Blogging into the New Year!

Happy New Year everyone! As we wrap up 2014, I'm wondering if 2015 will be the "year of the portfolio." We are talking to more and more people about digital portfolios and we can can see interest bubbling up and increasing. There are many of us out there trying to figure out the best way(s) to develop digital portfolios and also what we even mean by "portfolio." We are also building on the work of decades of traditional portfolio work from which we should be learning and adopting/adapting best practices. I'm hopeful this year we will start connecting the dots between the past, present, and future and learn from our colleagues who are also working on digital portfolio development. As someone told us the other day, there are lots of digital platforms and folks out there figuring this out, but what's going to matter is how you structure the process and change the culture to make it possible.

Updates and some of what we're learning after the break...

Educator Meet-ups

 

As an update on how we spent our December, both the DY Art Center and DY Prep held their monthly meetings. At the Art Center, all three programs have their participants blogging, but time constraints and digital literacy levels are the biggest challenges right now. Carla has her participants creating "pages" on tumblr that are tied to tags. This process is really helping them organize their blogs and make them more navigable. Here is an example of a participant blog using two simple pages - "inspiration" and "My Artwork" to separate her posts: http://michela-bacportfolio.tumblr.com/

At DY Prep, the team of educators had a special workshop led by Parsons faculty member, Gigi Polo, on design principles for the web. The educators were excited to learn more about how to help their students make their blogs more visually pleasing and well-designed. I can't wait to see how they take the information and share it with their classes. 

Google Training 

In December, we also had the amazing opportunity to visit Google for an Apps for Education training. About 10 people from both Parsons and DreamYard were able to attend and learn more about Blogger, Sites, YouTube, Drive, and Maps and how we might use them better for our project. We are so grateful to Google for hosting us and look forward to using what we learned in the classroom. More to come! 

Reflecting and Looking Forward

Finally, as we enter a new year, I've been reflecting on what we've learned this year and what we still need to figure out. 

Here are some things we know now: 

• It is increasingly important to differentiate between creating a blog and creating a portfolio. Creating a blog is a process that helps you generate digital content for a digital portfolio. Some young people will create a blog, post for a while, and then re-organize the blog to look more like a portfolio using tags and pages. Other young people will create a blog, add posts, and then create a separate website with their best work as a digital portfolio.

•  Each site of the Learning Portfolio project is taking on a life of their own - and that's great! We are working in three very different contexts and each is adopting and adapting the idea of a learning portfolio in different ways that fit the group of young people they are working with, the structure of their classes, and what they are teaching. 

• It takes time to create enough digital content to put into a portfolio. Young people might have a lot of work they've completed, but it's not all digitized. That's where blogging comes in because it creates an opportunity for young people to digitize their work, reflect on it and organize it in one place.  

• Tags and pages are key to making an easy-to-navigate blog. As our young people add more to their blogs, we are finding that tags help differentiate what content is theirs and what comes from other sources. We will have to teach how to tag different posts so young people can easily find content they want to add to a portfolio that shows a range of interests and content. Educators are already having their students use tags like "my work," "research," or "in process" to organize their posts and it's helping.  

Here are some things we still need to figure out: 

• Streamlining the "getting started" process
• Creating a Theory of Change with our evaluator (to assess our impact at a project-wide level)
• Writing up best practices for integrating digital literacy skills into blogging sessions
• Sharing all our educator-created resources and example blogs on a new website
• Creating assessments for blogging and portfolio development in the classroom 
  

The first six months of year two are off to a great start. Here's to lots more blogging and learning in 2015!