Digital Portfolio Resources for You!

I have the privilege this week to participate in the University of Northern Iowa's all-day seminar on portfolios, The Learning Portfolio: A Tool for Student Engagement and Inquiry. They have invited John Zubizarreta, author of The Learning Portfolio: Reflective Practice for Improving Student Learning, to share his idea about how portfolios can be used for assessment and support of students' learning.

Dr. Zubizarreta will speak in the morning and then there will be a portfolio panel of UNI faculty. These faculty members include:

• April Chatham-Carpenter, Communication Studies
• David Grant, Languages and Literature
• Patrick Pease, Geography
• Donna Vinton, Office of Academic Assessment
• Leigh Zeitz, Curriculum and Instruction

While I only have 5 minutes to describe how we have been using portfolios in Curriculum and Instruction, I have a number of resources that you should find useful to learn more about using digital portfolios.

Digital Portfolios Made Easy in C&I at UNI

View more presentations from Leigh Zeitz.

• Digital Portfolios Made Easy in Curriculum and Instruction at UNI slideshow - the presentation slideshow that I used during my presentation. This is posted at Slideshare.com.
• Digital Portfolios Made Easy - this is my website that has been up since 2007.  It has a number of Google Sites portfolios templates that can be used to create digital portfolios. 
• Curriculum and Instruction Digital Portfolio Wiki -  this wiki page is the source for support materials for creating digital portfolios in the C&I program. I provides portfolio examples, instructional videos, a link to the UNI Teacher Education Google Sites template (along with a set of instructions), and a list of possible artifacts that might be used with each of the INTASC+1 standards.
• UNI Example Portfolio - an example of the type of digital portfolio that a student creates in our Educational Technology and Design course. This portfolio evolves into their final digital portfolio for their teaching program.
• Dr. Z on Digital Portfolios - interview with Dr. Z by Wesley Fryer in Philadelphia. Dr. Z reflects on his philosophy on digital portfolios.
• Digital Portfolios: Why Do We Do Them? - Dr. Z explores the backwards manner in which most portfolios are designed to fulfill standards instead of sharing what is important to the student or professional.
• Electronic Portfolios - Helen Barrett's website that supports using electronic portfolios and digital storytelling for lifelong and life wide learning.

How do you use digital portfolios? What additional support materials would you recommend for our readers?  

Dr. Z on Digital Portfolios - Voices of ISTE '11

I was honored to be interviewed by Wesley Fryer at the ISTE '11 conference last week. Wesley did his typical outstanding job of covering presentations at the conference, but what was most impressive was  his recording equipment which just included an iPad2, a $60 iRig mic. He recorded this interview, used iPad iMovie to edit it and insert titles, and it was posted on the web in 5 minutes.  Wes is a media genius.
Anyway, here are some comments I made on my philosophy of Digital Portfolios. You can see the rest of Wes's Voices of ISTE at his website, Speed of Creativity. He has notes and interviews with Steven Covey, Chris Lehman, Scott McLeod and others. At this point, he hasn't indexed them in a single posting so you will have to search around for them.
So what do you think?  What are your philosophical thoughts on creating portfolios for students and professional educators?

Digital Portfolios Made Easy

Professional portfolios are designed to provide a medium for individuals to collect and share information about themselves. It is important to consider the audience that will be reading and evaluating the portfolio. Often these portfolios are aligned with professional standards. Unfortunately, people are misguided into believing that these standards are the most important part of the portfolio.

That is Totally Bogus!!

The most important part of a portfolio is the person about whom the portfolio is created!!! It is the collection of artifacts that describe the person's strengths and characterize the person as a professional. Envisioning portfolios in this manner will make the creation process relevant rather than drudgerous.

You can read more about my ideas on this at my previous posting entitled Digital Portfolios: Why Do We Do Them?

You can also read another of my postings, Optimal Portfolio Organization, to learn about my suggestions for creating a portfolio.

Middle School Digital Portfolio Workshop

I have had the opportunity to share digital portfolios around the country. I have had the opportunity to present some of these workshops with my DPME co-developer, Andrew Krumm, for a couple of years. Now I do these workshops by myself. For the past few years, I/we have presented a 2-hour workshop for the middle school teacher education students here at the University of Northern Iowa. We thank Dr. Jean Schneider and Dr. Donna Douglas for implementing this system in their program. Last October, we video recorded the workshop.

This semester, we are assuming that the students have enough technology savvy to learn how to create their portfolios by reading the outline while they are watching the recorded workshop. The semester is not over so we don't have any final information, but things are going well so far.

Here are the resources that you will need to do this:

Video of Dr. Z (Leigh Zeitz) giving a workshop on creating digital portfolio to a middle school teacher education students at the University of Northern Iowa. This workshop lasts 1 hour 45 minutes. (this video requires the RealPlayer add-on to watch it.)

MIddle School Portfolio Template website to copy into your portoflio - one screen at a time. This portfolio template is designed to align with the Iowa Teacher Education standards (INTASC + 1). You can find other templates at the Digital Portofolios Made Easy website.

Workshop outline (.pdf) that was used for the workshop. It is possible to use this workshop to follow along with the video.
I hope that you find this useful. Please leave some comments about what you are doing with these templates.

Dr. Z

Optimal Portfolio Organization

Standards Referenced. Artifact-Centered. Personal Bragbook.

In my last posting, Digital Portfolios: Why Do We Do them?, I discussed digital portfolios and how their primary function needs to be to act as personal testimonials about your strengths rather than a standards check sheet to satisfy "the powers that be."

These are all interesting ideas, but how will your administrator or governing body feel about this? We may want to redefine our portfolios, but what do we do about demonstrating that we have satisfied the standards that we have been asked to address?

Enter the Artifact Matrix:


This tool is designed to bring organization to potential chaos. Notice how the artifacts are listed in the second column followed by 11 columns to the right. Each of these columns correlates with a standard. Notice that it isn't like a standard-based notebook portfolio where the standards are "front and center." The matrix allows you to place the artifacts in the center of it all and then align them with the standards.

Based upon the strategy that I suggested for selecting your artifacts to demonstrate your strengths, you would probably see a collection of artifacts that address a specific area of interest. The rest of the artifacts would be ones that the educator used to fill-in the standards that weren't addressed by primary collection. Unfortunately, the example above doesn't fit this suggestion, but it wasn't created when I was advocating this new approach.

If you want to see more about this, you will want to visit our website at www.dpme.org. More specifically, you will want to read about this in the artifact matrix-specific pages on the DPME site.

So we have a strategy for selecting artifacts and organizing them in your portfolio, how should we present the artifact? It's more than just linking to the actual artifact, you need to provide a reflection about the artifact.

Stay tuned to this blog and we will discuss it in my next posting.

Z

Digital Portfolios: Why Do We Do Them?

Digital Portfolios are an interest of mine. A few years ago, Andy Krumm and I developed some templates to assist educators in creating digital portfolios that are aligned with their professional standards. These are called the Digital Portfolios Made Easy templates.
Since then, we have done workshops and lectures across the country about creating digital portfolios and how these templates can assist professionals in displaying their work.

The most interesting part of doing workshops on creating portfolios is discussing the motivation for creating a portfolio. The primary reason for creating a portfolio is "because my employer wants me to create a portfolio." This is usually quickly followed with "they want to see if I fulfill all of the standards." This last comment is usually filled with confusion and frustration with the idea that the portfolio needs to address multiple standards and criteria. In the case of the Iowa Teaching Standards, the educators need to address 8 standards which organize 42 criteria. This is daunting.

Typically, portfolio workshops that teach alignment with standards will provide the learners with a list of 42 criteria and a list of artifact samples. The educators are then asked to make a list of personal artifacts that will align with each of the criteria. I must admit that I have done this in the past and it is COMPLETELY BACKWARDS!!!

The emphasis of portfolio MUST be the artifacts, NOT the standards. We have been promoting this for 4 years but it suddenly dawned on me that we were not promoting that in our workshops. It MUST be about the portfolio creator NOT the evaluators.

We have coined two terms that explain different format (and mindsets) for creating portfolios, these terms are "Standards Indexed" and "Standards Referenced."

Standards Indexed: This is the typical format where a notebook (electronic or otherwise) is created with a tab for each standard. Printed copies of each artifact that addresses that standard are then inserted behind that tab and a person's success in addressing a specific standard is defined by how thick that part of the notebook happens to be.






Standards Referenced: This format places the artifact (and its creator) at the center of the arena. The professional defines her/his area of specialty and then selects the artifacts that best exemplify that area of expertise. Each artifact is then analyzed as to which standards/criteria are addressed. Additional artifacts are then added to the portfolio to fulfill addressing the other standards/criteria.





As you can see, the Standards Referenced format for the portfolio is more professional-centered than the Standards Indexed.

I taught a digital portfolio workshop for Cedar Falls Community Schools here in Iowa. I introduced the portfolio as a way to "brag about yourself." Realize what you do well and identify what you can use to show how well you do it. This approach gives a whole different perspective to creating portfolios.

I was amazed by the completely different attitude that the professionals in my class had about portfolios when completed the first class. I gave them a worksheet to begin thinking about their "Proud Points" and gave them the task to begin their search for personal artifacts. At the end of the class they were excited instead of intimidated about the prospect of creating a portfolio.

How should this portfolio be organized to fulfill the administration's expectations as well as emphasizing a professional's strengths? I will tell you in the next posting. ;-)