Digital Portfolios 2.0 – No Student Left Behind

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. 

Nothing will deflate a project like this more quickly than when teachers go to do the portfolio curation work with students a month or two down the road and scores of students don’t even have their Google Site created. The effort that we put into this “in-between” phase seems mundane but was crucial to the process continuing as smoothly as possible in months to come.

As described in this previous post, the Google Form collection of the published links served as “completion proof”. It was also super helpful as we systematically tried to have advisory teachers track down and help students get their portfolio completed if they missed the “gymnasium Google Sites creation day”.

As instructional coaches, we took on the task of having advisory teachers either a) confirm that their entire class had successfully created portfolios or b) send a list of absent students. We then spent the next two weeks or so sending very frequent email reminders to teachers who had not responded to the confirmation request, or who had students who needed to have portfolios completed. We offered to come and do mini-tutorials for any remaining students; many teachers took us up on this. Other teachers used the paper instruction booklet, or the Google Sites tutorial poster to help students on their own.

To help in this process, we used the spreadsheet connected to the “Link Collection Form” that collected students’ Google Sites “edit” link and “published” link. Students were organized by homeroom teacher for easier tracking. Another tab on this Google Sheet had all of the Homeroom Teachers’ names and either a ✅ when all students in their group had the portfolio completed or a list of students who still needed to create their Site. This was tedious record keeping, but really helped to achieve near 100% Google Sites creation.

This “in-between” blitz was a success. When we returned to the school in later months to help classes add their portfolio content, it was rare to encounter a student who had not yet created their Google Site. The few times that did happen, we could use the great tools that we had previously produced to quickly get the students up to speed.

The next step: helping teachers help their students add course content to their digital portfolio.