Digital Portfolios 2.0 – Collecting Portfolio links in Google Classroom

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. 

Teachers must have a convenient way to follow up with students to ensure that each “course” portfolio page is complete. In addition, teachers might use a simple rubric (see below) to assess quality or do a completion checklist. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize sooner that teachers needed some help and support in the follow-through. I wish I had helped some of the earlier teachers and classes set up this simple workflow, but this is a case of better late than never. Hopefully, at least a few teachers will follow this simple Google Classroom workflow to help determine the extent to which their students have completed the digital portfolio post for each of their courses.

To make this easy for teachers, here is a workflow for collecting an appropriate Google Site link in Google Classroom.

Super important warning: If students submit an “edit” link to their Google Site, or “upload” their Google Site from their Google Drive, they will lose all edit access and the Google Classroom teacher will become the temporary owner.

Use the italicized text below to paste into the “Instructions” section of your Google Classroom Assignment:

Use the “link” option to submit the link to your Google Site Portfolio Page. 
Be sure that:

• you click “Publish” to update your site
• you go back to the Publish button, click the little arrow, and choose “View Published Site”
• copy the link from this published page
  • your link needs to have the name of your class at the end (Bio 20 eg. https://sites.google.com/prrd8.ca/sus…)
• click Turn In/ Submit
• NOTE: as long as you continue to “Publish” your site, the most recent version will show up for your teacher

This clipped portion of the previous video shows students how to get the link they need for submission to the Google Classroom Assignment. In addition, this pre-written Google Classroom instructions text is in the YouTube video description.

Assessing the Digital Portfolio Page

At the very least, teachers should track the completion of the digital portfolio page for their courses as complete or incomplete. Assigning a grade will also support the importance of the digital portfolio. Here is the link to the rubric below. Feel free to edit this rubric or use a tool like magicschool.ai/ to generate your own rubric.

Review this YouTube video for suggested formatting for an EBHS Digital Portfolio page in Google Sites.

Digital Portfolios 2.0 – Adding Course Content

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. 

From the first day this process was introduced to teachers, we have promised that an Instructional Coach will be available to help them through the process of choosing content for their Course Digital Portfolio page and to be in the classroom to help students add their content to their teacher’s course page.

Several teachers have taken us up on the offer to brainstorm the best course content or learning progression to showcase for each of their classes. Even more teachers have invited us into their classrooms to model the process of adding content to their course pages for their students.

This is an excellent opportunity to talk about the importance of digital creation, digital craftsmanship, digital identity and so many other important elements. We model how to have students use important digital publishing elements like:

• headers,
• appropriate-sized fonts,
• correct spelling and capitalization,
• bulleted lists
• captions for images or other content
• and the overall importance of providing written context for the artifacts.

If the teachers do not want us to visit their classroom, we have also created several other supports to help ensure that quality digital portfolio web pages are being created across the school.

1. A YouTube version of the suggested page creation process:

2. A printable “How To” bulletin that outlines the steps to a functional and properly working page. We also added some “Teacher Talking Points for ‘Why Portfolios“. The first few times that I returned to individual classrooms to help add page content to the new Google Sites portfolios, I almost always had the “why do we have to do this” question. I realized quickly that this would be a pivotal moment in the success of the project this semester. While I, as the instructional coach, could spin off reasons why a digital portfolio was such an important tool, what would happen when the classroom teacher was at a loss for how to respond, or even worse, didn’t even believe in the importance of digital portfolios themselves.

So, we created this teacher bulletin that addressed both the “why” and the “how” and squeezed our way onto a staff meeting agenda for a 10-minute refresh. At this juncture, the jury is still out on whether this list has been enough to help teachers stay on course with their talking points. However, I’ve now been with some students two or even three times in different classes to create their course content page, and it does seem like the sulky “why” question is less prevalent.

3. Each class received a poster with a QR Code linked to a Google Sites Mini-Tutorials playlist.

However, despite all of these scaffolds and supports, it does seem that there are still classes where students have posted a single artifact with no title, header, caption or context description. And in most of these cases, we can’t even tell what the artifact is because the share settings have not been properly adjusted in Google Drive. 

Two steps forward, one step back. First Attempt In Learning?

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.

Digital Portfolios 2.0 – The “Creation” Process

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. 

So how do you get every student in a high school to create a Google Site for their digital portfolio from a template and submit a link to their personalized site in 20 minutes or less? You definitely need a carefully structured and practiced plan!

The location. We set up “row markers” so that each advisory group knew exactly where to sit when they entered the gym. Having them sit in their advisory groups was a critical element. Advisory Teachers played a crucial role in helping answer questions and most importantly, provided the “exit ticket” check. We provided advisory teachers with paper copies of the template creation steps so that they could troubleshoot if someone fell behind. This paper copy could also go back to the classroom with them to help them guide any students who were absent.

The wifi. We had the school tech supervisor triple-check that all wifi capability was up to full capacity; there’s nothing like 150 Chromebooks in the gym all trying to access the internet at the same instant to foul up plans. Fortunately, the wifi was superb.

This is the slide deck that we used to lead students through the Digital Portfolio creation process: “Creation” presentation in Canva. It contained a little a small section on “Why Portfolios”, but instead of showing that section we had the school principal give the explanation. The rest of the slide deck has succinctly written instructions and screenshots with arrows to project on the screen as we talked students through the steps. As we know, both more ways that we can pass along instructions (visual, auditory, etc), the more likely that they will be effective.

A key to conducting this operation in 20 minutes was having a pre-made, customized Google Sites template, easily available. Read more about the carefully crafted Google Sites template. There are some improvements that I would make to the template for next time, but as a first attempt, it has worked well.

Carefully designed “link catcher” form. This is perhaps the most clever part. What good is a student portfolio if the adults can’t access it? Many students are prone to losing their portfolios or being unable to find it afterwards. Sharing it with their advisory teacher and then submitting both “edit” and “published”’links to a central dashboard has been a very important step in making sure there is a backup plan.

After many iterations, we came up with a Google Form with very specific instructions and images. Students were able to easily navigate to the Google Form by opening a new tab in their browser and then typing a convenient shortlink: bit.ly/ebhslinks. The form was not only a “published link” catcher but asked students to confirm by clicking, “yes”, that they had :

Google Form image helping students know how to find the “Published Home” link to submit

• followed the specific site naming conventions
• shared the site with their advisory teachers
• changed the appropriate share settings
• submitted both and edit and and “published” versions of their links

The “submission” message at the end of the form also served as the students’ exit ticket. They had to show their advisory teacher the form completion message before they could leave the gym and consider their portfolio created.

After 3 days of 150 students per 25-minute sitting, the vast majority of students had a personal, Google Site digital portfolio.

The next step: tracking students who missed the “blitz” and getting them set up with their Google Sites portfolio.

Read about the whole process.

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.

Digital Portfolios at EBHS 2.0

Digital Portfolios 2.0 will be 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. 

7 or 8 years ago, a group of forward-thinking teachers at EBHS proposed and implemented a school-wide blog/portfolio project. Basically, students would all create their site in Edublogs.org and learn how to use it in their mandatory 10th-grade Information Processing class. That meant that the rest of the teachers on staff didn’t need to know how to use or create a website, they only had to provide an activity or content for students to post about on a web page dedicated to their class or subject area.

At the time, our school operated on a few Chromebook carts and much student digital work still happened on desktops in the computer lab. Considering this, it seemed that many bases were covered and that the project was exciting and feasible. There were many steps and considerations from the original portfolio project (1.0) that you can read about here.

Here are some of my thoughts on digital portfolios and student blogging from 2018. It’s now at least 5 years later and the reasons that students need to be able to create and operate a personal digital space are more important than ever.

The 2016 version of this project was well-thought-out, well-planned and scaffolded for success. However, by 2019, the EBHS school-wide blog/portfolio dream was scrapped, having never gained true school-wide adoption or success. There were some very successful micro or class projects where students did amazing digital work with this platform, but overall, the lack of institutional support prevented more widespread success. In this 2016 model, the school leaders allowed and tolerated the project but never championed or even supported the project.

Fast forward to 2023. Students at EBHS all have 1 to 1 Chromebooks. But otherwise, their digital skills, digital citizenship and online academic presence have not progressed much. They use Google Classroom more often than they did in 2016 and probably use Google Docs more often, but their skills at curating (and creating) their own high-quality digital content has generally been minimal.

So you can imagine my excitement last June when the new principal at EBHS, in need of a solution for an adjacent purpose (school-wide exhibitions of learning) asked if I thought school-wide digital portfolios were feasible.

Digital Portfolios 2.0 – Reboot at EBHS

My answer…Yes. And necessary. And practical. And overdue.

So since then, the planning and scaffolding to support 500 students and teachers at varying levels of “buy-in” has been thoughtful, careful and very intentional. Steps and moves and resources in this Digital Portfolio 2.0 project will follow in subsequent posts. Please explore the posts below to follow the process as it unfolds!

Phase 1: Convincing the Adults

Phase 2: The “Template Site”

Phase 3: The “Creation” process

Phase 4: No Student Left Behind

Phase 5: Adding Course Content

Phase 6: Collecting Portfolio links in Google Classroom

Phase 7: Midyear Check in & Tune Up