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Home > Resources > Classroom Practice > Assessment > Digital Portfolio
Introduction and Observations
Digital Portfolio, Chapter 1
Contents
- Introduction
- About the Project
- The Digital Portfolio Software
- What it Takes: Issues in Implementing Digital Portfolios
- Vision
- Assessment
- Technology
- Logistics
- Culture
- What Do Digital Portfolios Add?
- Digital portfolios bring a school's vision and standards to life
- Students take ownership of their digital portfolios
- Communicating with digital portfolios is easier than using paper
- Further Information
Introduction
The Digital Portfolio project is an ongoing investigation into how technology can help schools and students make portfolio assessment more useful and meaningful. The investigation uses a hypermedia software prototype called a "Digital Portfolio" designed and developed by David Niguidula and Michelle Riconscente. The project was part of the "Tools for Accountability" project of the Coalition of Essential Schools and Annenberg Institute for School Reform, and was funded primarily by the IBM Corporation.
The Digital Portfolio is designed to provide a richer picture of student work than traditional transcripts allow. Using this tool, students collect a set of "entries," consisting of work they have completed. This work may be in any medium --
text, graphics, audio or video --
and may contain the final product of a project as well as the student's process in developing that product.
The software also organizes the student work around a set of goals or standards. A school can determine what it wants its students to know and be able to do, and use that set of goals as the main menu for the Digital Portfolio. Thus, when students add entries to their portfolios, they need to consider what goals are met by each particular piece of work.
The software also suggests that student work has to be viewed in context. Each entry can be accompanied by additional information, such as the original assignment, assessments by the teacher or other readers of the portfolio, and self-reflections, where students indicate why they believe a particular entry belongs in the portfolio.
While the software is designed to allow easier organization and communication of a portfolio's contents than paper portfolios, it is also meant to serve as a provocation for and a tool of radical school redesign. We are suggesting that a school needs to focus on an examination of student work. To achieve this focus, students and teachers need both the access to information tools and the time necessary to use this information to enrich teaching and deepen learning.
During the two-year grant (from 1994 to 1996), the primary focus of the research was to examine what it takes to put digital portfolios in place. This research refers to the "rewiring" demands of school redesign -- a term meant to be taken both figuratively and literally. Our focus was to understand how time, space, personnel, and equipment must be allocated in order to make the assembling and reading of portfolios efficient and effective. We also wanted to examine how the process of creating and reading portfolios may push the school's systems toward deeper learning for students.
About the Project
The Digital Portfolio project began as a part of the Exhibitions Project of the Coalition of Essential Schools. That project, funded primarily by the IBM Corporation from 1990 to 1993, investigated the nature of exhibitions generally (as described in Joseph McDonald's book Redesigning School (New York: Jossey-Bass, 1996)), and particularly how technology could help with the process of developing exhibitions. Five schools in that study received grants of equipment from IBM, and each developed a different approach that allowed the students and staff to develop exhibitions in new ways.
One promising idea that emerged during this time was the "Digital Portfolio." Portfolios have become increasingly widespread in schools throughout the 1990's, and several schools in the project were intrigued with how portfolios could be useful to students and faculty. Some schools began working with portfolios and immediately encountered logistical nightmares; stacks of papers and folders began to overwhelm some schools. It seemed to make sense that technology could somehow help.
IBM funded a second project, from 1994 to 1996, focusing on particular tools for exhibitions. The project looked at three tools:
- the "New York Assessment Collection," which allowed schools to describe exhibitions and alternative assessments developed in their schools;
- the "School Portfolio," which allowed schools to demonstrate their progress in making reforms; and
- the "Digital Portfolio," which allowed individual students to present a richer picture of their knowledge and abilities than do traditional transcript.
Six schools participated in the Digital Portfolio project:
the three schools of the Croton-Harmon
(New York) School District:
Each school received a grant of computer equipment from IBM. The project's researchers, David Niguidula and Michelle Riconscente, worked with committees at each school in designing the digital portfolio software; the result was that each school had its own custom-made version. During the study, a pilot group of students in each of the schools built their own digital portfolios. Throughout the process, the researchers visited the schools on a regular basis, helping each through its pilot phase and observing what was required to put the Digital Portfolio system in place.
The Digital Portfolio Software
The Digital Portfolio software was built using the hypermedia program
Multimedia Toolbook from Asymetrix Corporation. The software allows students to record files from any media -- text, graphics, audio, or video -- and organize those files into a portfolio "shell." The main menu of a Digital Portfolio contains a set of goals established by the school. These goals represent the school's vision of what a student should know and be able to do.
Figure 1: Sample Menu
Over time, the students collect work that represent their abilities and accomplishments in each of these areas. A user can examine a student's portfolio by clicking on one of the main menu's folders or buttons. The software shows a list of portfolio "entries" that the student
(typically in consultation with faculty members) has decided best demonstrates his or her abilities toward meeting that goal.
Figure 2: Sample Entry
When a user clicks on a particular entry, the user will see the student work on the left side of the screen. Again, this could be text, graphics, audio, or video. For example, a lab report might have a write-up of the work, a diagram showing how the apparatus was set up, and a video showing the experiment in action. The entry also contains other information that the school wants to include for each entry. While these vary from school to school, this information can include the assignment, a self-reflection
(describing why this entry belongs in the portfolio) and assessments from teachers or other assessors. Any particular entry can be linked to any number of the main menu's folders.
What it Takes: Issues in Implementing Digital Portfolios
Putting a digital portfolio system in place requires a great deal of planning and reflection as to what a school wants to accomplish; otherwise, digital portfolios can be just one more gimmick that a school adds to its list of projects. For digital portfolios to truly take hold in a school, the school has to address multiple systems. What follows is an outline of five areas of the school that need to be addressed and a set of questions that each school needs to take on: a school's vision, assessment system, use of technology, logistics issues, and overall culture.
Vision
What should a student be able to know and do?
First and foremost, a school needs to determine what capabilities all of its graduates should possess. The schools in this project consulted a variety of audiences, from those inside the building every day (students, faculty, and administrators) to parents and community members to educational stakeholders such as colleges, businesses, and state departments of education. In the digital portfolios, the vision is typically translated into the portfolio's main menu, so that each student knows what is expected of him or her before leaving that school.
Assessment
How can students demonstrate the vision?
Why do we collect student work?
What audiences are most important to us?
How do we know what's good?
A portfolio should be more than a collection of documents. If we think about how portfolios have been traditionally used in areas like photography, a portfolio represents a set of work that shows both range and depth and is typically reconstituted for any given audience. That is, a student creating a portfolio needs to think about the audience who will be reviewing it, and might want to select different pieces for different audiences.
For a portfolio to be effective, a school needs to describe the purpose for creating the portfolio, the potential audiences who will review the portfolio, and the criteria which describe what makes a piece of work worth placing in the portfolio. Furthermore, the portfolio needs to be connected tightly to the school's vision.
The schools involved with the Digital Portfolio study answered these questions differently. For some schools, the primary purpose of collecting student work was for students to take stock of their own work and celebrate their accomplishments. A portfolio in these places was "successful" if it provided an interesting picture of the student and his or her work. Another approach was to use the portfolio as an evaluation tool to demonstrate student achievements against some standards. One school in the project used portfolios as a means of demonstrating that a student had accomplished the skills and acquired the knowledge expected of a graduate.
As Digital Portfolios become more commonplace, we can expect that other audiences, ranging from state departments of education to college admissions and placement offices, will become recipients of these portfolios. Still, we expect that the primary audience will remain the student and his or her teachers.
Technology
What hardware, software, and networking will we need?
Who are the primary users of the equipment?
Who will support the system?
Putting together digital portfolios obviously requires access to hardware and software. For the portfolios to be truly useful to an entire school community, that hardware needs to be networked.
In the project, schools used different configurations of equipment. The most effective configuration is one that reflects how the school operates, and places machines where students and teachers already gather. In one school, where students and teachers spend most of their day together as a team (consisting of about 80 students and 3 teachers), each team shared a set of six computers, at least one of which had capabilities for capturing video and audio, a scanner, and a laser printer. In other schools, sets of five to 15 machines were set aside as "digital portfolio" stations, meaning that they had multimedia capabilities, and were specifically reserved (for at least part of the day) for students working on their portfolios. (The assumption was that other machines in the school could be used for word processing or other tasks that did not require specific multimedia software; a word processed document, for example, could then be sent over the network to the digital portfolio machines or stored on a disk and walked down to the digital portfolio stations.) Setting aside stations for digital portfolios is a perfectly good strategy --
if the stations are going to be easily accessible by the students who need them.
The portfolios themselves were typically stored on hard disks, either on individual machines or on a network. As could be expected, audio and video clips took up a great deal of disk space; without audio or video clips, a collection of a student's year of work could be stored in about 10 megabytes. With audio and video, the number quickly balloons to 50 megabytes or more. (One technology which proved to be effective in transporting portfolios is the Zip drive from Iomega Corporation. A Zip disk typically contains 100 megabytes of space on a readable and writable cartridge and costs about US$15 each.)
In general, putting entries into the digital portfolio itself did not require a great deal of time; after an hour or two of learning how to use the digital portfolio "shell," students could add an entry to their portfolios in about five minutes. What took time was putting work into digital form in the first place
-- word processing, scanning, or digitizing audio or video. As the schools discovered, it was easier when students did their original work on a computer (when appropriate); if students, as a matter of habit, word process their papers, adding a document to a portfolio is a piece of cake.
Access to equipment often determines who uses the digital portfolios. If teachers cannot easily get to a computer, they are not likely to look at students' digital portfolios. One school's approach to this problem was to put computers on as many teachers' desks as possible. Initially, the school had about one computer for every two teachers; the school tried to pair teachers with more computer experience with colleagues who were less sure about the technology. The critical component, though, was the location of the equipment within the school. Teachers needed to be able to go as short a distance as possible to get to the machines. Similarly, if students did not have regular access to equipment, they were not as likely to work on their digital portfolios.
Technical support is the often overlooked component of a school's technology system. Ideally, a school's computing coordinator can be a champion for digital portfolios, providing enough support and encouragement to teachers and students to help them become excited and comfortable with using the technology. At the same time, the coordinator needs to see how the digital portfolios fit with the rest of the school, so that the project is not seen as "Mr. or Ms. Techie's Project." It's not just about the "wires and pliers" of using technology
-- the technical support must stem from a school-wide vision of how technology generally, and digital portfolios in particular, fits with the school's other systems.
Logistics
When will information be digitized? Who will do it?
Who will select the work?
Who will reflect on the work?
Putting portfolios together, digital or paper, requires teacher and student time. One of the schools described the process as "collect, select, reflect, present." Students need to think about what entries they will collect, how to select those that best convey their abilities, how to reflect on what their portfolio means, and how to present what they have learned in a reasonably coherent fashion. Similarly, teachers need to be engaged in the process at each step.
In the schools in the study, digital portfolios were considered the responsibility of the students (even more so than their paper counterparts). The expectation in every one of the schools was that students would be responsible for digitizing the information. In a couple of schools, a small group of students did the digitizing for others, but in most cases, students scanned and word processed their own work.
Similarly, students were expected to select the work for the portfolio. The expectations of what work should be selected depended a great deal on the purposes and audiences for the portfolio; and even among students in the same school, the ways that students selected their work varied. Teachers often helped to establish the criteria of what kind of work makes sense for the portfolio, but ultimately students were given responsibility for that decision.
Time for reflection is critical, and we are just beginning to learn how to reflect well on Digital Portfolios. For most schools, the first year of a technology-driven project is focused on the process of putting the technology system in place --
simply creating the digital portfolios was a major accomplishment. It was only later, with examples in front of them, that the faculty and the school communities can determine what makes a "good" portfolio.
Schools allocated time for reflecting on the portfolios in various ways, including celebrations (such as a special parents' night at one school where students demonstrate what they have done) to a formal presentations (at one school, students present their portfolios to a "roundtable" as part of the requirements for advancement and graduation). Those teachers and schools that already built time in for reflections on paper portfolios also found the time for reflecting on digital portfolios. Without that time for reflection, the digital portfolio might be no different from a paper portfolio filed away in a locked cabinet.
Culture
Is the school used to discussing student work?
Is the school open to tuning standards? With whom?
The school's culture is perhaps the most critical component in making the Digital Portfolios a tool for school reform rather than a technological version of a set of file folders. A school could answer the questions listed in the Technology, Assessment, and Logistics areas very mechanically, adding a system of equipment, personnel, and new uses of time and space. Unless the school has developed relationships among students and teachers, the vision will be overtaken by the new processes, and thus the result of creating digital portfolios will be of little help in terms of improved understanding of student abilities.
Discussions of student work are relatively rare in traditional schools. What a student does in one class is rarely built upon in another class, and then mostly through coordination of assignments among the teachers, rather than through understanding a student's abilities and needs for intellectual growth.
When a school community takes student work seriously and allows teachers, students, and others to reflect on what they have done, then the Digital Portfolio has more meaning. One teacher who knew that other schools in the project were using portfolios as a requirement for graduation pointed out that "unless we do something like that, we are just making up reasons" for students to create digital portfolios. As Jan Hawkins, Director of the Center for Children and Technology, put it in a review of this project, one challenge for a school implementing a digital portfolio is to "create a direct pipeline between the educators' daily and periodic record-collection procedures in traditional media and the technology."
This culture of reflecting on one's work applies not only to students, but also to teachers and administrators. A few schools in the project presented their vision statements to "critical friends" in an attempt to "tune" their standards (much like members of an orchestra "tune" their instruments with each other). Opening a school's vision up for scrutiny can be threatening, but tuning standards allows a school to say with confidence to its community that its work and its vision can stand up to scrutiny from others.
Thus, the key elements of a school's culture that makes a digital portfolio system work are the relationships within the school, regular discussions of student work, and an openness to discuss the school's work and its vision with others outside the school.
What Do Digital Portfolios Add?
Portfolio systems generally, and digital portfolio systems in particular, require a great deal of energy, time, and resources from a school. Even though it is very early in development, we have noted a few advantages that digital portfolios bring to schools involved in reform:
Digital portfolios bring a school's vision and standards to life.
In many traditional schools, students find the school's vision to be a mystery. They know they need to complete certain courses, or do the work assigned by a teacher, but it becomes very hard to put that work into a coherent picture. Since the Digital Portfolio is organized around a school's vision, it makes the vision very clear to students; each time the student opens his or her portfolio, the work is sorted according to the elements of the vision. Making the school's vision open also makes it more dynamic. In one school, the initial vision contained almost two dozen goals for students to achieve each year. It soon was apparent that a number of those goals were not clearly distinguishable from each other, for students or for teachers. Recognizing this, the school engaged in a number of conversations around its vision for students and ultimately settled on a set of five goals that the faculty could more clearly convey to students. At another school, the vision was adapted from state guidelines; students who were wondering where to insert their work in the portfolio asked teachers what elements of the vision were demonstrated by a particular project. Some teachers had not previously considered how their assignments fit into the state guidelines, and being asked the question by students forced them to think about how their own visions fit with the school's and the state's expectations. Some schools have started to use digital portfolios to explain the school's vision to parents, school boards, or other visitors. Using multimedia, schools can show how their vision is demonstrated by actual student work, rather than abstract descriptions. Similarly, it allows schools to consider what students are capable of doing, and by examining student work from all levels of achievement, a school can consider if it needs to reset its expectations.
Students take ownership of their digital portfolios.
Ask most teachers who knows the most about technology in the school and, inevitably, they will answer, "The kids." In the project, students were given more responsibility for maintaining their digital portfolios than their paper equivalents. In a number of cases, they felt even more ownership for their digital portfolios than for paper portfolios. Students discussed the effort they had put into the presentation of their work in multimedia and the technology skills they acquired in building the portfolios. Clearly, students who invested time in building a portfolio took ownership for its appearance. Many students in the project also noted that they wanted to create a picture of their skills and abilities for people who were important to them (ranging from peers to parents to prospective employers). Because the portfolio was a reflection of their entire body of work, not just a single course or subject area, students regularly mentioned that the digital portfolio was presenting a more complete picture of who they are than any other data that the school was presenting. A number of students mentioned that one strategy for applying to college is to "sell yourself" and describe what is unique about you; they said that the Digital Portfolio allows them to show those attributes.
Communicating with digital portfolios is easier than using paper.
As Nicholas Negroponte points out in Being Digital (Knopf, 1995), bits have great advantages over atoms. Bits are easy to transport; atoms are difficult. In the case of portfolios, the sheer volume of material and media makes Digital Portfolios much easier to transport than paper portfolios. Each of the schools was in the midst of networking its computers as the project was winding down, and thus there has been little testing thus far of how often teachers or other students would look at digital portfolios outside of the room where they were developed. Still, the ability to look at a student's complete portfolio, using multiple media, from any machine within a building, was something that encouraged the schools to become part of the Digital Portfolio project in the first place.There is also the assumption that Digital Portfolios will make it easier to transmit information from the school to other audiences. That is, students could show their portfolios to their parents at home, or bring the portfolios with them when they changed schools. With the technology used in the project, this is technically more difficult, simply because the Digital Portfolio software was written specifically to run on Windows-based machines. However, with the advent of tools for the World Wide Web, and various other technologies to transport multimedia data across wires and to different platforms, communication of portfolios should be much easier in the months and years to come.
Further Information
For further information about the project, you can send e-mail to
David Niguidula, or contact us at :
CES National
1814 Franklin Ave. Suite 700
Oakland, CA 94612
(tel) 510-433-1451
(fax) 510-433-1455
To use the World Wide Web to find out more about the sponsoring organizations, use the following addresses:
- Coalition of Essential Schools: http://www.essentialschools.org
- Annenberg Institute for School Reform: http://www.aisr.brown.edu
- IBM: http://www.ibm.com/IBM/IBMGives
You can also find school contact information in each chapter of this report:
- Carrie E. Tompkins Elementary School
- Pierre van Cortlandt Middle School
- Croton-Harmon High School
- Eastern High School
- Thayer Junior / Senior High School
- University Heights High School
Original material, Copyright, 1997
David Niguidula
Coalition of Essential Schools
Annenberg Institute for School Reform
Page last updated: June 07, 2002
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