Overview of Best Practices:
The research on digital portfolios, combined with anecdotal evidence culled from teachers, students, and administrators, has yielded some important insights about their value as reflective learning tools. The research also points to important steps schools can take to implement digital portfolios, so they enrich the existing curriculum, and advance progressive learning outcomes.
What is a digital portfolio? A digital portfolio an online venue for students to organize, archive, and display learning artifacts. Learning artifacts can mean many things; a project, an assessment, a presentation, a reflection, a video diary, an interview, an essay, and many other “visible” outcomes of student engagement. |
Relevant Links:Every Student Should Have A Digital Portfolio
What Does It Mean to Reflect? The Art of Reflection A New Coalition of Elite Colleges Tries to Reshape Admissions The Admissions Revolution Student Blogs: |
It's important to note that digital portfolios don’t merely exist to store student work; instead, they allow students to reflect on their learning, while developing observational, descriptive, and analytical skills. They tell “the story of learning” by allowing students to chronicle their own growth in a manner that is holistic, ongoing, and personal. The best digital portfolios look less like a one-dimensional warehouse of discrepant items, and more like a gallery of artifacts that showcase interactive, visual, narrative, and experiential learning.
digital portfolios should be viewed as a gallery, rather than a storage repository.
How can schools develop a strong and sustainable digital portfolio program?
As we all know, schools are busy places. Teachers have curricula to cover, courses to plan, and projects to grade. Administrators have events to plan, emails to answer, and fires to put out. Students scurry from class to class, with barely enough time to eat lunch, and plan out their homework schedules. In this context, it may seem impractical to ask students to reflect on their learning, and document their growth through a personalized digital portfolio.
Of course, the commerce of school life will always challenge a school’s ability to incorporate new initiatives. The difference with digital portfolios, however, lie in the way they promote and advance existing progressive educational ideals. Digital portfolios give students a sense of autonomy; they help students see the value and meaning of their learning experiences; they give students new ways to interact with their teachers and peers; and they promote digital literacy over digital distraction. And like any progressive learning initiative, they improve with practice.
Here are some best practices schools can consider:
- An effective digital portfolio program should be properly scalable and scaffolded; students in primary school may require teacher managed platforms like Seesaw and Pathbrite, while students in middle school and beyond can use platforms which confer more flexibility and freedom on the user. WordPress and Weebly are two such examples.
- Students should be able to easily access the digital portfolios of fellow students; likewise, teachers should have a convenient path to review digital portfolios, and provide meaningful feedback.
- It's important for teachers to help students learn the skills of reflection, as students (especially in younger grades) don’t automatically know how to be metacognitive.
- Advanced planning can help prevent digital portfolios from seeming like an intrusion, or an “extra” responsibility. For this reason, it’s important for teachers to prioritize digital portfolios in their planning process, so that the transition from pedagogy to portfolio is seamless, and updating portfolios becomes part of the assessment process.
- Reflective prompts, which can be customized for specific disciplines, include:
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