Tech Play 2: EPortfolio Tools

What is an Eportfolio....

I think that it is important to start off by explaining what an Eportfolio is before getting into the tools that could help one create one of these useful tools.  An Eportfolio is a collection of work that a person, particularly a student, creates to assess in an alternative format what they have learned throughout a particular course.  This in a way is better than a typical asssessment because you can gage more a students learning, because you can see if they understood specific concepts that you might have discussed in class based on the final product they created.  The ultimate use for an Eportfolio is that he develops an "ownership" of the students learning, because they are creating something that is meaningful to them.

Eportfolio Tools

Wikis are one of the tools that you can use to develop an Eporfolio because a wiki page is a single page of information.  This would be a good project for your students to create, especially in a history classroom at the end of the year.  However, the problem with a wiki pages is that anybody can edit them, even though you have some control over the information you put into it.  Another problem with this is that you can not upload any documents if you want to download the document to handgrand an assignment, if that is more preferable for you.  The affordance for this is that it can allow for some peer review, where students could review someone's website and then edit what they created.  However, this would not be the best recomendation for an eporfolio because there is not much creativity that can go into creating an eportfolio through a wikis page.

Then there is my personal favorite and that is the website, in the course of my educational career I have created several websites using google & weebly.  I have found this is the easiest way to creating a source of information, next to a blog, that could be used as assessment. When I mean they are easier, it just allows you to navigate through them at an easier speed, and the creation of it is a little more straightfoward than other sites that I have seen.  So from a time standpoint, it would be the best way to create an eportfolio.

The affordances that the website gives you, is a more organized way of presenting your eportfolio.  You can put the seperate assignment on a seperate page.  It also allows for more autonomy on what you can put, and how you can create it.  They also give you good visual backgrounds that give your site a more visual appeal.  The last affordance that these sites allow you, is that you can also only give access to those you want to edit your website and not just some random person coming in and changing your information.

My Eportfolio:

I have chosen to do use the Google Site for my Eportfolio, mainly becuase I have more comfortable in using the website format.  In my educational career, as both a teacher and student, I have used this numerous times.  So to ensure that my Eportfolio is of the best quality my eportfolio link is: https://sites.google.com/site/bbrowneportfolio25/

This google site is still a work in progress but by the end it should contain all the information that I need to adequately assess what I learn in the course work, as I prersue my doctorate in curriculum and instruction.

Tech Play 1: Blogging

Definition of a Blog

A blog is a place where people can go to express their thoughts and opinions to the different masses of people out in the world.  It also is a place where we can share our different ideas, and get feed back from people from all walks of life.  In an educational stand point, a blog is where students can have meaningful discussions about a specific topic based on the content of a class. I arrived at this definition because I have blogged before in a different capacity than an educational standpoint.  During that time period in my life, I had some intense discussions with people from all walks of life, they came from different educational backgrounds and different parts of the world. The different affordances that are associated with a blog are the sharing of different ideas and the ability to create something that can be shared with people all across the globe.  Some of the site that I had some experience with before this assignment, was weebly.  I found it hard to navigate weebly in the terms of blogging, while in this one all I had to do was simply click a button and begin writing.  

Blogging in the Classroom

In the terms of a history class, 11th grade US History to be more specific, a blog can be a very useful tool to use in class.  A lesson that I would probably design would be something where, they have to read an article, specifically over a topic that we are learning and most likely a specific TEK, the specific content would be the Vietnam War.  Reason for this is because we only spend about a day talking about the war in the general idea of the 1960s, according to the curriculum. 

The desired learning objective would be for them to create a final project of a blog, identify key important topics, and summarize what they learned.  A final piece to this would be to support or disagree with other students final works, by having them comment on two to three people's blogs and defend their stance.  

I have based this piece of learning based on what I saw a teacher at the school I work with do.  He would have them get on his weebly site, and he would post a question that they were to discuss  and answer.  It was not higher order, but it did give them the starting ground for what I wanted this project to turn into. 

The affordances that I identified is the main one that the blog is all about, the interaction with other people.  If there is a space to make a comment on the blog, then interacting with other people and developing an argument develops higher order thinking that all school districts and teachers strife to achieve. 

Blogging in the Learning Environment

In a learning environment the blog can be used, just like I mentioned above or it can be used for other ways.  In a way the students could use the blog to post their reaction to a lesson that the teacher taught.  For the subject of history, there are different ways that students and teachers can interact besides the classroom setting.  In US History, we have to do alot of primary source analysis, so in a way the teacher could give the students a primary source to analysis and take home.  Then the students are required to create a blog with the primary source embedded into the page, and analysis the document and explain its significance in history.  However, the main goal of any learning environment is to create a community of professional learners.

Problems with using the Blog

One of the main problems could face about using this technology is how well students are able to hold meaningful discussions online.  I know in the classroom it is very hard for students to hold meaningful discussions, when I first started out teaching I held one online discussion.  It did not go so well for me, I used a site that could develop a blog and the students just posted one world answers to their fellow students.  However, in terms of technology some students do not have access to a device of any kind and thus assigning this type of project could mean the student not doing it.  I know at my school we got rid of most of the computers and went with Chromebooks, however we don't have that many and one computer lab, so alot of students can't get access to the materials that they need.