What resources & assistance do you need? What are your challenges & barriers? What tools are you going to use?

The resources I will need are the following:

• Time (of course)
• Laptop, tablet, smartphone
• Internet access
• Specific apps for developing the portfolios.

I´ll need assistance basically to select the useful apps that will enable us to make the job easier and to familiarize more with Google Apps.

We've got a lot of challenges along the way, especially for the implementation plan. The most important thing here is to convince students this is good for them, and that it'll be a huge benefit on the long run. We need to plan this ahead in such a way that we have time for carrying the project out. I don't see many barriers right now, but I'll surely find a way to tear them down in case they appear. ;)

We are planning to go ahead and use Google Apps because its available for our students, and we will enhance it by the use of different apps (voice recorders, movie makers, etc).
We're really excited about the project, its just a matter of making it work.

What's your professional development plan for helping teachers facilitate the portfolio development process?

I first need to research more on the "theoretical" part of portfolios. I want to learn more on how to select the artifacts and especially find out about more techniques for reflecting. I'd like to share this with other co-workers, and for that I'll have to strengthen the vision we created and finish my own portfolio to set it as an example.

The other aspect I need to cover is the use of Google Apps. I love the magic of it, but I still feel I need to learn how to use those tools better to get the most out of it. If I expect my students to really pull this off, I need to go ahead and foresee what their problems might be (especially regarding technology).

How will your students create a showcase portfolio, reflecting on growth over time and setting new learning goals? (Including digital stories)

Now that the course is almost over, I realized how important reflection is in the learning process. This is why we are planning to combine the use of blogs and portfolios for next semester. We also need to share our vision with our students so they really get the relevance of becoming masters of their own learning. By analyzing their strengths and weaknesses over a period of time, they can have a better picture on how to work for the future. The only way of setting realistic goals is to figure out what worked or not. By adding digital stories, we can make it more interesting for others, especially considering that we've got different types of students. It also provides MORE voice than the one we can transmit with words.

I've really learned a lot during these days, now its only a matter of getting hands-on! =D

Reflecting on reflection

After having a discussion on what to do with students in order to foster reflection , I realized I haven´t worked on this as much as I´d like. This part is crucial for them so as to understand why we are doing certain things, what they got from the lesson, and to clarify or amplify their doubts. 

For next semester, I´ll start by giving students the topic and allow them to think for some minutes about what they´d like to learn from it. When we are done with the lesson, I´ll ask them to write a reflection on the topics we´ve checked with specific questions or reflection exercises. We could have a short discussion before starting a new topic in order to share their experiences orally, apart from writing in their blogs.

Workshop: Day 1

It's been a superb experience so far. I now have a clear sense of what portfolios are. We had the chance to explore the use of Google drive and to work collaboratively to state the vision (what our Ss will get from working with e-portfolios). II was amazing to see how we could all be writing at the same time, and to track how much each person contributed to the file. 

By the end of the day, we explored different apps to be used for collecting documents (blogging from my IPhone right now). I can't wait for tomorrow's lesson! 😄

What do I want to get out of the E-portfolios workshop?

Since I´m not really good at using google apps and so on, I want to be able to handle technology better so as to support the creation of portfolios. Moreover, I want to  understand the way e-portfolios work so as to engage my students into them. I´d also like to know how to assess my students during the process in order for them to get really involved with their learning process. Last but not least, there needs to be a way to evaluate their creation, and I want to learn the best way to do so. 

Assessment

Now that we have a better idea on how to create the e-portfolio, why to do so and what to put on it, the million dollar question for us teachers is to know how to evaluate it and how to get the most out of it. Personally, I like rubrics because if you give them to your students since the beginning, they will know exaclty what you expect from them. I also consider that there has to be a balance between teacher´s and peer´s feedback, because sometimes we miss things that students do not. The thing there is that we need to push them in order for the comments to be relevant and objective, because sometimes they do not like to be honest with their classmates, especially if they are correcting a friend. 

Getting into teacher´s feedback, I coincide with the readings: the sooner the better. If you wait too much to let them know what you think, they won´t probably remember what you are talking about. It is also important not to give them straight answers, but to let them recognize their mistakes. If we just tell them that it is wrong, there is a high probability that they won´t even understand why. The whole idea of correcting mistakes is that they become meaningful in such a way that students avoid them in the future.

Showcase

I really love the idea of creating a web page in which you can let others know what you´ve been upto (academically speaking). I think that by collecting artifacts through the whole year, and then spending time selecting what you want to show, thinking about why to show it and reflecting upon how much you´ve learnt so far is great. In this way, you can work not only on technological competencies, but also on visual - spatial competencies. It is learning much more than what´s limited to the curriculum and you are using it somehow, therefore taking it to a higher level. 

Technically speaking, the tutorials were a little bit overwhelming, not because they are difficult to follow, but it actually is a lot of information to process. I learn faster and better when I do it myself, rather than by reading it so I guess I will familiarize better with it once I start creating the webpage.

In the beginning, I didn´t understand why jumping from the blog to the web page. After govong it a lot of thought I realized that the blog supports the reflection part better, but lacks the practicality of organizing your artifacts according to categories (rather than time). Moreover, webpages are more people friendly in the sense that people can go over them in the way they want and it is more for showing the outcome rather than the process.

Reflection for learning

I found the information on this particular part really interesting, especially since I´ve had many problems understanding "metacognition" in the past. At the school were I previously worked, the principals insisted a lot on this part but I was not enlightened on how to do it. 

I do realize, however that reflecting on what we have done is really important during the process because it enables us to understand why we are learning a particular topic and most relevantly, on how to use it for future purposes. Last semester, I was facilitating Advanced IV at Tec, which is mainly a writing course. During the semester, I used a lot of peer analysis, in order to provide students with several opinions rather than my own. In the beginning it was tough, due to the fact that they were not critical enough. After reading the entries on the course, I realized it was partly because I failed to provide them with a rubric or something tangible for them to follow. After working for a while, I started polishing the way they had to approach their classmates´writing by telling them in a clear way what they had to look for in the tasks and this proved to be much more fruitful.

What I liked the most about this part were the samples one of the pages provides for getting into this reflection. In my view, this is the toughest part for students get bored of doing the same type of exercise over and over. We have to search for a balance between teacher and classmates ´feedback, as well as own reflection. We also need to encourage this by providing some time in the classroom to address reflection since it will give us a better start for what we will be doing next.

Portfolio Development Process

After revising the activities, I found out that I entered the discussion group but I forgot to write my blog entry. 
When reading the article, I noticed that the first thing we need to consider is our motivation towards using e-portfolios. We need to establish our purpose because this will give our work the path to follow. There is a huge tendency on evaluating with tests going on, and we are leaving the main goal behind (Students´ learning process). In many occasions, an exam does not tell you whether the student has progressed over time or not because there are many factors that alter the results. By looking at other ways of evaluation (namely portfolios) we are able to see the real improvement in a somewhat more fruitful context. 
Before considering if we are going to develop a portfolio, we need to keep in mind the development vs presentation deal. Is our goal to assess how much our students have learnt, or do we want to show off their work? I believe we have to look for a balance in this, since both parts are important. The development (workplace) will provide us with a great deat of information and will take our students´reflection to a higher level. However, given so much work it is also important for them to present it, and by comparing their work with their classmates, a different perspective could be given from their classmates.
We also need to go through all the stages in a portfolio development, and establish in which parts we are going to intervene (as teachers). Our students are the main motif to create an e-portfolio and we do not have to loose this from sight.

Collection

After reading the tutorials, I was a bit more confused since it was too much information for my brain. I couldn´t believe there were so many features out there to help us collaborate with others. For this reason, I decided to start with Dr. Barrett´s advice and get familiarized with Google Drive since I use Gmail and I knew more about this option. I have also used Dropbox, but after comparing them I noticed that Google Apps is more complex and enables us to do more things.

I watched the tutorials which are embedded to the website, and I felt so much better since I could understand how to use it. I was also amazed by the idea of being able to work with others from different locations in real time. I also tried to create documents, share stuff and so on so as to make it more practical. That is how I learnt how to embed videos on the blog.

I feel I´ve wasted so much time because there are hundreds of tools available that I didn´t know of before we started this course. At the same time, I´m really happy to get involved in this technological era. We need to consider that many of our students are really good at these things. This means that we need to keep up with them and try to be up-to-date. I believe this is the real challenge for teachers at the moment.

Google Drive Tutorial - Sharing documents

Understanding what eportfolios are

From the readings, we can see that even though each person has his/her own view of what portfolios are, there are some common characteristics that people share. Firstly, it refers to a selection of works which reflect student´s achievement over time. Those works are selected because the learner sees them as representatives of what they have achieved. Moreover, this way of assessing enables student´s reflection and contrast between what he/she is expected to learn and what he/she actually did. I believe it is a great opportunity to leave multiple-choice behind and explore another side of evaluation. When we use traditional ways of evaluation, students are not really aware of what they learnt and they do not recognize their weaknesses and strengths. In this way, we can also foster interaction with other people and peer evaluation, instead of teacher´s opinion. 

Considering the new technological era, eportfolios allow us to collect more than just one type of work. We can enhance the process by adding videos, podcasts, audio, etc rather than just paper work. This not only enriches the experience but it also targets different types of students (visual, auditive, etc). On the other hand, it helps our students to have stuff organized instead of having it randomly stored. Another advantage of eportfolios, is the space in which you store them. It is accessible for a bigger audience since it can be shared through the internet.

I really enjoyed the readings because it helped me to understand the way a portfolio is carried out, as well as looking at the advantages it has over traditional ways of evaluation. By reflecting upon our own learning process, we can really get where we are getting at and if we are achieving our goals or not.