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

How Twitter's spectacular growth is being driven by unexpected uses - Evan Willams at TED Talks

Just listened to Evan Williams, founder of Twitter, on TED Talks. In his 8-minute talk, he explained how Twitter was molded by how users used it instead of how the company designed it. Here are some highlights from the lecture:

• Defined Twitter as "Say what you are doing in 140 characters or less. People who are interested in you get those updates. If they are REALLY interested in you, they will get those updates on their cell phones."
• Twitter lets people share their lives - both the spectacular and mundane.
• He didn't anticipate how important Twitter could be in real time events.
• Information was shared during the San Diego fires.
• There are currently over 2000 apps for twitter including one that allows an unborn baby to twitter when it kicks or a plant to twitter when it needs water.
• Summize was a company that built a Twitter search engine. Williams liked the search engine so much that they bought the company.
• Some people in Atlanta used Twitter to find gas when it was scarce.
• People have raised tens of thousands of dollars for people in crisis over Twitter in a matter of days.
• Don't know what will happen next with Twitter, but when you give people easier ways to share information - more good things will happen.

Would you believe that at the end of his talk, the MC of TED searched Twitter to find about 50 tweets about Evans' talk.

Here is a man who is changing the world with his imagination. He invented Blogger as well.

BTW, if you aren't watching/listening to TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks, you are missing an opportunity to listen to the greatest minds in the world.

Follow Dr. Z on Twitter at http://twitter.com/zeitz

Google Notes is No More - Enter Zotero

Did you hear? Google has announced that they will not be spending any more time developing Google Notes. Google says that they will continue to support Google Notes but not improve upon it.

Although I have used Google notes some, I have not been an avid user. I am teaching a Seminar in Writing Graduate Papers now at the University of Northern Iowa and I was going to introduce Google Notes next week. Now we will go with Zotero.

Zotero is an add-in for Firefox that helps you collect, manage and cite your research sources. The latest version is 1.0.9 but there is a beta 1.5 version. I don't know the differences, but here are some notes about it.

Here is a pretty good video overview of Zotero 1.5 from Zoteron on YouTube.




Zotero also has a series of screencasts about Version 1.09. They give you an overview, finding items, managing your library, and other features. They even show how to connect Zotero with MS Word, Google Tools, and Flock.

Do you use Zotero or Google Notebook or Zoho or ????

Tinkering as a Mode of Knowledge Production

Tinkering as a Mode of Knowledge Production in a Digital Age: John Seely Brown from carnegie commons on Vimeo.Wow! I just visited the Generation YES Blog and enjoyed listening to John Seely Brown discuss the importance of "Tinkering" to build knowledge. He is discussing the opportunities of working with others in a world where craftspeople will work "shoulder-to-shoulder" to develop new ideas. That is what the collaborative movement is all about. It is about people coming together to work together to develop knowledge and make a better world. This is only a 10-minute video and it is WELL WORTH the time. Watch it!

You should also go to the Gen YES blog to read what Sylvia Martinez has to say about this. She always has such great insight into such topics.

Z

Using Web 2.0 Tools with University Students

Image by Lillou Merlin via Flickr

Vinnie Vrotny recently asked me about how I use Web 2.0 tools with my students. I teach Instructional Technology courses at the University of Northern Iowa. I teach an Emerging Instructional Technologies course where I use many of these tools but we integrate them throughout the rest of the courses as well. Here is a list of links to examples of how we use these tools.

Wikibook - Instead of students writing individual research papers for the course, we created an on-line collaborative wikibook. We used the actual Wikimedia software. It was interesting to see that we needed to address topics differently when writing online than when writing on paper. How to determine the length of the paper? (Not pages, but words). How to cite (Reference list? URL? Both?)

RWLDs - The information that you want students to discuss is not always in the book. We have developed Readings, Watchings, Listenings and Doings (RWLD) pages where students can find links to readings, videos, podcasts and things to do. We have found that more students do their homework with RWLDs because they are in a media form that is more appealing. I might point out that we post thes in a Blog form so that the students can subscribe to them like any other blog. Here is an example of one that I used in my Emerging Instructional Technologies course last Fall.
Google Forms - Google forms is probably the most exciting collaborative opportunity that I have found. Google has simplified the prociess of creating an online form to not much more than defining the headings on a spreadsheet. We create and use these forms to elicit student input during and after class. One application that I found interesting was using a Google form to collect evaluation information after I gave a digital portfolio workshop.

Digital Portfolios on Google Sites - Google Sites has made creating digital portfolios a snap. 5 years ago, Andrew Krumm and I created some templates for creating professional digital portfolios. These are housed at http://dpme.org (Digital Portfolios Made Easy). Originally, we made them using Word or HTML templates. Lately, we have created Google Sites templates and all of our Educational Technology and Design students create their digital portfolios using these templates. Here are some examples Example 1 Example 2 Here is a link to an hour and 45 minute workshop on creating a digital portfolio using Google Sites

CoverItLive - Recently we have been experimenting with using an open chat line during lectures. We have been using CoverItLive.com. It is moderated by another professor to ensure that discussion stays on-topic. See the next blog posting down below to actually see the transcript for one of the sessions.

Coveritlive in the Classroom

I am going to be presenting lectures today about Media Evaluation in our Educational Technology and Design here at the University of Northern Iowa. We are looking for new ways to use laptops/smart phones to make the class more interactive so we are going to incorporate Coveritlive.com so that the students will be able to discuss the materials in a back channel while I am speaking.

I created an account and am embedding the Coveritlive window here in my blog. I will have another person in the back of the lecture hall moderating the discussion while I am speaking.

You can follow along at 6:00 pm CST. We will be talking about Media Evaluation. I would love to have your input.

7 Things that You Don't Need to Know About Me (Dr. Z)

I was tagged by Kathy Schrock. She wrote a posting entitled 7 Things You Don't Really Need to Know About Me on her KaffeeKlatsch blog. Apparently, this was the result of her being mentioned in a similar posting from one of her friends. (Sorry this took so long, Kathy, but your use of media encouraged me to have "just the right photos.") I have been tagged by Vinnie Vrotney as well.

This adds a new meaning to the term "Tag You're It." She included a number of factoids about herself that were quite interesting. So, I have been given the personal disclosure baton and it is my duty to carry it to the next stop. I have been reading Steve Dembo's series of blog postings entitled 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger and he says that I should share personal content so that you will get to know me better, so here it goes: These are 7 Things You Don't Really Need to Know About Me.

1. I have been a magician since I was 14 years old (Member of the Hollywood Magic Castle since 1974). I performed under the stage name of Zeon. Seems that I have traded technological magic with stage magic in recent years.

2. I spent a year (1998-1999) in Malaysia at the Institute of Technology Tun Hussein Onn (now known as Universiti tun Hussein Onn Malysia) as a visiting professor for Purdue University. Taught Educational Media there. My whole family was with me during that year and it was a life-changing experience for all of us.

3. I am an avid West Wing fan. (This is not a cardboard cutout.)

4. I have a large collection of unique ties and wear them trying to fit the theme of what I do (i.e., I wear my Lone Ranger tie on the first day of my Technology Coordinator course at UNI) I must admit that my favorites in my collection are from famous artists (Da Vinci, Dali, Renoir, Munch, Van Gogh, Cezanne, etc.) Here's selection of some of my ties.

5. I run the Keyboarding Research and Resources website. I even wrote a book and a whitepaper

6. I was the first education computing editor for any magazine dedicated to the IBM PC, Personal Computer Age. about keyboarding. This was in 1981.

The tradition is for me to tag 6 more of my friends. Here you go:
Robin Galloway
Steve Hargadon
Clif Mims
Scott McLeod
Vickie Davis
Lois Lindell