June 19-24, 1999
Seattle, Washington, USA
ED-MEDIA 1999
ED-MEDIA 99 Topics: __X__Media in Education and __X__Teaching and
Learning
TITLE: Electronic Portfolio for the Professional Educator
ABSTRACT:
The portfolio is becoming an integral part of the educator's
professional files. Education departments are requiring electronic
portfolios for the pre-service teacher, and central administrators are
promoting the values of electronic portfolios to inservice teachers and
to central office personnel. The goal of this session is to provide
educators at all levels a conceptual overview of the professional
portfolio. Professional portfolios may be constructed in many ways. An
educator could begin with a hard copy and easily develop this into a
CD-ROM. A portfolio could also be constructed using commercial software
packages or on a computer using programs, such as Hyperstudio, Astound,
or Powerpoint. A preferred method for many is to publish their portfolio
on the WWW. Software is available to construct a web page that can
serve the purpose of an electronic portfolio. Presenters will review
these multiple models of electronic professional portfolios including
samples, as constructed by Wright State University pre-service teachers
and faculty. On-line web presentation will be provided. Audience
participation will be encouraged.
PRESENTER: Dr. Colleen Finegan-Stoll
SCHOOL: Wright State University
WORK ADDRESS: CEHS 376 Millett Hall
CITY/STATE/ZIP: Dayton, OH 45435-0001
COUNTRY: USA OFFICE/HOME: 937-775-4582 513-779-9994 FAX:
937-775-4588
PRESENTER Dr. Ronald G. Helms
SCHOOL: Wright State University
WORK ADDRESS: CEHS 370 Millett Hall
CITY/STATE/ZIP: Dayton, OH 45435-0001
COUNTRY: USA OFFICE/HOME: 937-775-3231 937-433-2611 FAX:
937-775-4588
Electronic Portfolio for the Professional Educator
Colleen Finegan, Ph.D. and Ronald Helms, Ph.D.
Wright State University
Dayton, OH
The three legs of the stool: Teaching, Scholarship and Service remain
the three-pronged pitchfork by which professors are raised high to
receive promotion and tenure or pitched out of the barn and sent on
their way to find a position at another institution of higher learning.
Historically, scholarship has been judged by the number and quality of
publications and the level of prestige of the journal, often determined
by the journal’s refusal rate. Service, the weakest of the legs of the
stool, is measured in terms of dedication to thankless positions on
committees and task forces, or in furthering other University goals.
Anything that wasn’t direct didactic instruction in the classroom and
didn’t appear in print, in some fashion was consigned to the category of
service. Recently, partnerships with school systems and community
organizations has been a goal of many universities seeking financial
support from federal and state grants which are emphasizing interaction
and collaborative partnerships between universities (particularly
colleges and schools of education) and business or community and human
service organizations. Partnerships are not easily nor quickly built;
trust cannot be rushed. Any educational professional who has worked with
school systems is well aware of the amount of time needed before
universities are seen as true partners and not the ivy-covered structure
on the hill with ulterior motives for their sudden interest in the
public school system. However the time spent building and nurturing
partnership sites and professional development schools in departments of
teacher education has often been relegated to the category of service.
More recently, of course, with the writings of Boyer and others, the
three legs of the stool are being re-constructed and re-defined. The
division between the three categories is not as clear as it once may
have been. The questions are being asked “When is service really more
like teaching?” “When should service be considered scholarship?” “Does
all teaching have to happen in the university classroom?” If university
faculty combine forces to create a better student teaching experience
for novice teachers, is that service or teaching, or possibly
scholarship? And how should all of these initiatives be documented so
that those who are not directly involved with the endeavor can become
aware of it?
In the past, and even today, the quality and quantity of scholarship and
service can be estimated, to some extent, by a paper trail, including
books, journals, and a well designed vita. But, how can teaching be
evaluated? For too long, end of the term student evaluations have been
the major source for judging the quality and effectiveness of the
teaching in our higher education classrooms. As many professors and
administrators realize, this form of evaluation, when administered near
the end of the quarter or semester, is often reduced to a popularity
contest. Students who have achieved high grades, whether or not they
have been challenged to learn, tend to rate the professor as a great
teacher. Students whose grades are lower, due to poor performance or
missing assignments, seldom have the wisdom to realize that even though
they may have personally failed to achieve their desired goal, a high
grade, they have learned much. Is teaching just the delivery of
information from the professor to the student and the grade received?
How is a student able to judge whether or not a professor is currently
knowledgeable in the field? Why should a person’s effectiveness be
judged on whether a student would recommend the class to a friend? These
are some of the questions asked on final evaluation forms in many
institutions of higher learning.
Intuitively, answers to these questions are not highly correlated with a
professor’s teaching effectiveness. Yet, year after year, merit pay,
promotion and tenure decisions are often made, based to a great extent,
on these popularity polls. Short of video taping professors in
interaction with their students, there seems to be few alternative
methods of documenting and subsequently evaluating teaching
effectiveness.
For several years, authentic assessment has become an increasing
priority in the field of education for teachers, administrators, and
curriculum developers. There are many models available for use with
K-16 students. Children in preschool and primary grades make judgments
with the help of their parents and teachers to choose their best work
and place it in a folder or expanding file. Students in the middle and
upper grades may continue this method and may take pictures of their
projects to place in their growing portfolios. With increased
availability of computers in the public schools, students in third and
fourth grade are beginning to use simple multi-media software to
document their interests, best work and projects. Whether the decision
is to develop a paper model or an electronic model, the concept of
portfolio development is a solid concept . National curriculum leaders
have long encouraged the development of student projects and exhibitions
at all levels of education.
Goodlad, Comer and other proponents of educational reform recommend that
schools and colleges of education provide future educators with multiple
experiences in classroom settings beginning early in their educational
careers. This proposal further emphases the need for authentic
assessment as professors attempt to evaluate the pre-service teacher’s
growing levels of expertise in the educational process.
The College of Education and Human Services of Wright State University,
as a leader in teacher education, has been selected as a member of the
National Education Association's Center for Innovation in the area of
Teacher Education Initiative. A primary concern of the College of
Education and Human Services is that pre-service teachers develop skills
of authentic assessment to document their own professional growth and,
in turn, be able to apply in their classrooms in the future. The College
of Education and Human Services has, for several years, assisted
pre-service teachers in the development of hard copy portfolios. These
portfolios were initially constructed during the foundation portion of
the education program, added to during the methods and materials classes
and groomed during the student teaching experience. More recently, the
authors have offered pre-service instruction in developing electronic
models of professional and teaching portfolios, including CD ROM format
and web page format.
For the pre-service teacher to the president of a university, the
professional teaching portfolio is becoming an integral part of the
educator's professional files,. A professional portfolio could be
constructed to document all three areas: scholarship, service, and
teaching, or any one of the three in isolation. Professional portfolios
may be constructed in several ways, but to be used for authentic
assessment, the portfolio must be more than a scrapbook, containing
stubs from movies or basketball games.
An educator could begin with a hard copy and easily develop this into a
CD-ROM by simply scanning the documents and pressing them on a CD-ROM.
Modern technological advances allow for use of multi-media to enhance
the format. For example, a simple portfolio could be constructed using
commercial software packages, such as Scholastic’s Electronic Portfolios
or the Grady Profile. Indeed, any multimedia presentation software may
be used to develop a template for student portfolios. Multimedia
programs such as Hyperstudio, Astound, Podium, Chisel or Powerpoint
could be used to develop a portfolio which might include actual video
and audio footage. This addition would provide a glimpse of the educator
in the classroom or in individual interaction with students. Many books,
as well as the World Wide Web itself may be utilized as models in for
the development of a portfolio. The resulting document might then be
stored and, in turn, viewed from a CD ROM or disk. One disadvantage
with a CD-ROM is that it does take special equipment to press and it
cannot be readily updated. Current technology, however, does provide for
rewritable CD-ROMS.
A web page may allow for the greatest flexibility in creation, storage,
updating and presentation. In the past, web design through programming
and required knowledge of html limited the widespread use of the web
page as a professional portfolio. Now that programs can be downloaded
from the web and software purchased at a modest price, web authoring has
been simplified and understandable to a larger population. A web search
engine will identify a number of on-line tools which would assist the
user in webpage development.
Some World Wide Web sites have been dedicated to housing references on
web authoring such as:
* WWW Authoring Information
(http://www.netspace.org/users/dwb/www-authoring.html)
* The Virtual Library of WWW Development
(http://www.stars.com/Vlib/)
Educators familiar with Clarisworks will adapt easily to Claris
Homepage. Current versions of Pagemill offer the novice a path to
webpage production. More flexible, but advanced programs might include:
* Lotus eSuite DevPack
(http://esuite.lotus.com/preview/preview.nsf/Content/Home+Page)
* GoLive CyberStudio 3.0
(http://www.golive.com/three/gogetit/index.ehtml)
* Virtual Media Technology’s /) Virtual Media Publishing Suite which
includes HDK3, INTRAWEB, Web*lite, and Hypershelf 3.0.
(http://www.virtualmedia.com.au)
* Matterform Media produces HTML Grinder and Theseus
(http://www.matterform.com/design/)
* E-Publish (http://www.stattech.com.au/)
Educators may design their portfolios to document items included on
their curriculum vita in the areas of scholarship, teaching, and
service. In the area of scholarship, text files with grants received,
and proposals which have been accepted for presentation at professional
conferences might be included on the web page. Educators might provide
hypertext links to their articles published in journals or to the
professional organization’s web page announcing a annual conference at
which they are presenting a paper.
In the area of teaching, with the students’ permission, examples of
assignments and projects might be included as a hypertext file or as a
scanned photo with sound bites allowing the students to talk about their
projects. Students’ individual web pages might be accessible through a
professional portfolio of their professor, documenting the student’s
professional growth even after graduating. Syllabi for classes might be
included, again with hypertext links allowing students to use the web
page as a resource to learn more about the topics begin discussed in
class. Interactive discussion between students as member’s of class user
groups might be displayed on line, again with student’s knowledge and
permission.
Service could be documented on a professional educator’s webpage by
providing links to community resources and information on local events.
Again, text files of grants which involved partnership schools and other
community agencies could be included. Letters of appreciation from
students and others might be collected and stored in an electronic
portfolio format.
The choices of what might be included in the portfolio are limited only
by the creativity of the educational professional and the knowledge of
the software available to make it happen. As an exemplar of authentic
assessment, the professional educator’s electronic portfolio may become
a template used to document individual and professional growth in the
business world.