Year-Long Digital Portfolio

1. Year-Long Digital Portfolio Dan Darrell-Sterbak Fredonia High School dsterbak@fcsd.wnyric.org

2. Goals for the next 20 minutes • What is it? • What does one look like? • Why do it? • How?

3. What is it? This handout can be found on our wiki

4. What does one look like? • Open the folder on your desktop called DIGITAL PORTFOLIO • Double-click on PPTVIEW.EXE • Highlight SAMPLE PORTFOLIO and double-click open • Take 5 minutes to look around. Read an Artist’s Statement.

5. Why do it?

6. Why do it? • 1. It improved student performance because there was a greater sense of purpose and pride as they worked on the projects that filled their portfolios. I was often asked: “Nowwwww…is this going in our portfolio?”

7. Why do it? • 2. It improved student performance because it created a real audience other than me (they became each other’s audience). Their portfolios were kept in a shared folder and they used each other’s work as study tools (Emily Dickinson poems). Flat-out, they put forth more effort knowing that their peers would be looking at their work and depending on it.

8. Why do it? • 3. These portfolios invited me to create projects that used formats other than standard text, formats kids spend their time playing with--mp3 .wav .mov, etc. This variety kept things interesting enough that they (for the most part) were engaged. To quote Emily, whose arm was not twisted:

9. Why do it? • “I learned how to record an audio reading and how to insert that audio into a power point presentation. The multi-sensory aspect of this project makes it more dynamic and interesting than most projects.” • “I really enjoyed editing our video and finding more and more ways to enhance it as we went. Creating this video was a refreshing change from the typical project. It allowed our group to be creative and helped us view Shakespeare in a new light.”

10. Why do it? • Not surprising. Tony Wagner says in The Global Achievement Gap: “[high school students] who’ve grown up on the net are habituated to multimedia learning experiences, as opposed to merely interacting with text.”

11. Why do it? • I’ve found that given the choice, this Net Generation will often take a multi-media project over a text-only one, even if it means “more work.” *They especially enjoy getting to see and comment on each other’s work when it’s done.

12. Why do it? • Designing an environment with navigation in mind made my kids more mindful of their own navigation. Tony Wagner says in The Global Achievement Gap that “The real literacy of tomorrow entails the ability to…know how to navigate through confusing, complex information spaces and feel comfortable doing so. ‘Navigation’ may well be the main form of literacy for the 21st century.”

13. Why do it? It exercised several 21st Century Survival Skills

14. Survival Skill #1:Critical Thinking and Problem Solving • Plenty of left brained stuff here. Packaging material and setting up the hyper-links within (and between Power Point) documents gets complicated and definitely exercises these skills.

15. Survival Skill #2: Collaboration Across Networks • O.K…they’re not collaborating with kids in the Ukraine, but they are depending on one another to have material up and running on the server for each other’s perusal.

16. Survival Skill #3: Agility and Adaptability • In talking about this skill, Wagner mentions the need for employees to be “flexible and adaptable”…and “able to deal with ambiguity.”

17. Survival Skill #3: Agility and Adaptability • Before long, the portfolio becomes a pretty big, complicated thing, with a lot of moving parts. It will break. Problems nobody anticipates will arise. There were file-type issues. There were Mac/ Windows issues. I was often saying: “Expect Delays. Be patient.” As student patience wore thin it became a teaching opportunity as I coached them through their frustrations (and managed my own).

18. A word on ambiguity • Tony Wagner quotes High Tech Highschool founder and CEO Larry Rosenstock as saying: “[An] outstanding teacher in my life was a man from Great Britain who taught the Introduction to Filmmaking class. The first thing he did was to put the cameras on the table and tell us to come back in two days with a two-minute film on burnt toast. He started to walk out, and we said, ‘Wait, wait! We don’t know how to use the cameras.’ But he wouldn’t tell us anything else. It was a gift.”

19. Survival Skill #5: Written Communication • Author’s statements require a higher order of thinking. They have to assess their own progress and be reflective. It’s one thing to know. It’s another thing to know how or why you know…and another thing still to be able to communicate how you know.

20. Survival Skill #7:Curiosity and Imagination • Ahhh…the design, the fun stuff. The right-brained stuff. Plenty of room here for kids to be imaginative in how they package their work. Power Point is a bigger box of crayons, so to speak, than a binder of text-only work.

21. How? • There are links on our wiki that will help with some of the technical sticking points like hyper linking and packaging to CD or jump drive.