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Overview of the idea
This model involves students in collecting, synthesising, reviewing and editing
information to publish in the form of digital portfolios. Digital portfolios are
systematic and selective collections of student work that learners assemble to demonstrate
their creative expression and metacognitive responses to a particular theme, idea or topic
and to the processes involved in their learning and reflections on the outcomes achieved.
Portfolios include annotated drafts of work, and final products. Students should
incorporate a range of media into their digital portfolios including audio, visual and
text.
Teachers are encouraged to undertake action research throughout their participation in
the telecommunications project and to document their professional learning in their own
digital portfolios. They can explore and share standards, develop comparability of
assessment as well as use informatrion and communications technologies to report their
achievement of learning.
An integral part of the model involves the development of a community of schools
participating in any given telecommunications project. The advantages of linking with
other schools to develop the digital portfolio are numerous including; students have an
authentic audience for their work, they develop their skills in interpreting and learning
from the work of others, and they have opportunities to purposefully use computer-based
technologies to communicate with students in a range of contexts.
The key concept is that the work of students displayed in personal portfolios can be
used by other students as they construct digital galleries drawing on the work of their
peers. The overlay of themes, issues and problems creates an interpretive framework
through which students can analyse the work of others. This in turn enables creators to
compare their intended messages and communication to the interpretations of their
audiences. This process encourages a dialogue between creators and publishers and their
audience. Students are supported by appropriate scaffolding, sequencing and ongoing
evaluation.
Collation of student portfolios through this model provides opportunities to increase
the exposure of student's digital publishing to broader audiences and to enable groups of
peers to host events that highlight their work and the work of others. Galleries, digital
tours and virtual exhibitions can satisfy curriculum themes, syllabus outcomes and provide
students with a personal framework to extend their audience, showcase talents and
participate in critical community.
The model has three defining emphases: Firstly, it enables student creative expression
and research to be organised in a system which promotes accessibility. Secondly, this
accessibility is used to provide a link between creators and audiences who have developed
the skills required to respond to the digital work. This means that students will have the
opportunity to publish the results of creative work, project work, investigations and
solutions to problems as validated outcomes of work that is genuinely student-centred.
Thirdly, the model provides particpating teachers with the opportunity to use their own
digital portfolios to discuss and document their involvement in the project within a cycle
of critical reflection.
Student portfolios may be developed as part of creative work, foreign language
learning, scientific process, social and cultural projects and technology studies.
Students can register their work and provide it to groups of peers working on similar
projects, themes and issues. This extends the applicability of the model into all
KLAs.
The model contains many of the attributes of the Natcom models described in
accompanying documents. It identifies the model components
which are central to the activities of the stakeholder groups, teachers, students, project
mangers and minor stakeholders.
From this model, a variety of curriculum projects might be developed, though it is
likely they will be more correctly viewed as episodes or events which schools might choose
to construct and host as events in their own right as part of the activities in other
telecommunications curriculum projects.
An example of an Digital portfolio episode
This model assumes that projects would consist of two parts: collecting the results of
students’ work and interpreting and applying the work of others. An example of this
process may involve a gallery of portfolios collected from students of music composition.
In this example, schools would offer performances and arrangements of music compositions
using real audio. This would provide a very useful means of collecting and making
accessible the original work of remote students. Current web technologies allow schools to
collect performances of remote students into a web page.
In another example, students would develop
e-zines or exhibitions based around the
theme of "Olympic Nations in Australia". This would involve the host school
selecting local work and selections from shared Digital Portfolios for inclusion. The host
school would communicate with the selected composers and establish dialogue to build a
shared understanding of the original work and its place in the exhibition or
e-zine. This
process would be documented and included in the final products. The Exhibition would be
developed and remote students invited to visit. Visitors may be invited to leave comments
and perhaps answer an issue or question inspired by student creations, thus creating
dialogue and comment.
Further examples
The National Association of Arts Educators have developed an example of a
telecommunications curriculum project using the Digital Portfolios model. Collections of
Digital Art are the focus of this project. Download Full project
description.
The Australian Federation of Modern Languages Associations have developed an
example of a telecommunications curriculum project using the Digital Portfolios Model for
sharing projects and practising literacy skills in a second language. In this example,
students work on the interpretation of a task, gathering material from a wide range of
sources including email, discussion boards, the Internet, books and video. Students are
working in a foreign language and building an audience that will include native speakers
of the language they are learning. The development of students’ communicative
competence in a second language is a primary focus of this example. Using current web
technologies, students will work with text, sound and pictures developing skills in
listening, speaking reading and writing in the target language. Download Full Project Description
Rationale
Making use of the new media to provide audiences for student work is a development from
the stage of using online environments to seek information and expertise. The emphasis on
communication means that it is vital that an authentic audience is developed to interact,
comment and challenge. This ensures a validation of students’ efforts and it means
that the possibilities of a student-centred problem-solving framework have been realised.
The real sharing of student work must become an embedded feature of the new online
culture. Building online presence is an essential element in a conceptual framework that
will promote both talent and a confident approach to sharing information and seeking
community.
Such ideas apply to individuals, groups of individuals, corporations and groups, and to
government and industry. It is significant too that any online content (presence)
contributes to the lives of others and the ways they make use of the information and
expertise the technology has enabled them to access. Communications technology also
provides a direct link between the creator and a targeted audience, a feature not easily
realised with print-based and video products where a number of players elongate the
delivery process. Digital publications are thus not only instruments that provide a
presence for the creator, designer and publisher, they provide a service to the consumer
of their information, and collectively may alter community uses of online networks.
Digital Portfolios provide new mediums for expression, creativity and a capacity to
perform for a new audience in multiple media and in multiple languages. Collectively,
galleries of portfolios or works from portfolios, and e-zines as collections of student
work create further audience for student constructions, a new culture and opportunity to
build new community amongst people who are exploring new media and enjoying online
connectivity. The medium enables creators to relate multiple perspectives of a story in
multiple ways, thus recording the process of creation and development in a variety of
genre and languages, linking these perspectives together in unique ways. For students
working in a foreign language, digital portfolios provide a means to interact with
speakers of the language in the context of an extended, authentic dialogue that is not
possible within the constraints of a classroom.
The medium is also a new stimulus for creativity, dialogue and expression and develops
new contexts, which can in turn be the stimulus for new stories and new expression. The
Digital Portfolios model thus represents a way for teachers and their students to explore
new ways to share creative work, significant designs, information and ideas, that are
leading the next evolvement of online publishing.
This model may enhance curriculum in a number of
KLAs. Publishing student work is a
common culmination to a curriculum activity and often the audience of such work is the
school community, parents and teachers. It provides an authentic audience for
students’ work, creating resources for other students and leads to the development of
critical community. This applies to students’ projects, problem solving, writing and
publishing in language and technology studies. The tools required to implement this model
will be valuable for all KLA teachers who want to extend the audience for student work and
capitalise on talents and skills in the student community.
This model enables teachers to insert their own models for curriculum activities into
events and activities and fully exploit the possibilities of a constructivist, dialogic
approach to learning and teaching. The project model acts as a framework though which
curriculum objectives of any KLA might be realised. It enables teachers to work in a
constructivist manner with students as they design the themes, problems and issues that
stimulate the selection and interpretation of other students’ work. As this model is
applied across KLAs and teacher communities, the variety of documented applications will
provide rich curriculum and pedagogical resources for other purposes and be a collection
of exemplary practice, thus becoming a professional development resource.
Project model components
In this description, the project structure is unravelled as structures for students,
teachers and project managers.
Student's components
| Core online idea |
Within a sequence of lessons, designed to develop students creative, critical and
problem solving skills, individual students or classes are asked to contribute details of
online publications and art works to a collection. Schools then participate in events,
constructing and hosting tours, exhibitions or e-zines of student publications in themes
or as solutions to problems or commentaries on issues. In the development of the tours or
exhibitions, students establish dialogue with the creators and negotiate the meaning of
the published work within the context of the theme. Exhibitions are then opened and
audiences invited to visit and add to comments and reviews about the exhibition, thus
creating a critical community of peers. Where the students are working in a foreign
language, an emphasis is placed on developing their communicative competence in that
language as an integrated element of this sequence. |
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| Core curriculum idea |
Students are communicating with a variety of real audiences within interpersonal,
informational and aesthetic domains of language use. They are involved in investigating
collecting and synthesising information, making key decisions concerning relevance and
suitability. They will develop and apply skills in drafting, revising and publishing and
their understanding of the power of combining sounds, words and images within an
interpretive or problem-solving framework will be greatly enhanced. They will develop a
range of interpretive, linguistic and interpersonal skills that are relevant to the
outcomes of all syllabuses. |
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| Curriculum processes |
The project will provide students with the opportunity to: • Actively construct
art works and authentic expression.
• Actively construct their response through the processes of inquiry, reflection,
problem solving, creating and communicating.
• Challenge and construct cultural understandings through contact with audiences
who have differing perspectives.
• Develop their language skills and cognitive skills through focusing on content
that may involve a range of KLAs
• Work with peers in action learning and experiential models that provide them
with results that are validated through the process of publishing.
• Move beyond egocentric, physicalised orientations and develop more abstract
reasoning capabilities through group discussion and multiple viewpoints. |
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| Online content students engage in |
The site for each exhibition or event will provide access to web-published information
around the topics, as well as analyses of the processes required to develop and visit the
exhibitions or e-zines. Teachers will determine the content that students engage in,
though the choice of topic, the framing of issues and the development process. Students
will pose issues and questions for visitors to explore. These products will become
resources for other projects. |
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| Online experts |
In this model students play the role of experts and offer critique and comment to
peers. Schools hosting events might invite experts from the community to add comment and
provide additional critique. |
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| Peer community |
Through interaction with peers within a collaborative learning framework, students
will help other students communicate meaning and interpret meaning from published work. In
this model, students are actively involved in exploration around a given theme and will
face challenges that will stimulate thinking and rethinking a problem or issue. This kind
of cooperative inquiry enriches thinking and helps students to learn to articulate
emerging knowledge and to appreciate alternative explanations. The quality of this
dialogue between students and their peers in the classroom and online is a key element in
the development of the students’ cognitive and metacognitive skills. |
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| Online content Students' build |
This project creates online content built by students. The interpretations and
commentary on them may become resources for other projects. The site should also allow
schools to submit links to their locally-published resources. Tools may need to be
developed to enable this process to occur without the project coorindator or forum manger
needed to manually edit web pages. |
Teachers' components
| Core activity idea |
This model includes building online community amongst teachers participating in this
project and developing a structure to share online content about teaching ideas, suitable
issues to engage students and technical aspects of the model. These conversations and
resources are a part of a professional development strategy for participating teachers and
those teachers who lurk online to seek new ideas and new ways of interpreting their
curriculum. Teachers help students publish online portfolios of their work. The details
of portfolios are added to a database and this creates access to Australian students'
portfolios. Teachers then help students participate in a development of galleries, tours,
exhibitions or e-zines around themes. Teachers can choose which curriculum processes the
students might experience in development of portfolios or exhibitions and choose the
variety of interactions students in their classes might undertake during construction. The
Digital portfolio community are then invited to visit the exhibition and add critical
commentary.
Locally, students can undertake the curriculum processes in their KLA and construct
products for local assessment and other purposes. |
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| Procedures |
In this model, teachers might respond to advertised themes for student portfolio
submissions from the project coorindator or might offer student work to a portfolio
gallery. Teachers might also join a teachers list and engage in professional dialogue with
teachers undertaking similar projects. Teachers might then offer to host an event and seek
cooperating schools or join in an event suggested by the project
coorindator. Teachers
then work with their classes and develop links to schools who agree to provide access to
students and their portfolios. Teachers might advertise the gallery opening and encourage
participating teachers and others to visit. Special guests and critics might also be
invited to the virtual exhibition. Teachers may engage in online professional
development activities as part of their preparation or as part of ongoing support while
the project is occurring. A debrief might encourage teachers to add activities and
student's publishing to the project web site. |
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| Professional community or professional development activity |
Professional development models are embedded into the design of this project model.
The project changes the role of the teacher in the classroom. In this model, teachers and
students are side-by-side working on strategies to solve problems that may not have been
proposed by the teacher. Teachers are thus encouraged to practise being facilitators of
open-ended activities and pedagogical experiences that lead to transfer of skills and
knowledge. Participating teachers will be part of an email community that serves as a
community of participating teachers as well as a place to seek help, share ideas, seek
partners, advertise students' events and conduct professional development events. Online
professional development events will be hosted on this list. |
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| Literacy walk |
A literacy walk may be included as part of the teachers resources, raising for
teachers the issues of conducting literacy activities in online media and in helping
teachers identify the language and genres which are incorporated in the processes of
student publishing and organisation of online content. |
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| Online content |
Online content for teachers includes links to professional information about
resources, teaching techniques and curriculum processes. This may be delivered through a
web site or through an online course conducted by email for participating teachers. |
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| Online experts |
The project coordinator and host teacher may invite online guests to critique student
work, act as student mentors and engage in the critical community around student
publishing. |
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| Peer community |
The teachers' peer community on this project is hosted by an email list and contains
pedagogical experts and teachers. Teacher's curriculum ideas may also showcased in events
and through the site and teachers will be encouraged to devlop their own digital
portfolios for this purpose. |
Project manager's
components
| Technical tools |
The tools for this model can be applied at two levels: to help organise students'
digital portfolios and to help teachers and students host online tours,
e-zines or
exhibitions. The project manager would be responsible for developing and maintaining
the tools that allow students to enter details about their portfolios. These tools would
need to allow audiences to search for contributions and access the web sites which contain
student publishing. It may be necessary to provide high volume web space for student work
if schools are restricting students' storage.
A tool should be developed that helps students publish a exhibition or virtual tour.
The tools should allow classes to call student work into view from external web sites, add
commentary, collect audience comments and perhaps provide multiple pathways through the
exhibition. Similarly an e-zine publishing tool might be created to remove some of the
HTML coding for some groups of students.
A forums web site would provide advice to teachers wishing to host and be involved in
online exhibitions generally. This site would contain the online content common to all
digital portfolio activities.
A calendar tool would enable teachers to register gallery and exhibition times and
timeframes for digital events.
An archived teachers' list acts to announce events, conduct some professional
development and seek partner teachers. A tool for easy list registration is important.
Tools which enable teachers to add resources and links to the web site is important to
engender community participation and to remove the load from the project coordinator.
Some activities may require access to a threaded web-discussion facility, a web-based
chat room or other synchronous and asynchronous spaces. These should be made accessible
through the students' and teachers' web sites. |
| Management tools |
The project manager uses technical tools to enhance organisational processes. It is
important to have processes in place to attract gallery hosts, collect student portfolios
and advertise online events, develop web pages without manual HTML editing and upload
resources from teachers. Management tools include processes to archive forums and convert
them to resources for later use and to collect feedback about the conduct of events. The
professional development process requires a number of processes and tools and may range
from face-to-face workshops, online events and courses, mixed programs of professional
development, web sites and online tutorials. Teacher content provides the bulk of
professional development materials. Helping teachers participate in digital portfolio
events is a professional development activity and tools may help project managers
encourage and support participating teachers. |
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| Human resources |
This model requires a project manager to work with teachers, develop the overall web
site and negotiate with programmers to develop tools which automate the process and extend
the projects structure and reach. Event hosts may be volunteers from schools, groups
within professional associations and other community groups interested in helping students
develop authentic audiences for their work. |
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| Development of the model |
As events and digital portfolios are developed, the coordinator would gather knowledge
about event design, use of tools to provoke dialogue, supporting hosts and conducting
professional development. This would enable the development of events to take account of
users needs as they develop and mature. |
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