I’ve just finished a great session led by Clint Hamada with a group of science and math teachers here at YIS. This is not a group that I usually interact with a great deal in my role, aside from helping with research and summative tasks, so it was interesting to hear their perspectives when it came to using portfolios to have students share online.

Gold Tiles ©Brian Farrell

One thing that this group grapples with is the ability of students to share their work when they incorporate things like charts, graphs, and complicated sets of data, and how to share things like tests that teachers have corrected and provided feedback on. We didn’t come up with a universal one size fits all solution for this, but several strategies for sharing these did emerge:

• Take a photo of the paper copy, and import this image into your blog
• Use the blog more as a place to focus on reflection, and embed links to places like Google Docs where more complicated data can be stored
• Use screenshots to import tables and charts
• Employ different levels of sharing with linked documents (e.g. students and teachers can read and edit, parents can view only, and the public gets a dead-end link for things like tests)

These are certainly not always ideal solutions, and there was a perception in the group that these may add more workload for them. The affordances that come from sharing and reflecting online were highlighted though, and so hopefully more and more of our teachers will embrace student portfolios online.