Before we can even think about expounding the term digital portfolio, the term portfolio must be defined in detail. A portfolio is a purposeful collection of artifacts that describe a student's progress in a class. There are several different kinds of portfolios :

• Project: The purpose of this type of portfolio is to document the steps taken along the way to a finished product.
• Achievement: These portfolios use quality recent work to assess the level of student achievement at a certain point in time.
• Celebration Portfolios: Students decide which work they are most proud of to include in this type of portfolio.
• Growth: This is the portfolio type that we will be most concerned with here. It's purpose is to show progress toward specific learning targets. Through the use of growth portfolios, document increasing levels of achievement.

  (Source: Assessment Training Institute)

In order to enhance learning, a growth portfolio must be more than just a object, it must be a process. Included in this process are several steps:

• Choosing an entry
• Receiving feedback
• Reflecting
• Using feedback to improve next entry

 

Perhaps you have your students write in a journal to record their learning in your classroom. Each day or week you allow them to write about a current topic in math. The journals detail their thoughts, reasoning, & troubles. Then you collect a few, or all, of the journals and provide students (and yourself) with feedback. You are often the only one to see them and to make comments. Most likely, students use a composition book or notebook for their journals.

Now imagine that instead of having your students write in a composition book, they keep a running record of their learning on their own Web page. This online journal is updated as often as they wish and, if required, the URL is available to every student in the classroom so that they may make comments. The page is also personalized--students have chosen a background color, font, and given it a title. No bulky notebooks to drag around. This online journal is known as a Web log, or blog, and it is beneficial in another way, it's free.

The main purpose of a blog is an online journal. However, because of the editable templates, ability to hyperlink, add images and audio, & comment on entries, blogs have evolved a plethora of uses. Though not nearly exhaustive, the following is a list of ways that blogs are being used in education:

• posting class - related information such as calendars, assignments, activities, and more.
• posting prompts for writing
• posting photos from class
• online journals for students
• learning logs
• classroom newsletters

There are many definitions for digital portfolio. In fact, the term digital portfolio is one of many different names for what's also known as an electronic portfolio, ePortfolio, & a webfolio (if stored on the web). The type of portfolio I am speaking of on this site would be called a blogfolio. Perhaps a proper defintion of digital portfolio is needed: the process of archiving student work in an electronic format with the purpose of enhancing learning. Unlike a traditional portfolio, where student work may be placed in a folder, in a digital portfolio, student work is saved to a computer hard-drive, a CD-ROM, or a somewhere on the web.

Blogs have many qualities that facilitate the process needed to enhance learning and make them excellent repositories for electronic student work. First, when a blogger posts an entry to his/her blog, the date is entered with the post. This makes it simple to order students entries chronologically. Second, a comment link (included with every entry) allows readers to give the blogger feedback about their entry. After receiving this feedback, the blogger can then post a reflection. This is powerful due to the fact that once posted, the reflection will be a permanent part of the portfolio. Finally, all of the entries that are posted to the blog show up on one page making it easy to see the year's growth.

My Experiment - Improving Scores on the State Test

In Ohio, there are many questions on the state test that require a great deal of writing on the mathematics portion. Questions such as these are referred to as extended response items. These are typically the questions that students struggle with the most on the state test. As a result, their test scores suffer.

Obviously, the solution to this problem is to have students write more in math. For the purpose of improving test scores, teachers must focus on having students solve problems and then explain the process involved. But this type of assignment must be more than a token assignment thrown in once a month, or as a word problem at the end of an exam; it must drive the mathematics instruction in each and every classroom. For this reason, I decided to begin using blogs as repositories for the extended responses that my students were completing in class. That way, they could get all of the benefits mentioned above and then I would be able to see if in fact their test scores actually improved.

The Process

As I said above, a portfolio must be seen as more of a process than an object. Care must be taken to follow a certain set of steps. In my classroom, these are the steps that make up the process:

1. Teach the material that students must know in order to complete the extended response entry. For example, a recent extended response question the students were to solve was:

   Mark's heart beats 16 times in 15 seconds. How many times does it beat in one minute?

   This question required students to know about derived measurements. Therefore, the material I taught them

2. Assign the extended response question and allow students time to solve it using the strategies they have learned. I usually assign the extended response question as homework so that they will be ready to post it the next day.
3. Post the blog entry.
4. Provide feedback. I do this through the comments link on each entry. I use a rubric (see it here) that the students are familiar with before writing the entry.
5. Students reflect. After students have read the comments, they must then take the time to reflect on them. What can they do to improve the next entry?

From the Classroom: comments

Brian's Blog Mindy's Blog Wesley's Blog See what your comments look like after posting them to a blog.

 

 

Read more about blogs in the classroom:

 

Classroom Blogs allow teachers to assess and enrich classroom learning. Student blogs allow students to create amazing multimedia projects and to communicate and dialogue with another. Writing with blogs in the mathematics classroom allows students to record their learning in a digital format. Digital portfolios allow students to demonstrate growth in an electronic format. Resources for Blogging in the Classroom - Books, links, and even more links.