Digital Portfolios

Having a portfolio, of any form, for each student in a classroom is extremely important. Portfolios are a way to guide students, with teacher guidance, to link academic learning with future planning and goal setting. Through the portfolio process, students develop the self-awareness, goal-setting, and decision-making skills essential for lifelong self-determination and achievement.

Here is a video of business men discussing the importance of a portfolio for their careers: 

http://youtu.be/YmvsEvsz_j0

This video does an excellent job at showing how relevant a portfolio is for student growth in the classroom and self-reflection. Here are some points that the professionals in the video touch on to explain why portfolios are helpful: 

• examine a broad range of their own work collected over time
• analyze and assess their own progress
• plan and manage their time to complete the work
• integrate diverse experiences in and out of the classroom
• make decisions about future goals based on evidence and criteria

These points can be utilized and in some cases, enhanced through an online eportfolio. When this information is in an online environment it is more easily accessible by student, teacher, parent/guardian, administrator, etc. and is very unlikely to be misplaced or lost. 

This is an excellent website that goes into depth about the benefits of an eportfolio and uses helpful visuals and charts to explain:

http://www.academia.edu/1039941/The_Electronic_Portfolio_A_Benefit_to_Quality_Learning_and_Higher_Education

Interaction For Community Building

There has been extensive research on interaction between learner-teacher and learner-learner in building an online classroom community. Most of this research has been focused on the higher education online classroom community. Most of this research presents findings that does not show a correlation between student interaction and student performance.

You will have students with different needs and learning styles in an online classroom environment and those needs and learning styles will affect how the student interacts within the classroom community. It is important to construct a welcoming learning environment for all of your students and make them feel comfortable communicating with you and each other.

Promoting interaction and carefully planning for the flow of info by using technology, equipment, and synchronous activities to enhance learning are crucial for community building (MERLOT journal of online learning and teaching). Here is an image that gives you an idea of what things to consider when creating and planning for this enhanced learning.

 
(http://www.crlt.umich.edu/teaching-technology/getting-started)


Based on the research I mentioned previously in this blog there are many different resources detailing options for technology, equipment, and activities for cultivating and enhancing learning within the online classroom community. One of the best ways to access this information is by getting involved in your own online "educator" classroom community. This can be done through blogs, twitter, facebook or any other form of social media.

Here is a link to an online community of educators called edWeb: http://home.edweb.net/.

Within this online community teachers have access to other educators through blogs, webinars, news, research, and reports. It is important to understand how to interact within an online classroom community to be able to develop one yourself.