Portfolios

A major portion of my technology integration for this school year is digital portfolios. I was and still am excited about the prospect of my students keeping a portfolio to show their progress throughout the course. However, I think the portfolio could be a little more productive.

I am having my students use Mind42, a graphic organizer, as a collection of links and ideas to their assignments and projects. The format is very good as it allows students to get a feel for how the content is organized and how it fits together. On the other hand, there are some practical matters that are causing a few difficulties. The first is storage. When using Mind42 there is no place for the students to store their documents. Thus, they need to use an outside source such as Google docs and link their document to their organizer. This works fine, but can be time consuming and the students need to learn a few more skills to accomplish this.

When starting off, I debated between using the mind map format and a wiki. In hind sight, I think the wiki format (such as PBworks) would be more productive. It would give the students a place to store documents and these could still be linked to a mind map to get a feel for the interrelations of the material.

Even though a wiki might be simpler, students would still have to master the skills of creating documents and uploading them to the wiki and they would have to learn how to navigate the wiki. I am beginning to think a digital portfolio hosted on our server at the school might be an even better option.

I will continue to explore different ideas and option for digital portfolios until I find the best one. If I do find a better way, I will transition my student to this and report back the results.