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-Assign numbered cameras/sign out system
-Neck or wrist strap
-Shock proof/water proof
-Go over camera care
-Tripods

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Padlet is not only great for documentation and portfolio building but can also be used to communicate.

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Padlet is not only great for documentation and portfolio building but can also be used to communicate.

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Feel free to also utilize it as a form of communication with your students.

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I want to use this plastic bottle in my project.

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I'm trying to figure out how to include windows on my sketch.

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I forgot the dimensions. Can you look at this and remind me what the dimensions are?

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I forgot the dimensions. Can you look at this and remind me what the dimensions are?

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I forgot the dimensions. Can you look at this and remind me what the dimensions are?

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Dimensions are 12" by 11"

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Smyidel Waterproof Mini Kid Camera High Definition 12MP HD 3M Underwater Swimming Digital Camera Camcorder 2.0 Inch LCD Display Include 32 TF Card

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Tools for Creating Digital Student Portfolios

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Tools for Creating Digital Student Portfolios

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Portfolios are a good way for high school students to see and share their learning growth over time, and digital tools make it easy to set them up.

Bob Daemmrich / Alamy Stock Photo

In assessing student work, one of the challenges that teachers face comes when students have created a product for a project. Ideally they've had a chance to share their work with each other because that has numerous benefits: It allows them to see how their peers interpreted the project content or questions differently, and to reflect on their own learning and their learning process, which can help them improve future projects and processes.

Sharing students' work more widely, with their families or with outside experts, for example, has benefits as well.

So how do we get student work in front of as many eyes as possible to increase the impact of their ideas? One of the best ways is to have students create digital portfolios, which can help students track their personal growth and share their work with classmates, the community, and the world.

Considering Student Privacy

Before creating digital portfolios with our students, we should consider student privacy and be aware of our district and school policies around sharing student work with third parties.

Sharing student work is powerful, but it's also vital that students and their families consent to that sharing, which includes posting student work to third-party platforms-platforms that students must log into outside of the school's internal systems. Before using such platforms, review the Student Privacy Pledge. Signatories of the pledge-which include all of the tools listed below-have taken the time to consider student privacy and data on their platforms.

You can also check with your school and district to see if the app or website you want to use is approved by your district.

Digital Portfolio Tools

Portfolios can serve different purposes, which dictate what goes in them and how they're shared. For more public-facing portfolios, students generally create fine-tuned products. These are portfolios that students may use to showcase their work for awards, internships, jobs, and college applications. Work shared here may connect students with experts and add their voice to larger conversations around issues they care deeply about, while also validating their agency as members of a global community. These portfolios may also be a place for them to celebrate their work with their family, friends, classmates, and school or district. No matter how they're used, these portfolios can help build confidence and excitement around student learning.

Sometimes, however, portfolios are shared less widely, with just the teacher and the student's family. In these portfolios, rough copies of student work may be included to show growth. If students are able to create a portfolio that spans multiple years, they can see growth over a longer time. These portfolios are a great window into what students are learning, showing what they understand and what they're struggling with so the teacher can plan accordingly. Families can see their child's progress in real time and celebrate successes or provide support at home for areas of struggle. Portfolios also help students reflect on their progress and make connections to their own learning process. There may be pieces that move from this internal portfolio to be shared more widely in a public-facing portfolio.

Once you're ready to provide students with an opportunity to reflect on and share their work with an authentic audience, there are several tools you can use.

For sharing inside the classroom: Students can use Google Slides to create a digital portfolio that showcases their progress on a project, posting their work as well as their reflections on the work. You can have them start from scratch or create a template for them to use. You can have students share this portfolio with you alone or embed it in a blog post or post it to a Google Drive folder shared with the class.

You could instead use Google Classroom to create the portfolios: A student can add documents to their portfolio that can be viewed by both you and the student over the course of the year.

For sharing with the outside world: Students can post their Google Slides to a public-facing class blog or use a tool like Flipgrid to post video journal entries about their learning. These videos can be summative, or they can act like checkpoints as students work through the project. Flipgrid is free, and the company provides a sample consent letter to send home. Videos can be shared publicly, with only the class, or with only the teacher.

Another tool, Book Creator, allows students to create digital portfolios that can include text, images, audio recordings, and videos. The books are contained in a class library, and students can browse each other's books. Students can review their books to reflect on their growth in critical skills, and their books and the class library can be shared publicly. BookCreator can be used for free, but if you want to create more than 40 books you'll need to pay for access.

The tool Seesaw allows teachers to create activities that students can work on and share to a class portfolio. These activities can be designed by the teacher, or they can be imported from an activity library curated by Seesaw. An activity might ask students to explain their reasoning while solving a math problem, reading and reflecting on an article, or reflecting on their progress on a recent project. Seesaw allows teachers to provide family access to student portfolios so parents have a window into what students are learning.

Benefits of Digital Portfolios

Digital portfolios-as repositories of evidence of learning and growth-can be used in multiple ways. They're helpful to the teacher for planning instruction and gauging student understanding, and for communicating student progress with families and sparking conversations at home.

They can also be helpful in creating a culture of learning in the classroom, where students look to each other for knowledge and understanding. And they're a useful tool for students to reflect on their own personal growth over the course of the year.

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Tools for Creating Digital Student Portfolios

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Portfolios are a good way for high school students to see and share their learning growth over time, and digital tools make it easy to set them up.

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11 Essentials For Excellent E-Portfolios!

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11 Essentials For Excellent E-Portfolios!

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A portfolio for learning is often a short-term capstone project that will be assessed summatively. At the end of the year, students put selections of their work into a portfolio so a teacher can assess their learning. This is often a showcase portfolio, or a sample of students' best work.

A portfolio as learning typically has an extended timeframe. This is often formative assessment, but students will also self-reflect and assess themselves. These process portfolios promote student reflection and ownership of the learning process.

On blending elements of positivism and constructivism, Barrett says, "In order to approach a balanced solution, we must envision a solution that makes it easy for students to maintain their own digital archive of work, where they can capture a large number of examples and add their reflections and notes in an ongoing way."

The answer can be found in using different portions of the portfolio for different purposes, or in having students keep separate portfolios. So be crystal clear about your purpose, as it impacts how you design your portfolio.

2. Select Tools to Empower Students

Adding to the portfolio should be easy. It could be in your learning management system. I prefer my high school students to select the tool for their capstone portfolio. Here are some popular choices:

In their electronic notebook: Perhaps one of the best ways to incorporate a process portfolio is within shared notebooks using OneNote or Evernote. The new OneNote Class Notebook allows teachers and administrators see work in a process portfolio. Students can also keep a page linking to their best work.

Personal website: My older students select from Weebly, Webs, Wix, or Google Sites to build their personal portfolio website.

One-page collection: Sometimes students just want to link to their work published in other places. In this case, a tool like Strikingly, Glogster, or LiveBinders may be used. One of my former students created a one-page wiki for this purpose.

Student blog: My eighth-grade students blog on a private Ning, so their portfolio is a blog post with links to their other blog posts that completed different tasks. Many teachers are using this method on Edmodo, KidBlogs, Edublogs, Ning, or other class blogging tools.

Paper: Some teachers prefer some or all of the portfolio on paper. With private student work such as journal entries, this is often a good idea.

Whatever the tool, select it with your purpose in mind. Share sample portfolios from previous classes. Use templates to help students start. They should focus on selecting the work, so help them on the format.

3. Select a Variety of Content

In addition to print media represented by text and photos, you can use videos, screencasts, hyperlinks to student work, audio recordings, and annotated photographs. If you use only text and photographs, you're missing the authentic student voice you'd get from audio and video. Students struggling as writers could record a video journal as part of their process portfolio.

4. Empower Portfolio Review and Publish to an Audience

There's a reason elementary hallways are lined with student artwork-students love an audience. Privacy should always be protected and age-appropriate safeguards should be considered, but we know that an audience for final work improves engagement. As part of revision, portfolio review might include students themselves, teachers, peers, other teachers, parents, or a global audience. Review and feedback should allow a student to grow and change.

When considering publication, online is the obvious choice. But if this isn't allowed for individual students, teachers can share screenshots on the class blog. Students could also publish part or all of their work in a protected online space for parents to see.

5. Know Your Timeline

You can do portfolios at a certain time of year or over a long period. If you're doing them throughout the year, make sure students organize themselves to put their portfolio in a place where they can reach it any time they need it. (Students often need to be reminded about putting their work in their portfolio.)

I have my students do their eighth-grade portfolios over a six-week period after they learn the keyboard. My high school students built their personal portfolio website in ninth grade and updated it again in tenth grade. Many of my students use these websites after they graduate from high school.

6. Empower Metacognition

How can your students reflect on their work (or think about their thinking)? Are there ways to ask metacognitive questions? There are many resources on metacognition because it's so critically important to learning, and this level of reflection should be incorporated into any portfolio of student work.

For example, a writing portfolio may have students select different pieces that demonstrate how they've learned to use voice during the school year. As they write about how they improved in this ability, they're reflecting on how their thinking evolved. Metacognition lends itself to the process portion of the portfolio.

7. Relate Portfolios to Other Coursework

In Identifying Critical Content, Deana Senn, Amber Rutherford, and Robert Marzano discuss the importance of effectively cueing critical information. One of the concepts they discuss is the advance organization of content, a term coined by psychologist David Ausubel to describe helping students understand the content of a section before it is introduced.

For a science portfolio, you could introduce a unit on water quality by informing students that they'll be preparing a section of their portfolio where they'll explain how water quality can be assessed. They can write their opinion beforehand while quoting the data and charts from their learning. In this example, you've told students what will be covered so they can begin with the end in mind. So at the beginning of a unit, you can share what type of evidence they'll be collecting for their portfolio, and you can relate standards to outcomes more clearly using portfolios as advance organizers.

8. Don't Overwhelm Students

How can you share your rubric and assignment for a long-term portfolio project without overwhelming the student? It can be upsetting to give students the entire portfolio assignment at one time. If you hand out all portfolio requirements at once, assure students that you'll be guiding them section by section. You can instead give students the portfolio assignments as needed during the year.

9. Link Paper and Electronic Portfolios

How will you relate online and offline portions of the portfolio? Consider linking them with a QR code. This makes it easier to grade the paper portfolio and see the online work without having to type a long hyperlink in your web browser.

10. Consider the Portfolio's Longevity

How will you help students preserve their portfolios for future use? They often don't consider their need for the work they've done until they're applying for jobs or want to find it later. With many schools deleting data over the summer, we promote student ownership by letting them take their portfolios with them. When the portfolio is created in an online space, students should save the files and burn them onto a CD or DVD.

11. Engage Teachers in Effective Portfolio Use

How will teachers learn and share best practices so that portfolios are implemented effectively? While perusing the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, I came across a finding from Clemson University (PDF) that one of their university's essential areas for improving portfolio use was "increased faculty support/buy-in." The Clemson paper notes, "Unfortunately, much of what has been done in the name of programmatic assessment has failed to engage large numbers of faculty in significant ways."

This emphasizes the importance of involving teachers in successful portfolio implementation.

Speaking From Experience

In my opinion, the best portfolios are part of the learning process. Students reflect on their work and learning. Two important aspects of teaching-metacognition and advance organizing of content-can be done powerfully through portfolios. Students can also have an audience of reviewers and readers. If done well, the final product can further their academic career or get them a job. A well-done portfolio is an essential tool in 21st-century learning. In my classroom, portfolios are essential, powerful means of learning and leveling up.

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11 Essentials for Excellent Digital Portfolios

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A portfolio for learning is often a short-term capstone project that will be assessed summatively. At the end of the year, students put selections of their work into a portfolio so a teacher can assess their learning. This is often a showcase portfolio, or a sample of students' best work.

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Edutopia: How Green Screens Bring Learning to Life

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Edutopia: How Green Screens Bring Learning to Life

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A simple video production technique can animate a wide range of student projects-and instill new energy in distance learning.

Courtesy of Justine Marie Bruyère

Teaching has always been as much about what we do as how we do it. It's about asking the right questions, using the right tools, and igniting students' curiosity to engage with content-even when we're not in the same physical space. Although much has changed in education over these last few months, students' curiosity and wonder have not. So it may be necessary, now more than ever, to embrace technology as a way of tapping into student interest.

My 15 years as an educator have taught me that a multimodal approach to learning-that is, working with different forms of media and with a number of senses-is one of the best ways to differentiate, build knowledge, and inspire creativity. Additionally, a multimodal approach has been shown to sharpen memory and improve attention to difficult tasks.

Forms of technology that do more than just replace pencil-and-paper tasks are a great way to incorporate multimodal learning. In my own classroom, green screens-a video production technique in which two or more video or image streams are layered together-have helped me embed opportunities for students to create and reflect on learning.

In remote learning, teachers no longer have hallways to display the work of students. Without a real audience for work, assignments can feel insignificant and students can feel unmotivated. Green screens offer opportunities for expressive, process-oriented work that can be shared as a class and with families.

Getting Started

There are a few things you'll need to work with green screens, starting with a green backdrop of some sort. You can use a large roll of green paper or a green bedsheet, paint a section of wall green, or purchase a green screen. For individual small projects, I've even used a green towel, a T-shirt, or sheets of green 8.5 x 11 paper.

A device to record the video and/or images. A tablet or smartphone will do.

A green screen application. I have tried dozens and recommend these two apps: Chromavid and Green Screen by Do Ink.

You'll also need:

To get started, download or capture a landscape photo (from life, books, the internet, or a hand-drawn image). Next, select a photo to use as the base layer. Then record your video.

Techniques for Using Green Screens

Green screen with downloaded still image background: I began using a green screen by playing with simple backgrounds. Students wrote stories or poems, selected backgrounds, and then presented their work in front of the screen. This small step worked magic for engagement.

Green screen with self-created still image background: Math journaling was always something that my students endured rather than enjoyed-until we used the green screen. At a green screen journal station, my students were able to respond to fictional characters from their math textbook.

To create these custom backgrounds, I use Microsoft Word or Google Docs and build fictional characters or real people into the images. Next, I take a screenshot in landscape mode. Last, I tap the plus sign and use the original image as my base layer.

Green screen with a moving background: As time went on, our comfort grew with this technology, and we started to utilize video, rather than still images, as a background. Students enjoyed the opportunities to respond to and interact with the videos.

For example, in one video students "became" National Geographic reporters in different locations throughout North America. Once they had completed certain research steps pertaining to their geographic location, groups selected a video to use as their promotional video backdrop and wrote a script.

Green screen with a student-created background: During Writer's Workshop, students wanted to promote their original stories with book trailers to feature their characters and other important story details. To do this, they drew the setting of their book on an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper and took a photo of this drawing. The photo became the base layer. Next, they individually drew and cut out the characters of their stories. The story characters were mounted on green strips of cardboard (which were folded for added strength).

Every time our class used this educational tool, I was impressed with students' work. The process motivated students to do their best: Students often rerecorded their videos multiple times, working to fluently read or emphasize certain words.

If you've ever seen students lose track of time when devoting themselves to a task or express delight at the sight of their own finished work, you know why green screens are a staple in my classroom. It wasn't just one assignment that made the work so memorable. It was the result of an engaging process merging with important work-and the promise of a real audience-that has made using a green screen such a success.

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How Green Screens Bring Learning to Life

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A simple video production technique can animate a wide range of student projects-and instill new energy in distance learning. Courtesy of Justine Marie Bruyère Teaching has always been as much about what we do as how we do it.

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Plastic green tablecloths are great cheap alternative. Poster Tri-folds also work too!

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$4.99

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Animation & Drawing by Do Ink is the fun, creative way to make animations on your iPad. The app was designed to be easy for beginners and young animators, but with powerful tools for creating advanced animations. Use the drawing editor to create vector artwork and frame-by-frame (flip book) animations. Use the composition editor to combine your artwork - along with props from the Do Ink prop library - into more complex and sophisticated scenes. Save to the camera roll, then share your creations with friends, classmates, or the world!

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Do Ink provides Creativity Apps -Green Screen by Do Ink and Animation and Drawing by Do Ink for students to show what they know in education.

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Clipchamp - free video editor & video maker

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Use Clipchamp to make awesome videos from scratch or start with a template to save time. Edit videos, audio tracks and images like a pro without the price tag.

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"Flipgrid is a simple, free, and accessible video discussion experience for learners and families. Start a discussion and engage your community...together!"

-Post video journal entries about  learning. These videos can be summative, or they can act like checkpoints as students work through the project.

-Videos can be shared publicly, with only the class, or with only the teacher.

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We express ourselves in different ways. On Flip, you can use our simple and fun built-in camera to record your thoughts, add effects and share within your Flip group as video, audio only or text in your web browser or mobile app.

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Flip is a video discussion and sharing app, free from Microsoft.

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Flip (formerly Flipgrid) is a video discussion and video sharing app, free from Microsoft, built for classrooms and beyond. Learn more.

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"VideoAsk allows you to have asynchronous video conversations with your learners. Just fire up VideoAsk, push the record button, ask a question, and share your link."

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The most effortless way to have asynchronous video conversations. Engage your community, recruit new talent, generate better leads, and much more.

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The Student Privacy Pledge is a public commitment for the responsible collection and use of student data.

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Signatories - Pledge to Parents & Students

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Taking the Time to Reflect and Learn with e-Portfolios

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Taking the Time to Reflect and Learn with e-Portfolios

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One of the most enjoyable aspects of the teaching profession is that there is always something to learn and refine. This year in my role as a trainer, I leaned into reading articles from outlets such as Edutopia, Education Week, and MindShift to increase my knowledge about effective remote learning strategies. In October 2020, I read an article in Edutopia which highlighted the importance and value of teachers creating an e-Portfolio for professional learning, especially while teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I was inspired to share this idea and to create a community of educators who support one another and share pieces of their e-Portfolios with each other throughout the year. Educators are experiencing intense learning curves as we scramble to identify effective strategies for teaching and learning via digital platforms; many veteran teachers have expressed that they feel like it is their first year teaching as they juggle many unknown variables. The COVID-19 crisis has created a critical need for teachers to leave their teaching silos, open their doors, and seek out collaborative learning opportunities. The learning curve is simply too steep to go it alone.

In response to the challenges experienced by teaching colleagues, I created and hosted an e-Portfolio workshop in December 2020. e-Portfolios are different from journaling and documenting evidence for a performance framework. The difference is reflected in the intentional learning that comes from recording professional growth that includes identifying what was learned along with a decision and/or change in action or behavior. Creating and maintaining an e-Portfolio provides the following primary benefits:

Opportunity to engage in a reflective practice. This is an opportunity to lean into failures. Rather than only focusing on successes, we can leverage our mistakes and missteps to improve our craft.

Shared reflection. Learning is a social process, and we must find a community of educators where we can collaborate, share our celebrations and how we overcame obstacles, and track our learning progress over time.

An acceleration of learning. This occurs through a targeted approach to documenting, reflecting, and identifying a change in action or behavior. Deep learning occurs when we are able to transfer our knowledge and skills to an unfamiliar environment or situation.

"The e-Portfolio workshop is a wonderful roadmap designed to set professional educators up for documenting their current thoughts and beliefs regarding their practice and for reflection as time goes on and the portfolio grows," said Amanda Arceo, a math and science learning coordinator at Nye County School District in Nevada. "It's imperative that educators stay up to date on best practices and continue to engage in their own learning as current events are changing the landscape of education and forcing us into circumstances that require outside-the-box thinking. Keeping an e-Portfolio allows an educator to distill what is integral to his/her beliefs and realign practice according to essential goals."

"The e-Portfolio workshop not only has helped me to get organized in terms of planning and available resources, but it has shown me what I have already accomplished and reminded me of all the innovative things I have already started doing," said Roxanne Johnson, a teacher at Findlay Middle School in Las Vegas. "By having all of my work in a portfolio where I have the ability to reflect on my inventory, I am working smarter, not harder."

As teachers who attended the workshop learned, creating an e-Portfolio is both a beneficial and facilitated learning process. There are three simple steps to begin creating your own e-Portfolio for professional learning:

1. Decide on an electronic format; this could be a slide deck, a Wakelet, or a website.

2. Begin with a few sentences that state your goal and/or your philosophy as an educator. While this may feel overwhelming (as many of us haven't explored our educational philosophy since our teacher preparatory program), it can help to provide a clear focus to capture and create connections along the way, making the learning more meaningful.

3. Write frequent, short summaries on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Include artifacts (e.g., links, images, photos, screenshots, audio recordings, etc.) to bring your post to life. The post can focus on a lesson, an interaction, or a memorable activity. If you participate in a book study or a conference or listen to podcasts, include your learnings from those experiences as well. As you begin to create this new habit, consider setting a calendar reminder or strategically placing a Post-it note to contribute to your e-Portfolio each week.

Teachers know how crucial it is for our students to make mistakes-after all, that is when learning occurs. Teachers know how valuable reflection is for students to strengthen connections and relationships within content, and to increase multiple pathways in their brains for greater retention. Yet educators often do not take the time to engage in either of these structured learning opportunities themselves to improve their craft. Therefore, my learning community and I will continue to meet virtually each month to celebrate successes and to discuss teaching and learning obstacles, lessons learned, pivots in decisions, and outcomes from reflections. This will allow us the space and opportunity to leverage the learning of our peers, as well as our own personal experiences that we capture within our e-Portfolios.
Are you an instructional coach looking to connect with other coaches to share best practices and strategies for supporting teachers? Join Digital Promise's Powerful Learning Community for Coaches!

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Taking the Time to Reflect and Learn with e-Portfolios - Digital Promise

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One of the most enjoyable aspects of the teaching profession is that there is always something to learn and refine. This year in my role as a trainer, I leaned into reading articles from outlets such as Edutopia, Education Week, and MindShift to increase my knowledge about effective remote learning strategies.