GoogleTranslate Service


e-Portfolios – how do we get the learners involved?

February 20th, 2007 by Graham Attwell

waiting for the eportfolio ‘pull’:

As part of the MOSEP e-Portfolio project we have created our own portfolios in ELGG Spaces. As always it is difficult getting people started but there are three of us there now and I hope the other project partners will get involved in the next ten days.

But one of our colleagues, John Pallister, who is an IT teacher at Wolsingham School in Durham has posted a brilliant series posts based on his personal experiences in introducing e-Portfolios in his school.

I am reposting his entry from yesterday in its entirety in the hope it will inspire others of you to go read his blog.

Why are our students prepared to work with their eportfolios? Acknowledging that some students, especially some of the older students, are a little reluctant to develop their eportfolios- the vast majority will work on them with very little ‘push’ from staff. The older students, who are not as ‘interested’ in their eportfolios, are tending to fit into the waiting for the ‘pull’ from the universities and employers category. Of course it is always easier to sit back and wait until the big picture is clear, rather than to do something, but we are dealing with students – we need to sort out the ‘big picture’ and declare the drivers now. – Quite a job! For ??

The creative environment provided by the multimedia authoring packaged has helped to motivate our students. It could be argued that, without evidence of reflection, the eportfolio is simply a creative product. Well, I see every day, evidence that students are proud of the product and want to develop it. We have won the first battle, we have sorted out the software/hardware and have given students a multimedia authoring tool that they want to use. As a by-product, the ICT multimedia skills level in the school has risen significantly.

The majority of my recent posts have focussed on reflection and audience. Historically, although as Gerlinde suggests, reflection is a natural part of what students do, students have not wanted to explicitly reflect. The ‘write about your holidays’ prompt was always a hassle and even ‘writing up science experiments’ and reflecting on whether it proved or disproved the original hypothesis tended to became a mechanical process without a lot of meaning/value for the student. Students tended to develop the set responses that they thought teachers wanted, they regurgitated these responses and thought very little about the process and how the might tackle it in the future/ what they ad learnt etc.

Again, picking up on Gerlinde point about student reluctance to record reflections in a written form, they might have gone through a very useful reflective process, and then not wanted to record their reflections in writing, or, they might have rushed-off some stock written reflections, devaluing the whole process.

Can Technology do it, (help), of course it can. Students might be more prepared to record audio reflections – why should a students reluctance to write, or their poor literacy skills stop them from reflecting, might the microphone liberate the learner?

How, as teachers, we encourage students to reflect and record their reflections is the next challenge, closely followed by how we contrive/provide/engineer ‘audience’ to support the process. I suspect that we need to encourage and link recorded reflections against the evidence of the original learning/activity. A general Blogg would probably be very awkward for the audience. – The calculations, if every learner in the UK created a blogg, who would be doing the reading? Ah – audience again!

waiting for the eportfolio ‘pull’, John Pallister :: Blog, February 19

Please follow and like us:

Comments are closed.

  • Search Pontydysgu.org

    Social Media




    News Bites

    Cyborg patented?

    Forbes reports that Microsoft has obtained a patent for a “conversational chatbot of a specific person” created from images, recordings, participation in social networks, emails, letters, etc., coupled with the possible generation of a 2D or 3D model of the person.

    Please follow and like us:


    Racial bias in algorithms

    From the UK Open Data Institute’s Week in Data newsletter

    This week, Twitter apologised for racial bias within its image-cropping algorithm. The feature is designed to automatically crop images to highlight focal points – including faces. But, Twitter users discovered that, in practice, white faces were focused on, and black faces were cropped out. And, Twitter isn’t the only platform struggling with its algorithm – YouTube has also announced plans to bring back higher levels of human moderation for removing content, after its AI-centred approach resulted in over-censorship, with videos being removed at far higher rates than with human moderators.

    Please follow and like us:


    Gap between rich and poor university students widest for 12 years

    Via The Canary.

    The gap between poor students and their more affluent peers attending university has widened to its largest point for 12 years, according to data published by the Department for Education (DfE).

    Better-off pupils are significantly more likely to go to university than their more disadvantaged peers. And the gap between the two groups – 18.8 percentage points – is the widest it’s been since 2006/07.

    The latest statistics show that 26.3% of pupils eligible for FSMs went on to university in 2018/19, compared with 45.1% of those who did not receive free meals. Only 12.7% of white British males who were eligible for FSMs went to university by the age of 19. The progression rate has fallen slightly for the first time since 2011/12, according to the DfE analysis.

    Please follow and like us:


    Quality Training

    From Raconteur. A recent report by global learning consultancy Kineo examined the learning intentions of 8,000 employees across 13 different industries. It found a huge gap between the quality of training offered and the needs of employees. Of those surveyed, 85 per cent said they , with only 16 per cent of employees finding the learning programmes offered by their employers effective.

    Please follow and like us:


    Other Pontydysgu Spaces

    • Pontydysgu on the Web

      pbwiki
      Our Wikispace for teaching and learning
      Sounds of the Bazaar Radio LIVE
      Join our Sounds of the Bazaar Facebook goup. Just click on the logo above.

      We will be at Online Educa Berlin 2015. See the info above. The stream URL to play in your application is Stream URL or go to our new stream webpage here SoB Stream Page.

      Please follow and like us:
  • Twitter

  • Recent Posts

  • Archives

  • Meta

  • Categories