SXSWedu and a zine to share!

It's been a busy five months - as you can tell by my lack of posts! I'm working on an epic post about our work to scale and spread the Learning Portfolio Project, but in the meantime, I thought I'd offer a little treat.



In early March, Jessica Cannon from Parsons and I went to SXSWedu to share Learning Portfolios with a national audience in the Playground area of the conference.



For the conference, we made a fun little "zine" that gives an overview of the project and some examples of best practices. It's accessible at http://learningportfolioproject.tumblr.com - so please check it out and share it with anyone else you know interested in digital portfolio development.

We are also working on a more robust website with resources, case studies, best practices, and examples of student portfolios. So keep an eye out for that in June!

End of Year Two: Pumped on Portfolios @ Parsons

Photo by Julia Vallera, Hive NYC

Whew! It's been a while since I've posted. Year Two of the Parsons-DreamYard Learning Portfolio Project wrapped up in June with a fantastic presentation co-hosted by Hive NYC. After a year of great strides, we wanted to share our best practices with a wider audience. The event, called Pumped for Portfolios, included a hands-on activity to design portfolios for the future, an (edu world) star-studded panel, and then small group discussions on topics related to digital portfolio development (including tools, privacy, and balancing process and product). We were also lucky enough to have some DreamYard Prep High School students in attendance who helped us become more aware of young people's interests and tools of choice.

Below is the video of the panel and a link to Hive NYC's recap of the meeting. More to come on Year Three soon!

Portfolio Panel with Joy Dolan (moderator), Digital Ready, NYC DOE; Rudy Blanco, Digital Learning Director, DreamYard Preparatory High School; Jessica Canon, faculty, Parsons the New School for Design; Nathan Larsen, assistant principal, Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School


Hive Portfolio Meeting @ Parsons 05.21.15 from Parsons - DY on Vimeo.

Photos and more about this workshop were shared here by Julia Vallera from Hive NYC.

Sharing Our Interim Report

We are wrapping up the first year of Catalyst funding from the New York Community Trust's  Hive Digital Media and Learning Fund for our DreamYard/Parsons Learning Portfolio Project. (Last year we were also funded for a year-long pilot and we will continue for one more year with our current funding.)

Hot off the presses is our Interim Report which shares examples of student and educator blogs and portfolios, challenges we faced, and more details on our process. We'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts on the report and our project. It is embedded below and is also available here.

Next steps this summer will be to compile what we've learned and start sharing it with partners!

Planning to Scale: Teaching Teachers to Blog

As we've round the corner in Year Two of the Learning Portfolio project, we are revving up our thinking about how we should scale and spread the Learning Portfolio model to other schools, organizations, and networks. Our goal is not to create a singular "how-to" curriculum package that we hand over to other educators. We recognize that digital portfolios come in different platforms and colors and will have to fit different contexts. So we are trying to shape a variety of ways to share our  key design principles, needed technical skills, and pedagogical approach.

One of our first attempts in developing a formal workshop on blogging skills to a new audience happened last week at DreamYard's School Programs' Conference Day. This is a full day of professional development that our teaching artists and public school teaching partners attend to deeper their practice in arts education. One of our returning educators, Moriah Carlson, and I led the workshop called Bring in the Blogs: Digital Learning Portfolios in the Classroom.

Meeting Up Halfway through Year Two

On Wednesday, January 28th, educators and staff from all three of our Learning Portfolio sites (Parsons Pre-College, DreamYard Prep High School, and the DreamYard Art Center) along with special guests from Hive NYC, Google, and NYCDOE met at Parsons to share our work and discuss common successes and challenges. This was the first time a majority of our educators were able to meet together and the creative energy in the room was truly inspiring.

Read on for more info and links to presentations.

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...

Meeting updates and making progress in classrooms

DY Prep educators using Blogger

The Learning Portfolio Project sites are officially in full swing and things are getting real. The laptops are coming out and young people are posting away. This month at our meetings with educators at DY Prep and the DY Art Center we decided to focus on hands-on technical skill building. Sometimes educators just want time to play and create too - so we gave it to them!

First though, as always, we all shared some successes and challenges. Here are some of the highlights:

• Using a school issued email is a no-no for tumblr. We knew tumblr was blocked in most public schools, but we didn't know you also couldn't use a student email address to create a tumblr blog outside of school. Some of our Art Center participants created tumblr accounts with their NYC DOE emails and they were deleted soon after. So we need to make sure our Art Center participants don't use their DOE email addresses. 

• We are starting to have young people blogging in multiple programs/classes and it's great. It's not a surprise, but the young people that have more practice with blogging are feeling more comfortable with it. The ideal is that blogging becomes just a normal way for them to share what they are learning and we spend less time on HOW to blog (tech and design skills) and more time on WHAT to blog (content). 

• Access to technology is still an issue at times. Teachers who have less access to the laptops feel like it is their biggest challenges. Emily said the more often the young people blog, the more comfortable they are doing it. So when you have sporadic tech access in the classroom it slows the whole process down. We are working on this with a combo of acquiring more laptops and scheduling them out.

• Teaching basic digital literacy skills needs to be baked into our teaching practices. Rudy is the BEST at modeling practices at our meetings for the educators. He showed them a keyboard shortcut recently and several of them had never learned it. These kinds of basic computer skills (shortcuts, typing, using a mouse, etc) are still so necessary for making blogging and other digital learning activities fit into the school day - at the educator and student level. We need to share more of our best practices (and honestly good posters to hang in classrooms) around how to teach these skills. 

• A lurking question remains: How should we grade a blog post? We hope to have some answers to this soon.

Keep reading for more on our progress...