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Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness

Tag: efolio

Connecting Personal Learning Systems to Goals, Autonomy & Portfolios

May 14, 2016 / / 0 Comments

PLS

We know that so much of learning is about making connections. 

This goes not just for students but also for teachers. Fortunately, I work with dynamic teachers who enjoy sharing and building off one another’s ideas.

Case in point, I emailed the Personal Learning System (PLS) page of Web Resources for Learning to Jessa Veneman, who teaches Sixth Graders at my school. Jessa responded with the following.

“One of my goals is to create a more autonomous classroom where kids become more aware of their needs, strengths, and learning styles so that they can be more responsible for their own learning.” We then spoke in person, bouncing some more ideas around. This led me to add the following to the Personal Learning System page.

As one colleague pointed out, working with students to construct their Personal Learning System goes hand in hand with furthering their self-understanding, developing their learner profile, and supporting their learning autonomy while moving them to be goal-oriented. The components of one’s PLS (see below) come together, supporting this idea of self-directed learners as we have them use tools to reflect (blog), create (multiple tools), set goals, and document their understanding and goal attainment through their portfolios.

Thanks, Jessa, for helping me make further connections!

Supporting Resources:

Blog Posts> https://lessonslearned.edublogs.org/tag/personal-learning-system/

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How Do You Celebrate Learning?

May 22, 2015 / / 1 Comment

celebrate

Becky Rosenberg, our inspiring PYP Coordinator, asked a group of us how we celebrate learning in our classrooms. Some excellent points emerged from the discussion as our international educators shared their experiences from previous schools.

Here are a few of the points:

  • How to celebrate the process of learning and not just the finished products?
  • Concern about having parents in to experience a dog and pony show.
  • How to keep celebrations with parents low-key and low-stress?
  • How do celebrations of learning connect with student-led conferences?
  • Setting up learning stations in the classroom for parents to experience with their children.
  • How often to have celebrations with your parents?
  • Would having too many celebrations with parents lead to a bit of “parent fatigue” in attending the events?
  • Remembering to have celebrations just with students as a part of having a culture of learning in one’s classroom.

I did some processing and came up with supporting face-to-face celebrations with periodic home-based celebrations using digital portfolios. This also connects to my writing about the value of students using their blogs to reflect on and share their learning with their parents.

Thus one way to support ongoing celebrations of learning is to periodically ask students and parents to share learning times at home using digital portfolios. Teachers could send home a scaffolded questionnaire for students and parents to follow and answer as they review the latest information the students added to their portfolios. These events can be followed up in class with students sharing their celebration time with their parents. A colleague pointed out an additional benefit of this strategy. She pointed out that students whose parents are too busy to attend in-school celebrations will feel included as they get to celebrate at home.

This process further develops a culture of learning in one’s classroom, guiding students to think about the process of learning and not just the finished products.

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Scaffolding for Student-Led Conferences

April 29, 2013 / / 0 Comments

The Alexandria Country Day Middle School students met with their parents last week to review their learning from the year. In preparation for the conferences, the 5th-grade students were given the following questions about our Portrait of a Graduate dispositions. The students spent time thinking about their learning and responding to the questions. Their teachers, Ms. Cook and Ms. Weaver arranged sessions for each student to practice with an adult in preparation for meeting with their parents. This was an excellent way to build on the scaffolding they already had in place with the questions listed below. The students typed up their responses to the questions and met with their teachers for feedback as they prepared for the conferences.

The 6th, 7th, and 8th graders create folios through our Haiku LMS. I wrote about our eFolio system in February, where a link is provided to notes and a draft version of the template used within Haiku. It can provide ideas for others reviewing their eFolio and student-led conference programs. We will soon be meeting at ACDS to do our review of these student reflection and goal-setting strategies.

______________________________

Independent Learner: Use three pieces of evidence from your work this year to describe how you have grown as an independent learner.

You should think about the following:

  • How did you solve problems or figure things out on your own?
  • How did you advocate for yourself if you needed something?
  • How did you organize yourself?
  • How did you motivate yourself?

Your response should include:

At least one entire paragraph. Consider using three (one for each piece of evidence.) Work from more than one class. Work from more than one trimester.

Look to reflect further on your strengths, weaknesses, and growth in this area.

 

Communicator: Use three pieces of evidence from your work this year to describe how you have grown as a communicator.

You should think about the following:

  • How have you communicated your learning this year?
  • How do you prefer to communicate your learning?
  • How was your message received?

Your response should include:

At least one entire paragraph. Consider using three (one for each piece of evidence.)

  • Work from more than one class.
  • Work from more than one trimester.
  • Work showing more than one type of communication (writing, speaking, VoiceThread, iMovie, Keynote, ScreenChomp, or other tools)

Look to reflect further on your strengths, weaknesses, and growth in this area.

 

Community Minded: Use three pieces of evidence from your work or activities this year to describe how you have grown as a community-minded individual.

You should think about the following:

  • What have you learned about your community (school, town, country, world) this year?
  • How did you act on this learning?
  • How would you like to act on it in the future?

Your response should include:

At least one entire paragraph. Consider using three (one for each piece of evidence.)

  • Work from more than one class or activity.
  • Work from more than one trimester.
  • Look to reflect further on your strengths, weaknesses, and growth in this area.

 

Balanced: Use three pieces of evidence from your work or activities this year to describe your work/life balance.

You should think about the following:

  • How do you balance your time between things you have to do and things you want to do?
  • Was there a time this year when you felt your balance was not right? How did it feel?
  • How is your current balance?
  • What strategies do you have to be balanced in the future?

Your response should include:

  • At least one entire paragraph. Consider using three (one for each piece of evidence.)
  • Work from more than one class or activity.
  • Work from more than one trimester.

Look to reflect further on your strengths, weaknesses, and growth in this area.

 

eFolios, Reflecting, Documenting and Workflow

February 21, 2013 / / 1 Comment

I am going to ramble here, but the thoughts are all connected just as we work to help students connect their ideas and reflections. 🙂

eFolios:

We piloted eFolios last year in the Fifth Grade. One goal was to help our students reflect on their learning while setting goals for future growth. Teaching students how to reflect and make connections in their learning is a challenging task. Yet, it should be central to every school’s culture and mission.

To also guide the students to find evidence to support their reflections is an additional skill that takes time for students to grasp. We supported the reflection process by having the students respond to guiding questions around our Portrait of A Graduate (POG) attributes (Independent Learner, Communicator, Community, and Balanced) while providing evidence of their work toward reaching the POG attributes. The students met with their parents at the end of the year as part of our student-led conference system, using their eFolios to communicate their growth. This year, the eFolios are being rolled out to the rest of the Middle School students.

We use the eFolio module of our learning management system (Haiku), where we insert a template with directions and questions to guide the students as they reflect and record their ideas into the template. Here is a link to a draft of our eFolio template. It provides one approach to have students review their learning from a course perspective and one with the Portrait of a Graduate approach. As noted, we had the students use the Portrait of a Graduate focus. The template can provide practical ideas for other schools using eFolios or looking to do so.

Our grade-level advisers are now working together to review the guiding questions in the template for each of the four POG dispositions. The questions are being refined and differentiated for and within each grade level. As we know, a Fifth Grader’s ability to grasp complexity and work with open-ended questions can be quite different from an Eighth Grader’s.

A further connection is to consider having teachers and administrators develop eFolios as part of their professional growth experience. eFolios can also be used in partnership with teacher coaches and administrators to be used in teacher appraisal systems. This leads to the next topic of how students and teachers document the evidence/artifacts to be used in their folios.

Documenting Information:

I have written several posts about students creating their personal learning systems of Web resources, software, and hardware tools. I will remember to include teachers and administrators in future posts as they also work to use their personal learning systems to gather and document information, curate it, and communicate their learning and professional growth.

The students at our school are using their iPads to document examples of their learning. The next step beyond using examples of work from Pages documents, links to Prezis, video projects, etc., is to help our students use their technology literacy to choose tools to record their thinking about the work they are producing.

Many of us have moved from paper and pencil to digital tools to record ideas, reflections, goals, etc. On the iPads, the students might use Evernote, Notability, mind maps, voice recording, and the camera for screenshots, still shots, and video. A wide variety of apps assist us in recording our thinking.

The tools are easy to put into the hands of our students. The more significant challenge is to help the students be more reflective about their learning and go to the next step to record their ideas throughout the year. Making this recording habitual is another teaching and learning task that will take some time. But once the students, teachers, and administrators get into documenting their thinking, they will be ready to bring their learning artifacts and reflections into their eFolios.

Workflow:

Mark occasionally mentions how he manages his workflow on the Edtech Co-Op podcast. This led me to think further about how our Information and Communication Literacies (ICL) curriculum includes targeted lessons to help students not only find information but also help them manage and eventually communicate their understanding. An example of an ICL lesson is when we teach how to use Noodle Tools for research documentation, synthesizing information, and creating a Google Document to communicate one’s findings. Here is a link to a post from our school blog that covers it.

What we need to work on regarding eFolios is helping students build a system for processing and synthesizing their recorded reflections to then publish their understanding in their eFolio. This workflow challenge will need to be differentiated for groups of students and eventually individualized for each student as they build their workflow system, including one’s personal learning system tools to use in this process.

As I like to provide tangible examples of ideas presented here, I look to review a WebQuest we used several years ago at an international school in Taiwan. The Middle School there started in Grade 7. As the school’s culture was very progressive and one where students used a lot of technology, we created WebQuest as an orientation to the Middle School, connecting it to the students’ study of culture in the social studies curriculum. There were no iPads or similar devices during that time, so WebQuest doesn’t include any information about apps. If I were to write up a similar WebQuest for my current school, it would include information on using iPads/Android tablets and smartphones.

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