have banned its use in many schools for some of the same reasons it is banned elsewhere.  My purpose is to show that the technology or tool can be used constructively.

Of course, I am flattered by the kind comments. His P.S. raises concerns about access to the Internet in developing countries. I received this comment in a message from Trent Batson, AAEEBL's Executive Director:

...we heard a woman from Guatemala lamenting that few kids have Internet access but "everyone has cell phones."  Not smart phones, yet, but at least that's doable for places like Guatemala.

I've also been communicating with educators from Egypt to Brazil, and because of the lack of connectivity, I often write to them about implementing ePortfolios with tools we were using in the late 90s. (I read a recent report about the high cost of Internet access in developing countries compared to average monthly income.) But the universal connectivity tool is the cell phone. My granddaughter updates her Facebook status here in the U.S. from her cell phone (not a smart phone). I want to learn more about connectivity from cell phones with online generic tools used to develop ePortfolios, such as GoogleApps and WordPress. I know it is possible with smartphone apps, but most of the developing world is using SMS. I will do another post soon about the iPhone Portfolio apps I have been collecting.

K-12 and Higher Education ePortfolio Support

What is the most effective way to meet the needs of K-12 schools for supporting the implementation of ePortfolios? Is there a need to bring ePortfolio information/resources/training to events that K-12 teachers normally attend, such as ASCD, ISTE, NSDC, BLC, and other K-12 education conferences? We can spin our wheels, and not get much traction if we don't recognize the differences between the K-12 and higher education cultures. I spent eight years in K-12, six as the Staff Development Coordinator for the Fairbanks School District, and another 14 years in the Teacher Education program at the University of Alaska Anchorage. I have seen both sides of education, although I didn't start studying ePortfolios until I arrived in Anchorage. Most of my work with ePortfolios in the 90s was focused on K-12, but with the PT3 grants, my focus shifted to higher education in 2000. In 2005-2007, I conducted a research project on implementing ePortfolios in secondary schools, sponsored by Taskstream. Since that time, my consulting time has been more focused on K-12. Perhaps some of my more recent experiences can illustrate some of the differences between K-12 and Higher Ed.

I did make a connection with one of the few K-12 educators attending AAEEBL's July 2010 conference (which was co-located with another higher education conference), and I will be working with her organization on some K-12 ePortfolio activities, still to be developed. (But they have little or no funding... another problem with K-12.) I am also continuing my self-funded research on how ePortfolios are being implemented in K-12 schools: In October, I am planning to visit several High Tech Highs in the San Diego area, where they have been implementing digital portfolios with every student since the first school opened in 2000. In mid-October, the students are leading student-led conferences, so I am getting permission to observe and to conduct some short focus groups with students and to talk with the lead teachers.

Earlier this week, I conducted a two-day planning/training session with a small school district in North Dakota that wants to begin implementing ePortfolios over the next two-three years. I met with a committee of teacher leaders for a day, then made a presentation to the entire district (60 teachers!) for a couple of hours, followed by an activity where I led the committee through the Change Game (a simulation to move a school district through the stages of change). I also had both principals and the superintendent participating in this two-hour simulation. The district is planning two more early release days before I go back in January for a two-day hands-on workshop. So the committee and I planned how they could best use that time. We also set up a Google Group to maintain communication between face-to-face meetings. This is similar to the work that I did for the last two years with a small school district in California.

I did 10 days of face-to-face workshops under a Title IID grant (No Child Left Behind) for New York City Schools last spring. I am working via Skype with an individual high school in Manhattan, where the lead teacher is a Google Certified Teacher, so I am learning a lot from how her teachers and students are beginning to implement ePortfolios across the school. I hope to visit that school when I am in New York in December, to see how the process is going.

Last spring, I visited the American School of Bombay, after conducting monthly 45-minute teleconferences for them (over their lunch hour or before school). While in the school, I had appointments to meet with individual teachers or groups of teachers. I saw some wonderful examples from their third grade students! In June, I visited a private school in Barcelona, and with simultaneous translation, introduced them to using GoogleApps for ePortfolios over three days. I also provided a full day workshop at a private school in California after school was out in June.

The K-12 culture is very different from higher education. Professional development is very different, their reasons for implementing ePortfolios are different, and the tools/strategies they use are also different. Most schools don't have the level of technology support that you will find in most higher ed institutions (unless they are a private or international school). The time constraints are also very different. They squeeze in PD in one- and two-hour blocks. But from my observations from the Intermediate (middle) school that I visited in New Zealand, it is the small incremental trainings on a regular basis (before and after school) that makes a difference in how well teachers implement technology in teaching and students' learning.

That's what I am trying to document in my book! It is slow work, but I am gathering lots of good observational data and lots of resources along the way. Any other examples of success stories of implementing ePortfolios beyond a single classroom? For those with experience in both K-12 and higher education, what do you see as the differences?

GoogleApps Education and Blogger

The message was posted to the Google for Educators Discussion Group:

Blogger has been added to the Educational Edition but the transition won't occur enmass until later this fall. Your GoogleDomain administrator can transition people to the new apps by going in the admin dashboard and "transitioning" users. I love it, I can now embed my Picasa3 slideshows and create an iGoogle page with RSS feeds, this will make school portfolios so much richer. 

I totally agree! When will Blogger be universally available in Google Apps Education Edition?

Kindergarten Portfolios with Blogger

I'm doing online research for my book, and found some great examples of using Blogger to create ePortfolios in Kindergartens. Here are some links:
http://kdgroom102.blogspot.com/ (Carol Stream, IL) - written up in a local newspaper
http://hunterparkkindergarten.blogspot.com/ (NZ - with links to 2 public blogs) It is obvious that the students are not posting to these blogs, and most of them are private, requiring an invitation to view. The two public blogs:

- http://hpkgtn09abigail.blogspot.com/  (NZ = public student example in Blogger - lots of embedded images+video) - The teacher added Labels (Tags) that can be selected under Quick find
- http://bennybee.blogspot.com/  Quote from profile:
This is my E-profile all about me!
Mum and Dad have decided to leave it an open blog as an exemplar of how e-profiles can be used to document and assess my learning and life as a partnership between my extended family, my teachers at kindergarten, my dance teachers, and when I get there my school teachers too.
Please enjoy and respect my E profile.

I have emailed the school to communicate with the teacher who put together these portfolios. I would love to have a conversation with more Kindergarten teachers who are implementing this process with their students.

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

View more presentations from Helen Barrett.

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.

Portfolio Life --at Mercy College

I made a presentation this week to the faculty of Mercy College. I am sharing my slides here in my blog. This presentation is an extended version of the TEDxASB presentation that I gave in February. I am pleased with the response that I received from this presentation. I heard from some of the participants that they weren't expecting a motivational talk about electronic portfolios. I guess that is my mission...and my passion... and I never showed a single digital story.

Portfolio Life --at Mercy College

View more presentations from Helen Barrett.

Add-Ons to GoogleApps

Today, several tweets from Google:

Lots more Google products are coming to Google Apps soon. Which one would you like to see first? #add2GA

Blogger, Picasa & Reader got the most votes! Those & more coming to Google Apps.

Their blog entry today: Lots more Google products are coming to Google Apps customers contains a lot more details. To quote their blog:

We intend to have all Standard, Premier and Education Edition customers moved to the new infrastructure that enables this change in the fall, and customers who would like more control over the timing of this change will be able to make the switch voluntarily during the summer.

I voted for Blogger! K-12 schools need a protected version inside their implementation of GoogleApps Education Education, which just keeps getting better and better! Now we need to resolve audio recording (Aviary's Myna add-on?) and safe, accessible video storage.