​I. LEARNING PROCESS
June - August
This project began with Parson instructors presenting the overall concept of learning portfolios to DreamYard staff including high quality examples and hosting a technical introduction to blogging workshop. The DY educators each created their own personal blog and/or class blog at this point to better understand how blogging works and how they might teach it to their students. Together as a team, the group discussed ways to integrate portfolio development into classroom curriculum including developing lessons and homework assignments around the portfolio, ways to support less tech savy students, how to monitor and foster community building efforts on the portfolio platform, techniques for scaffolding content and supporting documentation as a natural process of learning rather than an additional responsibility. Developed collaboratively, the goals for the project were to:o Broaden access to portfolios.o Transform the traditional notion of a portfolio.o Evidence multiple learning pathways.o Help young people gain agency to tell their own learning story and gain competency with variety of digital tools.o Help educators better understand the learning history of their student.
II. INTEGRATION
September - November
Through this period, educators were guided through the development and implementation of portfolios within their class. This plan included choosing and setting up a platform. A collective decision was made by the DY Prep teachers to use Google's Blogger platform because all of the students already had Google accounts via the school. The DreamYard Art Center educators decided to use Tumblr because of the ease with design and posting. Tumblr is blocked in most public schools in NYC, so it was not an option for DY Prep. Then the teachers each developed plans that fit their teaching context to help their student set up their own learning portfolio blogs, begin developing content for posts, and address potential challenges. The major hurdles that educators faced included developing the technical skills to feel comfortable teaching blogging and portfolio development to their students, finding time for planning, making time to generate content for the portfolios that did not compete with other class priorities, and developing student tech knowledge such as navigation, browser know-how, typing, and technical vocabulary, as well as strategically developing content for non-arts subjects that traditionally are not traditionally visual. On reflection we should have allowed more time up front for teachers to develop their class blogs. They immediately gravitated to the idea of having a hub for each of their classes but would have benefitted from more time exploring this before rolling it out to their students. Two different forms of blogs have taken shape including a class blog made by the educator and learning portfolios made by students. The first hurdle was getting the teachers to create a class blog that would serve as a hub for each of their classes. They got really into this but it meant we should have allowed more time for this first step and then a next step of adding the student blogging portion. In order to address some of the challenges, Parsons educators hosted workshops on documenting process, shared templates for posts that are easily transferable across different subject areas, and discussed common vocabulary around portfolios. Issues that arose included the question of quality versus quantity, and time spent on teacher-run class blogs versus student-run portfolio blogs.
III. SHARING
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November - December
An important piece to the development of the portfolio project was setting aside time to share practices and challenges among the group. Some of the questions or thoughts that came out of these discussions included:o How to reserve and share limited technology resources at the high schoolo How to implement the Learning Portfolio in the classroom without taking away from regular instruction timeo How to collect and address students’ thoughts on the process.o How to scaffold learning for students, both in terms of digital literacy and writing about their processo How to create a strong teacher-run class blogo How to address issues of digital literacy of educatorso How to balance posts about process with finished products
IV. FINAL REFLECTION
January - Febuary
The group is in the process of collecting data on the project including interviews, templates, overall reflections, meeting notes, recordings, example Learning Portfolios, and updating the project website. A dedicated documentor was hired as part of the project to film, create a website and package resources for sharing purposes. Some of the best practices worth highlighting include:o Spend more time developing educators’ technical skills around blogging prior to introducing the project to students and the curriculum. This includes also spending more time exploring model blogs and portfolio writing both traditional and digital versions. Additionally, having tech savy educators pair up with other educators, co-plan lessons, provide training, and co-teach also has been helpful.o Spend more time developing students’ tech skills (navigating the web, typing, etc) prior to and during integration of portfolios.o Help educators plan the digital portfolio process so that it does not feel like an additional responsibility but more so a new approach to what they are already teaching.o Focus more on developing the content of the portfolios and less on the design.o In addition to documenting learning, encourage students to use the blogs to revisit past work, access resources and relearn topics.