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.