E-portfolios :: Making Things E-asy(5)

E-portfolios :: Making Things E-asy
by John K. Waters
And then there’s the e-portfolio rub: These applications are useless without the peripheral technologies to support them. “You have to make sure that your school is ready, technologically,” Weigand says. “You have to have the computers, the scanners, the digital cameras. If you don’t have those things, it’s very difficult to make one of these things work. If you can’t get your students’ work up on the site, quickly and easily, what’s the point?”
If someone can go online and create a Yahoo e-mail account, they can go to [our] site and set up an e-portfolio....We certainly want this to be a sustainable business. But we’re really educators first. Our ultimate goal is to help people to teach and learn better.
— Jeffrey Yan, Digication
Gaining Converts
The impact of Weigand’s work with digital portfolios on Hope Arts’ turnaround efforts is tough to quantify, Weigand admits. Although the school’s supply of modern, internet-connected computers grew substantially with the reorganization, Hope Arts is not a technology-driven school, and she doubts that many of her colleagues will recognize the benefits of e-portfolios until they “feel the stress of the class of 2008.” That’s the first class to graduate under the state’s new NCLB requirements, under which each student must have a portfolio with 18 pieces of work.
And yet, word is getting around to her Hope Arts colleagues. History teacher Jonathan Mendelsohn and English as a Second Language teacher Erin Strnad, for example, used e-portfolios in an RISD summer workshop conducted by Sproll. They submitted to Sproll student work on art and literacy, which he uploaded to the Hope website.
Sproll sees e-portfolios as a potentially critical component of the high school’s curriculum. “What I see in the way those teachers are taking ideas, working with students, and publishing their work is a very interesting model,” he says. “What is so compelling about it is that their students recognize that their work is being published, and they take a great deal of pride in that.”
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It’s this newfound pride that Weigand hopes can help interest the kids of East Providence to overcome their environment, which exposes them to frequent violence and a host of social problems. In a school like Hope Arts, Weigand believes that eportfolios can be used to keep kids engaged in their schoolwork. “It’s incredibly motivating for students to be able to publish their work and to see that what they do matters to somebody other than a bunch of teachers,” she says. “Suddenly, their parents, grandparents, and friends can see it. They can see what other students are doing, compare their work, and get peer feedback. They can even display their work for potential colleges. This is an overlooked aspect of the e-portfolio that makes it just as powerful as a teaching tool.
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