Digital Portfolios and PDAs for Research and Assessment
Most K-12 student activities which should be preserved for performance assessment or documentation occur offline...
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Barrett
http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Publications/LL/LLIssues/Volume_27_1999_2000_/April9
/Create_Your_Own_Electronic_Portfolio_Using_Off-the-Shelf_So
ftware_to_Showcase_Your_Own_or_Student_Wo.htm
Most K-12 student activities which should be preserved for performance assessment or documentation occur offline. Hands-on science investigations or construction and exploration of physical mechanisms and presentation or explanations of these accomplishments come to mind, for instance. Even if research or simulations or reports or exhibits and especially creation of student notebooks are conducted primarily online, they may be supplemented by offline work. Consequently, the transfer of offline exemplars of student work to online displays has become a new challenge for assessment.
Currently two sets of equipment can be used to capture features of offline student work.
Cameras and scanners, accompanied by audio, are being developed with higher quality imaging and at reduced prices. Moreover, compression and streaming technology are improving so longer samples can be transferred without overloading available bandwidth. Each of these products is intended to link your customized curricular goals and projects with student work.
As part of the Grady Profile, for instance, you can purchase, at a discount, a scanner for inputting writing samples. Other equipment, such as a moviemaker or audio track for recording a student reading aloud, readies student work samples for transfering to an online system.
Successmaker from Pearson Digital Learning, includes a selection of courseware and an encyclopedia for multimedia science projects as well as a portfolio capability. Students are encouraged to organize their own portfolio. Pearson Digital Learning also provides an online, interactive structure for gathering Web resources to meet curriculum objectives.
Chancery's work-in-development will encompass hyperlinks to policies and administrative tools, such as searches for matching online projects, and generate correlation data for board reports. The software is called Orchestrator and will allow distant exchange of linkages among colleagues.
Personal data assistants are popular gadgets in the business community. Information can be transferred to matching templates on a pc or mac with wireless or plugged in transmissions. Products from Palm may cost under $200 while Compact and Dell fall around $500. These tools are more portable than even a laptop and can be used in the "field" to collect and record experimental data or in classrooms to chart student progress on a set of observable, discrete activities or annotating performance qualitatively.
The Coalition of Essential Schools and IBM unveiled a digital portfolio system at an Educational Summit for governors and business executives.
Now once all these digital portfolios have been polished, a new question arises: How can you capture them to show to different audiences? Most folks use screen capture techniques (see Web Tools) for still images and text. What about animation? Hyperstudio to the rescue. Roger Wagner, the founder of Hyperstudio, has prepared a booklet which explains how you can turn an ordinary VCR into a "printer".
One of the most comprehensive set of guidelines for Digital Portfolio Creation and Management, sponsored by Learning and Leading with Technology at ISTE, was the lead article in the October 1998 issue (Lead articles are archived.). It explains what a traditional or electronic portfolio should include, justification for using technology to store portfolios in multimedia format, models of differently-structured portfolios for particular purposes, technology audit for planning and implementing a portfolio, 20 different software packages for implementation, storing a working portfolio and publishing the formal version, and hardware requirements. Most of your questions will be answered in this article.
Create Your Own Electronic Portfolio -- Using Off-the-Shelf Software to Showcase Your Own or Student Work, by Helen Barrett, is another ISTE article on this subject is a fllow up article describing the electronic portfolio development process further and covers seven different software and hardware tools for creating portfolios.
DIVER, a product of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning, is a collaborative technique for editing 3D videos of teaching. The 3D enhances a full view of teaching. Forthcoming applications will show its versatility.
Annotation
All of these systems will enrich school-home partnering; parents can view a sampler of the complex environment in which their youngster learns, even though they were not present in the classroom. In Special Education, such a portfolio would be especially helpful, because it can showcase one-on-one idiosyncratic work that is sometimes hard or tedious to describe in words. The other major advantage of these systems is their contribution to EDI (electronic data interchange). In a mobile society cumulative "folders" of student work may take several months to reach a student's new school; obviously EDI is instantaneous and saves the time a new teacher would have to devote to diagnosis for productive learning. Multimedia can be an important motivator for students. The major disadvantage of these systems is that the technology for digital video compression and streaming audio is just becoming affordable for schools.
As with paper records, students and parents (if the student is a minor) always have access to their folder, including teacher comments and recommendations, under the Freedom of Information Act.
