Moodle in English: Electronic Portfolios

Electronic Portfolios

by Tom Kennedy - Thursday, November 27, 2003, 1:00 AM

Hi All,

I am brand-new to moodle but not to Linux and the technologies that it runs on. As a middle school technology coordinator I have had staff ask me about setting up eletronic portfilios of student work.

Specifically, we would like each student beginning in grade 5 be able to login, upload samples of their work in various formats (word, excel, ppoint, inspiration,etc). We want teachers to have access to student work and we want each kid to keep the same account on moodle through the 8th grade.

Staff could then periodically assess students as they move from one competency to another. We plan to assess technology skills using work that grows out of subject areas. The idea being that the kid needn't create a phony document to show that he knows how to set tabs, etc., just submit a writing piece from language arts, etc.

I know that this is possible (acknowleding that it is not using the full capabilities of the moodle) but would like to hear if anyone is doing this yet. If not, any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Re: Electronic Portfolios

by Mike Shields - Thursday, November 27, 2003, 8:45 PM

Tom, I put up a posting the other day, trying to gain information of how I could achieve something similar http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=3808.

I to am in the process of setting up electronic portfolios for NVQs within the UK. There are 13 units within the portfolio, however within each unit we may need to collect (electronically) up to 30 files.

Our staff would then assess students competency from the work they produced, and provide feedback or request further information for the verification process.

Once Ive got my idea running, I will let you have a look

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Re: Electronic Portfolios

by Tom Kennedy - Friday, November 28, 2003, 10:12 AM

Thanks Mike. It sounds as if you're looking to set up something similar to what I have in mind. I will need to do much the same thing but over a longer period of time. I appreciate your willlingness to share your results.

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Re: Electronic Portfolios

by Tom Murdock - Thursday, November 27, 2003, 11:16 PM

Tom,

This sounds like a great idea. Moodle could skin this particular cat a number of different ways.

One way might be to enroll each grade level in a course titled after their graduating year. That way, the course won't change through time. I would choose the topic format for the course.

If you have hundreds and hundreds of kids, you might want to to break down alphabetically by graduating year: 2008 A-F, 2008 G-P, etc. It would be simple enough to add or subtract students from these courses as they move to and away from your school.

Within the course, I'd create a topic space for each year (Topic 1= Work from 2003-04; Topic 2= Work from 2004-05). Hide the off-year topics and the students won't post to the wrong ones, but the teachers can still access the work.

As for storing the files, you have two good options:

1) create specific assignments for each sample format (word, excel, ppoint, etc.) that you want uploaded and stored.

or 2) If you want more than one file uploaded in each sample format, you might create forum activities (where the students can start only one discussion) instead of assignment activities. The advantage to this is that they can reply to their initial posts as many times as they want. i.e. Joey X can say: "I really liked this powerpoint assignment about King Arthur" in a forum post and then he can attach the powerpoint file. This option would also allow other students to view the work of their classmates.

As I'm sure you've realized, the "Activity Reports" for each student will allow quick access to each student's posts. You can also review the reports to make sure that everyone has completed the uploads. One cool feature that your school might pay Moodle to build would be a way to turn a student's activity report into a zipped file that could be saved to a disk, so the kids can burn them to cds and take writing samples off to secondary school...

I'm sure there are some more elegant organizational strategies than the ones I've mentioned, but I think Moodle is the best platform for a project like the one you've described.

Good luck!

-Tom

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Re: Electronic Portfolios

by Williams Castillo - Friday, November 28, 2003, 12:08 AM

Well.. I think this (or some of this) could be achieved by the bookmark add-on I began to write around one month ago (cvs:/contrib/bookmark)... It only needs to have a "public" category and a "for-teachers" category... Well... And to automatically bookmark every assignment/activity a student submit/present. The bookmark was thought to be course-independat so it "should" persist on time.

If anyone wants to keep that going... go for that... We could make a sort of "joint venture" on this.

Will

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Re: Electronic Portfolios

by Mike Shields - Friday, November 28, 2003, 2:51 AM

Will, can you send in *.zip format, will have a look at. I am keen to try anything to develop my project.

Mike.

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Re: Electronic Portfolios

by Williams Castillo - Friday, November 28, 2003, 3:29 AM

Here it is... Fairly alpha... but it has some steps walked...

Let us know how you go on this.

Will

bookmark.zip

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mFolios: Electronic Portfolios in Moodle

by Ger Tielemans - Saturday, November 29, 2003, 8:11 PM

After reading this email I downloaded and installed your bookmarks and must say: It has lots of potential, complements surprise approve big grin

Having the bookmark tool on every page: Would be nice if I have more courses to do and get stuck on a page that I could bookmark that page for my own redo/todo agenda in my privat-zone of my planner/portfolio, but also to send a copy of that bookmark with my comments/questions in the current summary field to my teacher (as a student: default the teacher of this course in a dropdownbox ) or my local Moodle-supporter (as Teacher/designer: default the Moodle-man, dropdown other teachers)
Categories is a good tool to organise all these bookmarks with different meanings in my central bookmark-window:

... another differentation in bookmarks will be a bookmark to a context (the page where I got stuck) or a bookmark to my studentproducts (the candidates for my portfolio and the ones that you later will export to the portfolio resource-area, with a stamp of teacher approval on it?)
... later functions will grow on this window like hide/unhide and moving a bookmark from one category to another
Having a bookmark system that is functioning above the single course level is great! That makes it a candidate for helping the creating of overall portfolios/ efolios
Auto bookmark? YES!! As soon as I (as a student) deliver a product, there could open a form that asks me to "candidate" this product for one/or more competencies in my privat-portfolio-catalog: .... a dropdown list,?
Looking at this list of competencies in your porfolio - flat dorp[downlist,like now the resourcelist opens? - I can fill the chosen form on the spot. (Using also the scales and Rubrics the teacher placed next to the task that ended up in that studentproduct) - or doing it later when I have more time (..I think now...)

Looking at the portfolio you have two different perspectives: the process-view and the result-view. Therefor you need in your portfolio different zones:

Privat zone: the area where the student collects and store ideas and information about his/her WISHED school/university/life career: A modified dictionary for collecting in this area would be a great help. Also a page where the student could make a draft proposal for his wishes/planes. If a student needs help, he could paste here a dialogue with someone else, giving him/her automatic access to this page: trusted relation..

- Inner circle: A student WISHES to be on the other side of the ocean, but BEGINNING to swim is another mental set:
  
  In this zone the student makes (or gets) an outline of todo's on different levels:
  - global for his life/schoolcareer,
  - more specific for next year,
  - details for next moth, this week, tomorrow and NOW.
    (How can this be more simple then this...?!?)

In this zone the student deliberates (journal) starts a dialoge with his mentor (journal/dialgue) with others (forums) and publishes his TODO's.

(Would be real Moodle to let the student checkmark the tools he/she wants to use for his/her mentors and peers..)

Instead of just trust, the student and the school agree in a contract, that especially the course-journals in this portfolio will be closed for everyone, also the teachers (1) with exception of the student himself AFTER THE ENDING OF THE COURSE: after that only the products and certificates count, unless the student chooses to show things in his public portfolio-zones.
Closed-Products can be stored on CD-ROM (with areference in a virtual catolg) to save disc-space?

(1) ...otherwise no wise student will utter his doubts and struggles in his journals. (Sorry for this important sidestep)

Missing here is the simplest form of an electronic webbook:

- - a privatbook module where every student can organise/modify his TOC as the outline of his school career. (schools/universities can give the student an outline or the student must create one on his own and offer for approval?)
  - The student creates/fills pages behind this TOC BUT with the option to reorganise very easy by changing this in the TOC. (Also build in the temporary hide-eye option?)
  - and then fill the pages behind that TOC with opinions thoughts overviews, texts, pictures (easy as in in the forums) and other resources.
- The outer circle is he place where a student can create the public books: public views (= alternative TOCs) that show to that audiance only the pages he wants to show to that group

Later: creating export options to give the student a school/university TOC with all HIS studentproducts on it, sealed with a checkable checksum-seal of the school

Also iCalendar export of bookmarks: id I could create a category called MY TODOs and synchronise this with my external Calendar... wink

Your bookmark approach inspires me, thanks

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Re: mFolios: Electronic Portfolios in Moodle

by Williams Castillo - Sunday, November 30, 2003, 7:30 AM

Glad to see you are inspired...

Unfortunelly, I think I get lost in your post.. What I could clearly see is that you have proposed a three-level privacy settings for every bookmark:

Privacy level 1: For my eyes only.
Privacy level 2: Teachers only (and the owner, of course) with an optional feedback feature.
Privacy level 3: Public.

Also, you want a way to export the whole portafolio to a standard format so it could be downloaded for later use... with an electronic certificate of autenticity that could be checked against the website where it was created (via a checksum of whatever it takes).

Did I miss something?

I think I won't be doing anything of these in the near future, bur it's nice to have a written path in case anyone could advance on this (including me).

Regards,
Will

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Re: Electronic Portfolios

by Tom Kennedy - Friday, November 28, 2003, 10:20 AM

Great suggestions, Tom. Your organizational scheme would work well in my situation. We have about 650 kids in our school who currently save their files on our server organzied in a similiar fashion: GradYear A-L M-Z. Its a format that they are familiar with.

As I beome more familiar with Moodle I will test some of your suggestions. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Tom

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Re: Electronic Portfolios

by Ray Kingdon - Friday, November 28, 2003, 10:04 PM

It may be possible to set this up using the Exercise module. A number of exercises would be set up asking for examples of different competencies. The assessment of each exercise would be suitably focused on the particular competency. The exercise module does allow the student's submission to be any type of file and for them to get feedback on what they've submitted. The teacher can also ask the student to re-submit if they feel the work is not satisfactory, relevant...

I currently use Exercises to get my students to create "phony documents" but that's my problem

Ray

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Re: Electronic Portfolios: Storage Capacity

by Art Lader - Friday, November 28, 2003, 11:01 PM

Hi,

This is something I had hoped to accomplish with Moodle, but my concern is server space. We have about 1,600 students at our school. If even one quarter of them begin to upload artifacts (correct term? not sure), then I think we might quickly exhaust our 200 Megabytes at Moodle.com.

What do you all think about this? Is this not an issue for you?

Regards,
Art Lader
Aiken High School

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Re: Electronic Portfolios: Storage Capacity

by Martin Dougiamas - Friday, November 28, 2003, 11:53 PM

On moodle.com (and most other web hosts) you can always buy more space, but even 1Gb will rapidly get eaten up with that many students and no quota restrictions.

This is one of the things the document management system is supposed to solve (through quotas and management tools).

Meantime, alternatives include setting up your own server with some nice big hard disks, or simply encouraging the kids to set up their own web sites elsewhere (tripod have free space, for example) and link to them from inside the class site.

In fact, this last method is exactly what I promoted with a class of University education students - the good thing about this was that they owned an online portfolio they could show to prospective employers anytime after they left University.

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Re: Electronic Portfolios: Storage Capacity

by Art Lader - Friday, November 28, 2003, 11:56 PM

"The other alternative is to bite the bullet and set up your own server with some nice big hard disks."

Yes, but we really want to stay with Moodle.com. Once you go Moodle.com, you never go back!

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Re: Electronic Portfolios: Storage Capacity

by Paul Duff - Saturday, November 29, 2003, 12:50 AM

We've gone the 'own server' route. Potentially even better performance and larger capacities - plus support via Moodle.com.

Our experience is that the support is second to none - the extremely rare 'undocumented feature' is usually fixed in minutes or hours - an enviable record the commercial houses could only dream of. Martin has no rival.

On second thoughts, maybe we (the community) should keep these facts secret - otherwise there won't be enough of him to go around!!! big grin

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Re: Electronic Portfolios: Exporting

by Art Lader - Saturday, December 27, 2003, 7:31 AM

Is there the possibility that a student's portfolio could be exported as, say, a PDF file or a collection of PDF files? Or that the back-up module could somehow be used to generate a zipped file that would contain the student's work in a bowsable form?

Best regards,
Art Lader
Aiken High School

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Re: Electronic Portfolios: Exporting

by Paula de Waal - Tuesday, October 5, 2004, 1:34 AM

I have been following the discussion about portfolios and i think the moodle module closer to other portfolios applications is the glossary module. With some cosmetic changes it would be a great portfolio tool! You can work at the level of categories, organize works by authors, comment the uploaded files, grade them and have them be graded by peers. The only missing feature, which is "wanted" by many teachers is the possibility to have the standing by flag (unpublished work) held by the author instead of the teacher

Paula de waal

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Exploring Eportfolios

by Augie Ralla - Wednesday, July 18, 2007, 4:28 AM

Hello,

Your comments on eportfolios has caught my attention. Has there been any more advancement from moodle on for portfolio development?

I'm a project manager for a school that is launching e-portfolios in moodle. I'm interested in any further discussion on he newly updated tools that moodle 1.9 and 2.0 have in the near future.

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Teaching with Moodle

Electronic Portfolios