Learning Portfolios Head to Sunny California!

Last week, Jessica and I went to Palo Alto, California to take part in an Open Portfolio Project working group meeting hosted by the Maker Education Initiative and the Moore Foundation. The facilitators and attendees were a mix of researchers, program directors, technologists, graduate students, and folks who work in college admissions. We met over two days as a whole and in small groups to discuss digital and open portfolios. We made, documented, reflected, asked questions and created some new ones.

More about the take-aways after the break... 

Second Meetings of the Year - Getting Started

DY Prep and the Art Center had their second in-person Learning Portfolio meetings of the year last week, both with similar and jam-packed agendas. It's been a treat (it's Halloween, pun intended) collaborating on agendas with Rudy. It seems like we often think alike and bounce off each other's ideas. It's hard to remember the order of putting together the agendas but based on what the educators need one of us comes up with an idea, the other runs with it, and then sometimes we build on them from there. This time Rudy came up with an amazing agenda and worksheet for the DY Prep meeting, so I used parts of it for our Art Center meeting and it worked well.

 

DY Prep

At the DY Prep meeting, one of the best parts was starting off with educator elevator pitches. Each educator had to come up with a pitch that was less than a minute to convince their students to get on board with the Learning Portfolio Project. The educators really rose to the occasion and got into it. Here are some examples: 

Then the educators worked on their plans to align 2-3 units with posting to the student or class blogs. Some educators worked in their teaching pairs and the returning educators moved around the room as needed to help out the newer educators. Rudy used Google Classroom again to organize the whole session, which is really showing itself to be a useful tool.

Here's a link to the worksheet the educators used to plan. 

Rudy is also working on his "Push-In" schedule with the teachers to figure out the best classes for him to support this semester.

 

Art Center

This time at the Art Center we focused most of the meeting on working time. This is something the educators have asked for because they don't have a lot of extra time for planning or trying things out. Our project this month was to clean up and beef up the "First Five" document. This is the template for how to get started with blogging in the Art Center programs. Each class is different (in terms of content, time, age level), so they might not follow the plan exactly, but it was very helpful for the educators to address concerns as we went through and share best practices from previous experiences.

Here's a link to the First Five document they created.

One exciting development since the last meeting is that programs have officially started and George from Carla's BAC class last year (and current Parsons student) has come back to be an intern with us on the Portfolio Project. He will be starting by assisting Carla in her class and hopefully help Austin and the ACTION participants as well. We are still working on getting an intern for DY Prep.

Next meeting everyone wants to dive into learning more about tumblr as a platform. I'm going to spend some time learning more about it myself and then walk them through a little workshop in November.

First Meeting of Year Two at the Art Center

Yesterday, we had our first meeting of our small, but mighty group of DreamYard Art Center Teaching Artists. These teaching artists have a lot of experience and all happen to work in the visual arts - so we are hoping for lots of learning in that area this year. Two of them are returning and one of them is new to the project - all have taught at DreamYard for over five years.

Our meeting included a review of our goals for this project. I looked back at some older materials and share them with the TA's. These included some of our original goals from our first proposal:

• Broaden access to the portfolio development process
• Evidence multiple learning pathways 
• Help young people gain agency to tell their own learning story and gain competency with a variety of existing digital tools
•  Help educators better understand the learning history of their students

We also looked at the key ways that Learning Portfolios are different from traditional portfolios: 

 Linear Narrative --> Interactive

Final Work --> In Progress

Solely Visual Art --> Multidisciplinary

Static --> Easily Shareable 

Carla's Bronx Art Collective class blog

Moriah's Fashion program class blog

After revisiting these early, guiding principles we started to brainstorm around criteria for what makes a good digital portfolio and learning blog. Last year, during our pilot, we learned that our young people usually don't have enough content created to start right in on a digital portfolio. So this year we are starting young people off by just blogging in their classrooms in hopes that will generate enough content that by the end of the year they will be able to pull out some of the best work and share it in a digital portfolio. Here is a link to the chart we created as a way to start brainstorming what young people will have to do to develop a quality portfolio as well as learning blog. We kept in mind our core actions of Empower, Create, and Connect as we brainstormed. Next time we will think about criteria on a more granular level by looking at what makes a good blog post.

Draft Portfolio and Blog Criteria - Art Center 

A draft of a chart for assessing what goes into a good digital portfolio and learning blog. 

We also had some time to brainstorm what we want out of these meetings and we came up with a great list of ideas and also possible tools to create: 

Ideas:

• Create an in-class incentive for posting
• Have Hillary and/or an intern there for first couple sessions to help troubleshoot
• Create how-to guides for practices everyone will need
• Maybe bring in pro photographer to teach classes how to take pics of their work
• Use these meetings to brainstorm ways we can work together
• Add in work time to these meetings - either on the blogs or on the lesson plans
• Need help with back up plans and troubleshooting tech problems
• Would love to get under the hood and have the young people learn some HTML and CSS
• Each educator should have a typed up list of all the student emails and URLs

Possible Resources to create: 

• List of good free Tumblr themes
• Guide to getting started: What do they need - email address, password, URL formula, picture of themself
• Images and video: How to use Google Image, save images, upload images, embed video, etc
• Best practices for prepping a post: Writing it up in a journal first, typing it up in Word or Drive first so you don’t lose it, having images picked out, writing a good title, etc
  
  

Speaking of resources, I also created a new chart (it's a work in progress) of possible types of blog posts. It's meant to help educators think of different types of content the young people can create on their blogs that might eventually end up in their portfolio.

Types of Blog Posts

Draft of a worksheet for explaining different types of posts

 

All in all it was a great first meeting and I can't wait to see what the teaching artists and their participants do this year!

 

First meeting of Year Two at DYPrep

Teachers sharing Blogger skills and ideas

 
Yesterday we had our first meeting of Year Two at DYPrep. (YEAH!!) We had a great turn out with four returning mentor educators and five new educators. Rudy, our Digital Learning Director at DYPrep, led the meeting and helped us cover a lot of ground. 

This was the agenda: 

1. Welcome back - Brief statement describing how you are feeling about the portfolio project? 
2. Parsons - Welcome Jess Walker
3. Google Classroom - What is it? (Emily)  
   Join the class if you haven’t done so already
   Assignment #1: Copy and paste the link to your blog to the shared Google Document
4.  Blog Share Outs - What’d you learn? What are some questions?
5.  Student Posts - Discuss:
   Criteria of a “good post”
   Different types of posts: reflective, in process, final product, inspiration/research, etc
   Drafting Process
   Life Ready Task Connections
6. Geeking Out - Play time. Go on blogger and do the following tasks
   Create your class blog using blogger.google.com
   Explore: Creating a post, adding images, embed videos, tagging and linking
7. Computer / Device Usage 
8. Future Meeting Dates/Time

Rudy presents to the group about Classroom

Overall, the educators are feeling a mix of excitement to start engaging their students with new tools and practices, but also nervous about trying something new when time is tight. All the educators are at very different places with blogging and so we told them all that matters is pushing yourself to whatever your next step is. 

A couple of great things that happened during the meeting where: 

1. Rudy ran the class like he would a tech class - he introduced language he uses as cues like "45" for closing the laptops half way to focus or "Access" which means to open your Google accounts. This is helpful because some of our teachers haven't taught as often with technology in the classroom. If teachers share common practices across the school, the students will hopefully pick up on the cues more quickly.
2. Rudy and Emily introduced everyone to Google Classroom. Emily is using it in her classes and so far it's going well. She's basically using her Classroom hub as her "class blog" where she sends out assignments and shares resources. We talked about how the first year teachers should still create class blogs using Blogger, but maybe next year everyone would move to Classroom if it works better. It seems like a great tool! 
3. Rudy also leveraged the expertise of the mentor educators really well. He asked them to get up and help the other educators several times in the meeting which built a spirit of cooperation and support in the room.

Jessica A's blog for Global

We spent some time looking at some of the educators' blogs which inspired a lot of conversation about what is possible. Jessica Altounian especially inspired folks by showing her own class blog and her own digital portfolio from grad school. It was great to see that we are teaching high school students skills that are currently  required in grad school programs. 

One thing that several educators were confused about was the embedding of documents using Scribd. They understood basically what it did, but they weren't sure why when you pressed the "translate" widget (which is a feature everyone was excited about!) it didn't also translate the embedded document. We worked through it and some people came up with some work arounds, like linking to a Google Doc with the text copy and pasted so folks can translate it. 


We also discussed what it might look like if all students starting in 9th grade were beginning with portfolios. Rudy tied that idea into the bigger plan for the school to use more portfolios and to make students "life-ready". I think we all know that every student making digital portfolios and keeping an organized Google Drive archive of all their work is a ways off but everyone seemed to be on board.  

Excerpt from a student lab post in Emily's class

We then had a discussion about different kinds of posts students can write and also what makes a good post. One group said that it wasn't enough to just have text but students should be able to connect their text to multimedia like memes, videos, or even audio. In addition, Emily talked a lot about her own class and how she wants her students' posts to go deeper this year. She wants to move beyond quick responses to prompts. She showed an example of a post a student had posted that day that documented a lab they had been working on. She was glad to see that her students rose to the challenge - writing up everything they had done and also including photos of charts. (see image to the right) Moving forward, she wants the students to not just post their labs but write about what they learned from their lab - more like a reflection on their learning and their take aways. A new educator - Gerry - also had some great ideas about how to connect blogging to his Math class, including using the blog for life ready tasks and connecting to fields like urban planning or landscape architecture. 

We used the last part of the meeting to log onto Blogger and make sure everyone had at least created a blog. Educators and support staff worked together to help one another get to their next step including adding labels and widgets. We had about 25 minutes to work on the computers, but we can always use more of that lab time! As the meetings move on we will probably have more time it. Rudy's new lab room where me meet is great, but now with the bigger room it gets loud quickly and can feel a bit chaotic. Mika - one of the educators - asked me about pairing up the educators in future meetings and I think we might work on how we do that. It would be great to have the mentor educators paired up with one or two new educators to share their expertise and maybe also learn new ways of thinking about blogs from the new folks. We might also eventually have to break out into two rooms or even into the hallway to find the space to focus. So much to do ... so little time!

We wrapped up the session with some talk about scheduling computer time and future meetings - both big challenges, but we will figure it out. All in all the group is ready to run with this project - knowing there will be some hurdles along the way. Looking forward to what comes of the creativity and perseverance of the DY educators and students this year!

Starting Year Two

And... I'm off! I've started this blog to document (internally for now) my own view of the progress of DreamYard's Learning Portfolio Project, which we are doing in partnership with Parsons the New School for Design.

So far this year, we are off to a great start. We found out about the grant in June and had our first Design Team meeting in July with most of the returning educators from DYPrep and the Art Center. We were happy to find that all the educators who completed last year's pilot wanted to return this year as Mentor Educators. Our Design Team meeting in July oriented the returning educators to our plan for the next two years and got us inspired to spread this project to more educators and students.

We've also had two Orientation calls for new educators (the returning educators joined as well) in July and August. We had to have two calls because the Art Center educators and DYPrep educators had very different summer schedules. (#challenge!!)  We laid out a lot of information for everyone - and also sent out an Orientation packet - and all seem on board and ready to go. Rudy is taking the lead at DYPrep to set up the calendars, tech and training. Here at the Art Center we have a smaller team that I'm heading up. Our first DYPrep meeting is today and our first Art Center meeting is next week. Parsons already had their kick off with their faculty. AND, Anna from the Open Portfolio Project, is coming for a visit next week. Oh and did I mentioned I talked about the project at the Arts Ed Tech panel Hive put on and Rudy published an article on getting started with portfolios and blogging on EdSurge?

I'm starting this blog for two reasons: to stay on top of how Blogger works and also to add to my process of working "Open."  More soon!