I am proud of one of my students who recently put together a 5 minute video for the KWN Panasonic 2011 competition. The theme she choose was “Communicate” and here is her video based on the life of Helen Keller.
Congratulations to Mt Aspiring College who won the competition with their video “The Invitation”.
In the same way a weed can strangle a plant or a robber can take something from you, there are threats to the effective development of e-Portfolios in our classrooms. I wanted to share one that we have had to deal with and are still working on in our journey.
We all enjoy receiving feedback on our work. Students gain feedback from their teacher, peers and recently at Bethlehem College, from their parents. However I find that unless teachers teach students how to comment and then monitor this activity, the commenting students produce often defaults to social chit-chat.
To address this we expect students to use the following sentence starters; “I like the way you….” and “Next time you could…” We termed these ‘learning comments’ and use a range of strategies to help students use these. These include:
At the end of last year we also disabled the messaging module (another place for collaborating that worked like an email box) within our e-Portfolio platform. It was intended to be a place where students would collaborate on work (e.g. projects at home) but in the end we could see that it was a distraction and students spent more valuable time in this environment than on the work itself.
So… is this a threat you have found?
And what other threats have you encountered and how are you dealing with them?
Last year we held a very successful ‘e-Porfolio Pedagogy Meeting’ in Hamilton. A number of educators shared how their schools were implementing e-Portfolios and the afternoon was dedicated to thrashing out some of the pedagogy behind e-Portfolios.
With the desire to do something like that again this year we have teamed up with another unconference that is occuring in Tauranga.
The Educamp Bay of Plenty is being held on the 13th August from 10am to 3pm at Bethlehem College and is being organised by Karen Mills and Rochelle Jensen. After speaking with them, they thought it was a good idea for us to piggy back their unconference because of the common interest in e-Portfolios.
From the registrations shown so far, iPads is another topic of strong interest. You can also expect to see ICT innovation, literacy, collaborative projects, digital citizenship, etc, discussed.
So I encourage you to visit the Bay Of Plenty Educamp website http://educampbop.wikispaces.com/ view the topics and scroll down to enter your details if you want to be apart of the learning experience.
See you there!
