https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/OR/ConsumerGuides/classuse.html
Check out the link above for example. The link will take you to an archived article from the United States Department of Education. The article discusses what portfolios are, how and why they are used, and what some of the problems with portfolios might be. Now, this article is from November 1993. Yes, that's right 1993, well before our current high school students were even born. While the article is nearly 23 years old the idea of how and why to use portfolios has not changed. However, the way in which we have students complete portfolios is completely different.
This year I have been playing with the idea of having students complete a digital portfolio of their class project that is incorporated throughout the semester.
This idea has come from trying to keep up with multiple classes, groups, people for the last 2 years. I knew one of the downfalls of the project was making sure every individual was getting something accomplished as well as their group being knowledgeable about what each member was doing. This is especially true when the work days start to be spread out and classmates might be absent. I thought that a visible portfolio might be a way to keep groups as well as individuals moving forward and on task with what needs to be accomplished each week.
Here are a few questions I asked myself & wish I would have asked myself before jumping into the digital portfolio world.
1. What are the abilities of my students? How tech savvy are they?
2. How do I want to be able to view the portfolios? Do I want just myself and my class viewing them or do I want them open to the world?
3. Do I want to be able to view/edit posts before they go live?
4. Do I want the group to share a blog or do I want each individual student to have one?
5. How many options do I want students to have? Keep it simple or give them lots of room to play with settings to make it their own?
6. How often do I want students to post?
7. What should student posts look like? How long should their posts be? Should they include pictures and videos?
The one thing I was really concerned with was making the portfolio as EASY as possible. The class I am trying this with first is mostly Freshmen. They are fairly new to using technology other than their phones. Within the 2 classes, 2 students said that they had some sort of blog of their own. So my focus this year was finding something simple to try out this portfolio idea. The main options I was looking into were blogger.com, edublogs.org, and web.seesaw.me. While these are the three options I looked into the most there are many other options to consider such as Weebly, Wix, Wordpress, Google Sites, Wikispaces, etc... depending on what route you want to try from simple to complex, from classroom blogs to entire personal websites.
Blogger
Obviously, I like blogger. However, I felt that for younger teens it may seem like a bit much to set up. It has a ton of options and would allow for everything I could possibly need but I did not know if I was ready to take on teaching how to use Blogger in the midst of a project that already has 1.2 million questions. Also, I would have to have a Padlet page, web page, blog, something to put the links to each group or students blog. It would also be somewhat difficult for me to keep up with in the way of making sure students were only posting things that they should.
Edublogs
Honestly, Edublogs is the route I wanted to take. It has options to stay local or open to the world. I can view/edit before sending student posts live. Students could have group or individual access. Edublogs looks like a real blog and has plenty of options. However, Edublogs cost money. Since I was not sure how this was going to go I really did not want to invest my own money into a system until I had a better idea of how I wanted the portfolios to look. For student and class management it costs $39.95 per year. It has a free option but is limited while not including the management features. I may jump in and try it or Blogger next year.
Seesaw
The one I chose to try this time around was Seesaw. I saw several people this past summer present on its ease of use and how they had used this site for various portfolio concepts. The website presents itself as being elementary friendly. Along with appearing to be child friendly and the multiple people I had talked to that praised its ease I decided to go this route. It has been okay, and has fairly served its purpose but I do think I could have used something a bit more technical. Seesaw is easy to set up and students can make their account and join their class in about 5-10 minutes. Seesaw post to the individual students page and to a classroom stream. You can make Seesaw visible to everyone or just the people in the class. As a teacher you can let students post freely or you can review their posts before they go live.
A part of me wishes my students had more creative control when using Seesaw but really for posting thoughts, activities, pictures, videos, documents, etc... it really does work pretty simply. I found that it wants you to make Google Docs into pdf. files but that is the main downfall I have ran into so far. I feel that for younger grades, including my freshman or anyone who is just getting introduced to the idea of a blog in a safe place Seesaw is a good place to start.
Below is an example of what the class feed can look like. I have also had students upload documents, pictures, and videos to share what they have done or what they need to do on their next work day.
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| Class Feed Example |
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