I have nothing but admiration for the English Department at my school. They have decided to cut the rope tethering them to the past and require that all students maintain electronic portfolios.
| It hasn’t been easy for them, and we as a school are up against even more challenges as we make this jump. But rest assured, the payoff for these efforts will be substantial. |
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The e-portfolio has been a part of the “plan” from the beginning. It has always served as the “clincher” in any discussion with parents, teachers or administrators. Students at this school will maintain an “academic myspace” through ELGG, gathering evidence of their learning journey through high school. Essays, PowerPoint presentations, videos of class discussions, audio of musical performances – even sports highlight videos will be stored in their own personal web space. College applications can be accompanied by the url addresses of each student’s “My CHS Space”. Admissions committees will have the opportunity to know more about students than ever before. Better yet, the students themselves can have a better sense of their growth over four years.
In some ways we have been lucky in this process. From the very first we were fortunate to have the talent of a district tech office necessary to create a Moodle environment linked directly to ELGG. Teacher and student logins were smooth and without incident. However, one should not get the impression that this is easy. The we still don’t know the issues that will spring out of the dark as we go through the process of transforming the learning environment of the school.
The English department has the courage to open the proverbial pandora’s box of tech issues: time, training and pedagogy. I would rather use the word “introducing” or “touring” rather than training, but nonetheless, all of the teachers and several hundred students must learn how to navigate through both Moodle and ELGG. Instructional time has to be sacrificed to shuttle everyone through the labs. The cacophony of a chorus of questions in these sessions however, is as exciting as it is exhausting. Yet, I recognize that the excitement is really only shared by the teachers who agree that in the end, our students will be better writers and thinkers, so some are left only with the exhaustion.
The teachers are also struggling with pedagogical issues unearthed by the realization that students can all see each other’s portfolios in ELGG. Can you use the same assignment next year, if those students can review this year’s work? Are teachers obligated to continue to invent new assignments? Before anyone is tempted to answer “yes” to that question, don’t forget that assignments can also be crafted to make “cheating” immaterial.
Although I heard that this issue was batted around a lot, I did find a solution. In ELGG a student can create a group, then restrict access to their portfolio to just that group. All they had to do was designate a teacher as their “friend”, then create a group called “My Teachers”, then restrict their portfolio access to “My Teachers”.
I joined a couple classes in the labs and I have to admit I became a little apprehensive as the students discovered the instant messaging of Moodle in less than three minutes. What are they saying to each other? What if it is inappropriate? My guess is that most of the instant message banter is just fine, though some of it clearly is not. This is not any different than the conversations we hear in the halls and the cafeteria. The reason for my apprehension is that society seems to put a much greater burden on the schools to police online interaction than face-to-face conversations.
Are two students using obscenities in their personal conversation that no one else hears any different than the two students sharing that trash talk in Moodle instant messages? Before you are tempted assert that we have provided the means to do the latter and are therefore more responsible, I would point out that we have also supplied the cafeteria and the opportunity for the students to personally share their inappropriate language as well.
Don’t be mistaken, we still need to model proper etiquette, especially online. Reviewing personal students’ ELGG pages, I have sent several e-mails to students to ask them if they think that they are exhibiting the best of themselves for the whole school to see. Asking them if they would wear a t-shirt that has the same phrase as that adorns their homepage, I wonder how we can best teach them how to behave online. In so doing, I’ve stumbled upon the second-best clincher argument for creating this environment; there is simply no better way to teach them how to be responsible members of an online community than creating one for the school. And the English teachers are to be commended for leading the way.