Before jumping into my assessment of the potential e-portfolio I play-tested, I would like to share a few thoughts on “folio thinking”. “Folio thinking” is consistent with what I have attempted to do with my student hardcopy portfolios coupled with student journals. Certainly I have asked students to collect and organize their work as artifacts to evidence their learning journey. The student journal prompts each week have ask students to identify artifacts they were particularly proud of and explain their selections. At the end of each semester, I have asked the students to pare down the artifacts they earlier identified as their best, explain their selections, and connect the arc of their learning for the semester using the final set of artifacts they selected. In essence, this feels like a fair effort at the “folio thinking” tenets of collecting, selecting, reflecting, and, at least to a small degree, connecting. The weakest point of my approach in retrospect was likely the failure to invite more experiences from outside the class than I did in any individual assignment that ultimately became an artifact.
Now, the COVID-19 pandemic has hurled my student portfolio efforts into a world of flux. Paper assignments and hardcopy portfolios are no longer considered safe, so I have moved headlong into e-portfolios. Unfortunately, the resources available to me on behave of my students for e-portfolios are Class Notebook through Microsoft Teams. While this is a workable platform for an e-portfolio with all the engaging, creative affordances offered by e-documents and multimedia, the opportunities to ground my students in the technology and to rethink how to use this new technology have been sorely lacking. As a result, I feel that my student portfolio efforts have taken a giant step backwards; on the other hand, I find the somewhat serendipitous election to take EDTEC 524 this semester as fortuitous in helping prepare my steps forward.
In any event, I can attest that I witnessed more deep learning and personal growth through their portfolios and journals than from any assignment, lab, or test. The portfolio and journal process was a truly constructivist activity for my students where they learned about their learning and learned about themselves. Yes, there were bumpers on the sides of the lane for these activities, but less so than most assignments in my classroom. Not surprisingly, students will often amaze you with what positive steps they will take when you let go of their hand.
As I think of my own professional e-portfolio, I would certainly prefer the scenario where I am articulating what I know and have learned about educational technology from my academic, professional, and other experiences and providing evidence of that learning with a collection of artifacts I have created. Rather than being guided step-by-step, pursuing what I am told to pursue and in a manner I am told to purse it, I am allowed to have a genuine constructivist experience to enhance my knowledge and to build my skills. Just as I believe the freedom to pursue their own path, even with possibility of choosing an unnecessarily bumpy path, allows my students to create deeper and more personal knowledge, I feel the same way about my own learning. I also believe that the more prescripted a course of study is the more extrinsic motivation comes into play, while the more unscripted a course of study is the more intrinsic the motivation becomes.
Now, on we go to playtesting e-portfolios. When it comes to play-testing e-portfolios, there is an enormous number of choices. My particular investigations broke down into what are generally classified as website creation tools – Google Sites, SnapPages, Weebly, Wix, and WordPress; learning management systems – BlackBoard Learn, Brightspace, Canvas, and Moodle; specialized portfolio software – Mahara e-Portfolio System, Portfoliogen, and Adobe Spark; and specialized websites for educators - Mahara FolioSpace and PebblePad. Although each of the particular tools within each classifications above have both a wide range of overlapping capabilities and usually a few unique twists. To truly definitively assess all the unique affordances of each of the potential e-portfolio platforms above would prove to be an insurmountable task; so, I will generally use broad strokes and occasionally narrow in on some interesting aspects of a few platforms along the way.
First and foremost, all of these are potential platforms for e-portfolios, so they all have an affordance to create and organize electronic documents which can be stored, edited, and shared with varying capabilities and varying ease of use. All of these potential e-portfolio platforms have an affordance to include multimedia enhancement of the content including text, images, videos, and hyperlinks. Although there is more variability in this affordance, all of these potential platforms offer some opportunities to creatively enhance the organization and presentation of content to, ideally, make the form of the information more pleasing to someone perusing the e-portfolio.
As I looked deeper into each of the classifications above, I found a key affordance of the website creation tools is that they have many capabilities beyond those strictly needed for an e-portfolio; this is both a blessing for someone seeking greater flexibility to use web-based media, but also could present an overwhelming number of choices on how to do things that could distract the user from the core purpose. I uncovered a key affordance of the learning management systems is that a student’s interaction with their e-portfolio could exist on the same platform where courses, assignments, assessments, grades, feedback, wikis, and discussion boards reside. This leads to another affordance of students being able to easy access their coursework as artifacts and to receive feedback on their portfolios from their instructors and peers. A key affordance of the specialized portfolio software is that it is focused on e-portfolio development that allowed the user interface to be more tailored to the development of an e-portfolio; this typically made the process of e-portfolio development more user friendly, focused, and less overwhelming. The specialized websites for educators felt like they are an attempt to combine the best of the affordances of learning management systems and specialized e-portfolio software. In particular, the specialized websites for educators typically have the affordances of allowing the creation of assignments to be included in the e-portfolio as artifacts to be reflected upon and connected with feedback from the instructor. These specialized websites for educators also had an affordance of allowing collection of multimedia into assignments through images, video, and audio recordings directly into the e-portfolio assignments. Although I am sure this could be done in a learning management platform, PeeblePad in particular had an affordance that allow the instructor to tailor scaffolding to differentiate assignments for individual students.
After looking at all these different potential e-portfolio platforms, I was of two minds with respect to where to establish my own e-portfolio – either in Wix where I had established my blog or Adobe Spark as a specialized portfolio platform. Both Wix and Adobe Spark had the affordance for me that they would house an e-portfolio that was in my possession and control. Wix had the advantage of offering the affordance of me doing my blog and e-portfolio in one platform. Adobe Spark offered me the affordance of being in the same suite as my creative tools that I use for many of my documents and the images I take through my photography. In the end, Adobe Spark appeared to have a bit more creative options while maintaining user friendliness; so the balance was tipped to Adobe Spark for my e-portfolio.
Now, if I switch my perspective to that of my students, I think I would choose PebblePad as their e-portfolio platform. My rationale is based on the affordances I mentioned above. The focused purpose of PebblePad would make it easier for students to use. The capability of being able to collect aspects of artifacts directly through various multimedia modes would both inspire greater student engagement and give me more creative ways to redefine approaches to learning content. Finally, the ability to collect assignments, give students feedback, and scaffold assignments tailored to the specific needs of individual students would allow a nurturing and supportive environment while operating in a “loose-tight” pedagogical mode.
If I had PeeblePad for my students, I could design an initial assignment of a measurement lab that substituted an online assignment for a paper assignment allowing the students to be more mobile in collecting their data, and I could then augment the assignment with a reflection on the measurement lab as an artifact in their portfolio. From the TPACK model perspective, the pedagogy (P) is still a constructivist exploration of measuring everyday items, the content (C) is slightly modified as the students can seek out their own everyday items to measure rather than having them presented to them in class. The technology (T) has afforded students to do a deeper constructivist exploration by increasing their mobility and to include their reflections.
As the skills of both my students and I with PebblePad grow, I could redesign an experiment where students do an ecosystem survey of the school grounds using multimedia modes to collect information, the students could then select their most relevant and interesting information collected and write a reflection on what makes that information interesting. Later, the students could review the multimedia information and reflections of other students, and write a reflection on how they connect to their own information and reflection. From the TPACK model perspective, this represents a deeper dive into constructivist pedagogy (P) as the students experiences are largely unscripted. The content (C) is also expanded as unscripted explorations tend to lead to questions and insights unplanned by me. Finally, the technology (T) enabled all of this by allowing the students to be mobile, to use multimedia tools to capture information about the local ecosystem, and to include their reflections. The level of engagement and good-natured competition of this scavenger hunt of sorts has excellent potential to deeply engage students in a very non-traditional manner.
Having written so much about reflection, perhaps I should reflect for a moment. Having spent two weeks play-testing blogs and e-portfolios, my cup runneth over with new ideas I wish to pursue. I am a bit trepidatious about making changes on the fly to the e-portfolio approach I currently have in hand. Still, I can make some adjustments at the margins that will put me in a better position to make more efficacious changers next semester and next year.
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