Portfolio Review

I think I have learned a lot in this class. I started with maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of the "total knowledge" of the class, so that's a pretty good gain. Stuff like blogs and wikis I knew before, and I knew what a podcast was, but I didn't know how to make one or submit one. The comic life stuff was totally new to me, but I had prior knowledge of other programs that helped me intuitively work in Comic Life. I had done a little work in iMovie before, but had never used it for digital poetry or storytelling, and I really like those genres. All of the note-taking stuff with Delicious and Diigo I think is really cool and I didn't know anything about that before.

I think the projects I'm happiest with are the comic about my son and my PowerPoint presentation, with my Nicollet Avenue video close behind. The comic is so short, but tells an important story, and the process of creating those includes so many layers like photo placement, text placement, choosing which events are important enough to include (if there's a length limitation), showing emotion with pictures instead of text, and all kinds of stuff. The PowerPoint I like mainly because I had such a hard time coming up with an idea and I think the final product actually illustrated a pretty good point.

I think if I had my students doing an ongoing type of project or something like that, an online portfolio would be a great option for organizing and presenting the material that they have created. I'm still fuzzy on good options for high school students to create an online portfolio like some of the tools we have at the U, but a blog would be one option or a wiki, but I'm inclined to think that a wiki isn't the best option for that type of thing because you wouldn't want anyone but the student changing things, so then what's the point of a wiki? Maybe just the set up with different pages and links I guess. I'm thinking about using some type of folio with the poetry unit I do with my 9th graders in January, so hopefully it will go well.

As far as using the tools we learned in my class, we're already doing podcasting and online comments (Check out http://wayspace.wayzata.k12.mn.us/blogs/jnelson to see that). I'm also going to incorporate digital poetry into my poetry unit.

The big piece, though, is that next fall I'm going to propose a one-term class to teach called "Digital Writing" where we would use all of the tools learned in this class. It wouldn't go live until the 2011-2012 school year, but that gives us a lot of time to figure out where we could do it (all of the students would need computers obviously), if we have to cut other sections in order to do it, what it would do to the schedule, etc. I'm really excited about the possibility of this class, and I've already started talking to my assistant principal and our tech department to see if this could happen. I think the students would really enjoy it and buy into what is going on in the class.