Digital Portfolios 2.0 – Convincing the Adults

Digital Portfolios 2.0 is a series of blog posts describing the carefully crafted steps and scaffolds put in place to help a high school reinstate the use of Digital Portfolios. 

A key component of the 2.0 version of digital portfolios at EBHS was to convince the teachers that this grand endeavour was both intensely worthwhile and also manageable with already packed syllabi.

There were different types of teachers on staff and each needed a specific message.

• The beginning of this school year marked the most new teachers on staff in over two decades. These new teachers needed to hear that this was a school expectation and that there were people (instructional coaches) who would help them figure out what to do. In all the newness of their jobs, this was just another new thing.
• There were teachers on staff who had been strong supporters of Digital Portfolios 1.0. They had helped carefully craft the first iteration of digital portfolios at EBHS and were perhaps skeptical that a second attempt would only get a half-hearted promotion, just like the first time around.
• There were also teachers on staff who had been opposed to or ambivalent toward the Digital Portfolio 1.0 era. Because they hadn’t been required to use digital portfolios with their students, they most certainly did not attempt to. I think that some of this group figured that they would play the same “opt-out” card this time.

To address and convince all of these parties, we concocted a presentation that would lead the crowd through considerations and discussions of WHY Digital Portfolios 2.0 was a worthwhile and necessary endeavour. (And, because it was August 2023, we couldn’t resist using Curipod, a newly released AI tool, to deliver an interactive presentation.)

In our time together with staff, we also had them go through the same process of creating a Google Site from a template and then submitting the link to their portfolio via a Google Form. This exercise had two important purposes.

1. We knew that we would need teachers to help supervise the student Google Site creation process en masse in the gymnasium. We also knew this would be much more effective if the teachers knew the process because they had been through it themselves. This did indeed turn out to be true.

2. We needed to test the process and iterate as necessary. Did the Google Site template have any glitches? Were the instructions in the Google Form clear enough? Did we miss any important steps in the Google Form? At the end of the process, would we have the links and data that we needed? It turns out that the Google Form needed a few tweaks. It led to using “response validation” in the student version of the form which helped that process work so smoothly.

At the end of our time with staff, it seemed that many were at least partially convinced that this was a worthwhile endeavour and that there would be Instructional Coaches to support the process.

The next step: Creating Google Sites Digital Portfolios for over 500 students in 25-minute time blocks.