Matt Renwick's List: Digital Portfolios

• When approaching any learning goal, experienced teachers typically know the misunderstandings students are likely to have and the kinds of errors they are likely to make. The key is not to wait for these problems to be verified through an assessment but to build lessons around them.
• Regular formative assessments paired with structured, high-quality corrective activities can prevent minor errors from becoming major learning problems and failures.
• Finally, we must help our students understand that the conditions for success are within their control and that we will help them remedy their learning errors when they occur. In other words, we, as teachers, must have a growth orientation to learning, and we must help our students develop the same orientation.

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• Another area that's still hazy is the e-portfolio feedback system. As Pirie put it, "If I have no audience for what I'm doing, why should I care?" But the question is, who should do the reviewing and provide the feedback to the student — faculty members, the program adviser, somebody from the career services department or peers in the program?

  • Audience
• "We don't know what the right choice or mix of reviewers is," she conceded, "but we do know [e-portfolios] should be reviewed on a regular basis" to get specific feedback to the student around content, structure and overall usability.

  • Purpose
• And there are questions around expanding the usage of e-portfolios within the online program. "Are we missing pieces?" asked Pirie. "What touchpoints are the most essential for the students throughout that three-year process?"

  • Audience
• the renewed focus on e-portfolios will help students reconnect with "their own purpose," Enders said. "That purpose is unique to them. It takes a lot of work and time to develop self-awareness about your strengths and passions and then understand why you're on this planet.

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• We acknowledge that there is so much that is out of our control right now when it comes to assessment, but we believe we need to also remember what we can control.
• These assessments can help a teacher determine the type of small group and whole class instruction that needs to be done to support her readers in using strategies effectively and flexibly. This type of analysis is typically not required — only the list of levels needs to be turned in.
• When we simply look at these students based on the numerical score they achieve on these assessments, we lose so much data. Knowing a student or group of students did not reach a benchmark helps us determine that these kids need support, but it does not tell us the type of support they need.
• Assessing students counts as a conference!
• Another way to translate assessments into day-to-day teaching is to use your conferring notebook while you are doing your required assessments.
• It is so helpful to take a little the extra time after each assessment to think about what you learned, and how you can use that data tomorrow to lift the quality of your instruction.
• we believe that what is most important is that you can assess the full profile of a reader and you use the assessment data to inform your teaching
• Sometimes it is better to stay the course with the tools we have and understand it is the best decision for our district at this point in time.

  • student portfolios
• This work is messy and rarely precise.

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