Schools would do well to copy New Tech High.
GO HERE I read tony Wagner's book about MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED where he discusses the Mastery.org transcript of skills (not g.p.a.) and he discusses digital portfolios.
NEW TECH HIGH put portfolios into action and they SHARE THEIR products. You can actually see a student's portfolio.
GO TO THE PAGE ON HUNDR.ED if you have a HUNDR.ED account, you are an outlier.
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Here's what I wrote to Lisa Gottfried.
Ms. Gottfried
I've just finished reading parts of Tony Wagner's book most Likely to Succeed and I like the parts about portfolios. I found your school in Clarke and DiMartino's book about personalizing the high school experence.... and when I searched "portfolios new tech high" I was stunned to see the traiing materials that your school uses.
a) Are these materials available for any teacher or school to use (with appropriate attribution)?
b) I'm putting together a free ebook to promote portfolios in my school district. Can I post images of your Google Drive and suggest that teachers can download the documents?
I'm interested in the cost and time of training teachers and students to use your system. Do you have some estimates of the time and cost? Can you pass to your school director this request?
THANK YOU
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To _____________________
School Director
RE: The cost of training students in your school to use portfolios to display their work
Hello -- I’m a grad student. I’m studying how schools introduce and encourage the use of digital portfolios.
My dissertation includes a discussion of the cost of bringing an active portfolio system to a school. I am interested in the following areas:
1. What do eportfolios look like at your school? (Can you show me some screenshots)? I want to show my students what other students are doing.
2. How long does it take usually to train students to use the system?
3. Who does the training? (teachers or a non-teacher?)
4. How do the trainers get trained?
5. How many "artifacts" (essays, photos and videos of projects, etc.) do student portfolios usually contain?
6. What rubrics do you use to guide students?
7. How did portfolios get started at your school? Did the school board come up with the idea?
8. Is having a digital portfolio a requirement to graduate?
Thank you for your time.
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Here is her reply
Steve,
I'm super excited that the resources we've created might help you implement a useful blog portfolio program across your district! There are a variety of places you can get resources that are open-source and can help you build what you need for your teachers.
You can also find my graduate work and supporting research which fed into our blog portfolio program and continues to be deepened by other staff members, also focusing on portfolio for their Master's work. You can start here: http://www.learninginnovationlab.com/gottfried-home.html
As for trainings, I'm going to include Aaron Eisberg in on this email reply. He heads up our Center for Excellence, which is a top notch training facility that is fully embedded on our campus and can definitely help you with your training needs. I have given many talks to folks around the world who come for training about PBL and the portfolio process.
I would ask that if you do move to implement, that you report your successes and your implementation through the hundred.org site, as they keep track of when innovations are adopted across the globe and across the country. We've got someone in FL who is implementing this innovation as well as someone in India, so far, (that we know of) and we'd like to know when others are also adopting the toolkit or trying to use the innovation.
You can contact Aaron to find out more about training and how we can support you! We'd have to get permission from teachers and students before including their websites in your ebook and I would guess that Aaron would be the best person to talk with about that.
Hope that helps!
Sincerely,
Lisa Gottfried
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to the readers of this blog:
Do what Lisa did -- put your materials online and let others build on your progress.
