12.08.09
As I viewed my course blogs, I was reminded of some ideas that I had forgotten I wanted to implement in my classroom. The blog review was a reminder that simply thinking back on my semester was not sufficient to recall all details. I can only believe that the same phenomenon would occur with my eighth graders, too. An wiki, blog or e-portfolio could help students with reflection and concrete proof of growth. Since we want students to become more reflective and accurate of assessing their work, the e-portfolio, wiki use or blog use is a way to help foster that skill.
As for my own work, I am most proud of my podcast, and PowerPoint because they were time consuming but worth wile so that I could use in my classroom. I was most frustrated by the FlickR slideshow because of its limitations with editing (inability to rearrange images). I was and still am unsure of Diigo highlighting and commenting, but am working on it so I can teach it to my students for a research project in January. The most fun digital writing experience was the comic creation and role play. They both forced me to look at information in a different way and both allowed me to be creative.
Students loose items or leave them in at home all the time (final copies, flashdrives, etc.) so having an e-portfolio in combination with Google Docs can alleviate those issues. The bonus of the e-portfolio is that it can be used throughout one's elementary, middle and high school years. As I viewed the Australian student's 5-6 and 7-8 years portfolio, I thought about the use of it in my students' middle school career. As a district, we could require a k-12 repository of their academic career. Flashdrives get filled and lost, so this seems the better route.
Some projects that I would ask students to share on their wiki/portfolio are academic, study habit, social and physical goals they have for the quarter, semester or year via audio or typed venue. Middle school is about the 'whole child' so looking beyond academic goals is necessary. I would then ask students to use their work to assess how they are making progress on their goals. Another area would be for all final papers, presentations and projects. All (vlogs, podcasts, blogs, research, imovies, voicethreads, etc.) can be electronically produced or linked. These would also be utilized for conferences, ideally, student-led conferences.
I do have 2 concerns or questions I still feel need to be addressed in this course: 1) how to teach attribution of sources in a very electronic culture of drag, drop & dash to the next... 2) Formal, academic writing versus digital, 21st-century writing. As a state, for college entrances, AP writing and high-stakes testing we assess writing based on a traditional multi-paragraph essay format, traditionally 5, how does that translate or equate to the type of writing we have completed/test driven in this course. Others thoughts?
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Dixie,
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you on being able to look back at my eportfolio and being able to remember things that I wanted to use in my classroom.
I also think that it would be handy to use an online database for storage. It would definitely cut down on missing papers. Also, we had a case of students erasing each others documents off our computers, so this would also help stop that from happening. I have been thinking about using Google Docs and Presentations more for my students' work. Have you had much experience in using those?