October 26, 2007 Managing Student Portfolios

Student Portfolio and Assessment Management

Compare these two portfolio models:

• A portfolio that is assessed as a whole against a rubric.
  • This portfolio is a showcase in which students present final polished products. Useful for assessing overall achievement in a class (summative evaluation) and for resume building.
• A portfolio as a growing collection of work, with pieces that are individually assessed and revised periodically.
  • This portfolio is a place to store documents or projects as they are exchanged among authors, editors, reviewers and evaluators. One keeps track of progress and revision. Useful for encouraging and a assessing progress toward goals (formative evaluation).

Looking to the second model, we want something that will facilitate student-teacher and student-student interaction with repeatable editing opportunities. So we need

• Word-processing that permits document creation, multiple edits, and commenting.
• File transfer/sharing that permits students and faculty to share documents easily.
• Maximize power in word-processing, commenting and sharing; minimize complexity and set-up demands on users.
• Permit a publicly accessible final presentation.

Opportunities:

• Microsoft word.
  • Readily available
  • Fairly easy to use
  • Great commenting tools
  • Requires additional tools for sharing (file transfer)
• Google Docs
  • Available with free account (gmail)
  • Easy to share (via gmail account)
  • Easily integrated with a Blog or Web Page (via Google)
  • Easy to revise and use revision history (like wiki)
  • Moderate comment abilities
  • Work is online but can be easily exported/downloaded
  • Modest editing capabilities
• Blackboard
  • Readily available
  • No editing; global commenting on file only
  • Complex but useful sharing setup
    • Students use Discussion Board to upload and comment on (MS Word) documents
    • Put students into groups to share files
    • Student upload files to personal Content Area to access/share them
    • Use Portfolio tool to present content
  • Could be used as a shell for displaying Google Docs, blogs or wikis
• Adobe Acrobat (PDF) also permits editing and commenting and workflow, but requires advanced software and lack (currently) sharing capabilities
• Wiki
  • Create pages for individual students and assignments
  • Easy to edit, provide comments (includes revision history)
  • Easy to share; can assign permissions to individuals or groups
  • Lacks the word processing sophistication of MS Word (but similar to Google Docs)

Also:

• MediaFire and other file sharing services might provide a simple platform for sharing documents.
• Writeboard offer an online collaborative editing environment. It has a limited editing menu, but otherwise it's easy to use with lots of potential.
• Zoho offers a full suite of collaborative productivity tools, including document creation, commenting, sharing and presentation tools. You can also create a Zoho wiki.

Some comparisons:

• MS Word provides most compete and sophisticated word processing capability, but files must be transferred/shared by other methods
• Google Docs provides only modest word processing capability but excellent sharing opportunities
• Blackboard serves document sharing opportunities (with some set-up) but no editing capabilities
• Wikis have limited word processing power but strong on editing and sharing.