1. education

assessment for learning: use of eportfolios
in teacher education programs
Assoc Prof Glenn Finger
celebrating teachingseminar09
The presentation...
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Celebrate the central importance of teaching
Supporting data:
11% of CSP in Australian Universities are studying in Faculties of Education.
The ‘other’ 89% were taught by those prepared in Faculties of Education.
– Prof Sue Willis, President, ACDE, 2009
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Share some thoughts about ePortfolio possibilities
celebrating teachingseminar09
Our Griffith University vision...
In our teaching, we will offer our students a high-quality
learning experience.
We will equip them to be the global citizens of the future, to
challenge orthodoxies
and create new solutions to shape our global community
positively. We will do this by
providing curriculum that engages with global issues and
perspectives, and by providing
opportunities to integrate learning with work or engagement
with our communities.
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Our guiding principles...
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Our L & T Strategic Plan...
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Something about me...
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Inside the actor’s studio
Originated by Bernard Pivot , the ten questions Lipton asks are:
 What is your favorite word?
 What is your least favorite word?
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What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
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What turns you off creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
What sound or noise do you love?
What sound or noise do you hate?
What is your favorite curse word?
What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
What profession would you not like to do?
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If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear
God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
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What turns me on?
•human purpose of learning
- making connections, relationships
- making a difference, which implies some
change or transformation
•storytelling
- powerful, reflective stories of learning that
inspire
- ‘the road less traveled by’ (Robert Frost)
•creativedesignprocess – especially ‘dreaming’, students as
designers
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The teaching technologies...
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What I tell my students...
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ICT are the digital lubricants of globalisation
There are no future possibilities that can be imagined which cannot be designed
using ICT now
Given the range of technologies available, there has never been a better time to
teach than now
No technology has ever been beneficial – Acknowledgements to Ian Lowe
Adopt a technochoice perspective – determine the relative advantage of the
technologies you choose for particular purposes and contexts – what’s the
educational rationale? – Acknowledgements to Sachs, Russell & Chataway, and to Roblyer
You must be the change - Ghandi
Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great.
You can be that generation - Mandela
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Teacher education...
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Shulman (1986, 1987, 1992) - Model of Pedagogical Reasoning - a cycle of
several activities that a teacher should complete for good teaching: comprehension, transformation, instruction, evaluation, reflection, and new
comprehension.
Transformation. The key to distinguishing the knowledge base of
teaching lies at the intersection of content and pedagogy in the teacher’s
capacity to transform content knowledge into forms that are pedagogically
powerful and yet adaptive to the variety of student abilities and
backgrounds.
Requires:
 Preparation which includes the process of critical interpretation, including
multimedia and hypermedia
 Representation of the ideas in the form of new analogies and metaphors
 Instructional selections from among an array of teaching methods and models and
technologies
 Adaptation of student materials, technologies and activities to reflect the
characteristics of student learning styles
 Tailoring the adaptations to the specific students in the classroom
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TPACK (formerly TPCK)
Mishra & Koehler, 2006
AACTE Committee on Innovation
and Technology, 2008
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Our students? – 2003 audit
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Our students? – 2003 audit
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School-home difference
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Queensland College of Teachers
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Professional standards for teachers...some examples
Note: This course – 1074EPS - relates specifically to all of the following standards. The specific indicators are included to
demonstrate this. The standards which it most relates to are Standards One, Two, Three, Four, and Ten.
Standard One - Design and implement engaging and flexible learning experiences for individuals and groups
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P1.5 identify and use teaching, learning and assessment strategies and resources in which ICT is embedded
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K1.8 ways of identifying, evaluating and selecting teaching, learning and assessment strategies, resources and technology
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K1.9 effective teaching, learning and assessment strategies and resources where ICT is embedded
Standard Two - Design and implement learning experiences that develop language, literacy and numeracy
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P2.4 identify, select and use teaching and learning strategies and resources that build on and support the development of
students’ language, literacy and numeracy skills.
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K2.11 how ICT supports, enhances, enables and transforms language, literacy and numeracy expectations and development
Standard Three - Design and implement intellectually challenging learning experiences
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P3.4 plan and implement learning experiences in which students actively use ICT to access, organise, research, interpret,
analyse, create, communicate and represent knowledge.
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K3.8 teaching and learning strategies that incorporate the purposeful use of ICT by teacher and student
Standard Four - Design and implement learning experiences that value diversity
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P4.6 apply ICT to empower students with diverse backgrounds, characteristics and abilities and enable their learning.
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K4.7 how to use ICT to increase opportunities for learning and address the individual learning needs of students
Standard Ten - Commit to reflective practice and ongoing professional renewal
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P10.4 identify and access learning communities and professional networks
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K10.6 how to access educational research, contribute to learning communities and professional networks, including through
the use ICT, to support professional learning, self-assessment and development
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1074EPS Learning with ICT
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The major assessment
the design and creation of an ePortfolio which has webpages organised
according to:
Professional Knowledge,
Professional Practice,
Professional Values, and
Professional Relationships.
This provides the framework for students to collect, select, reflect,
direct and publish evidence related to the QCT professional
standards throughout their program, as well as the potential for
using this as the basis for demonstrating evidence for acquiring
Education Queensland’s ICT Certificate. The ePortfolio requires
students to demonstrate their ICT capabilities in relation to ICT
Knowledge, skills, and more importantly the curriculum, pedagogy
and assessment application possibilities.
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ePortfolios and assessment
ePortfolios for assessment purposes
– what kind of assessment do we require? (Barrett, 2006)
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assessment for learning and assessment of learning are different
not dichotomous (Matters, 2006)
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ICT enhanced ePortfolio Process
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The major assessment
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ePortfolios
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Purpose and process
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ePortfolio possibilities...
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Institutional ePortfolios
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ePortfolio possibilities...
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Learner Centred ePortfolios
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ePortfolio Possibilities...
Web 1.0 tended to be characterised by the webpage with hyperlinks
 Web 2.0 technologies
- enable linking and exchanging information, data and communication over the web
- involves connections and collaborations between people, and connections
between ideas and hypermedia.
- design the social aspect of the application into the architecture (Kelly, 2007)
- unlike economic theory where the increasing use of a resource results in a
depreciation of its value, the more that a resource is used in the Web 2.0
environment, the greater the value it aggregates (Brickin, 2001, cited in Kelly).
- can “take advantage of and cultivate collective knowledge” (Kelly, 2007, p. 2).
 Connectivism attempts to account for learning in a digital age, where knowledge
is growing exponentially, where new information is being acquired and
reconstituted or remixed, and where know-how and know-what is being
supplemented by know-where (Siemens, 2004).
 Thomas Friedman in his revised version of The World is Flat, “changed his fourth
‘flattener’ from ‘Open-Sourcing’ (Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities) to
‘Uploading’ (Online Communities, Open Source, Blogging, Wikipedia and social
networks)” (Barrett, 2006, p. 5).
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ePortfolios 2.0
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ePortfolios 2.0
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ePortfolio 2.0, used within a paradigm of assessment for learning, has
the potential for enabling students to perceive their ePortfolios as
an “academic MySpace” (Barrett, 2006, p. 8).
With Web 2.0 tools, student work can be posted and feedback
invited (e.g. through blogging), collaboration invited (e.g. through
wikis and Google.docs) and, if necessary, authorship can be tracked,
for accountability.
While commercial learning environment systems such as
Blackboard™ and Open Source such as Moodle provide discussion
forums, blogs and wiki support, a key criticism is that those tools are
limited to the students, instructor and teaching assistants, and
collaborative content needs to be able to connect to course
materials and ePortfolio systems in the online, networked digital
world of the student outside formal education (Zhang et al., 2007).
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an alternative model...LPWS
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“rather than limit people to the e-portfolio model, why not develop
a model providing a personal Web space for everyone, for their
lifetimes and beyond?” (Cohn & Hibbits, 2004, p. 1).
They refer to this as the Lifetime Personal Web Space (LPWS)
Could store searchable content (personal, business, social, and
educational) that was important in a user’s past and will be
accessible for future use, as well as for use in current projects.
The virtual structure of the LPWS could consist of multiple cells
with flexible entry points, allowing internal cells and connections to
external web based courses, mentors, per reviewers and libraries.
The primary user of the LPWS would decide what sections were
public or private, and it would be available anywhere, anytime.
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a Universal ePortfolio...
Tolley (2008) proposes the Universal ePortfolio and identifies the
‘prime directives’ for any ePortfolio must be:
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Portable. It cannot be located in any one institution or embedded within a proprietary
Virtual Learning Environment (VLE);
Personal. It is ‘owned’ by the user and is customisable to the user’s age, stage and style;
Generic. It is not modelled on any particular curriculum delivery system nor content;
Web 2.0. It should be compliant with all generic formats within the application;
MIS-free. It is not ‘hard-wired’ to any institution’s MIS infrastructure;
‘Light’. It is not a permanent repository of all of a user’s files, rather a ‘transit camp’;
Lifelong. Ownership must be maintainable as a continuity, ages ‘5-95’ [Glenn: 5-95 is
insufficient – why not from -100 to the 22nd Century?];
Lifewide. It is capable of being used by all ages and abilities through a wide range of
assistive templates;
Accessible. It must recognise common standards of accessibility in terms of both
outputs and inputs;
Credible. Evidence of any summative assessment must be linked to a secure repository;
i.e. the awarding body or a central MIAP/Minerva archive. (Tolley, 2008, pp. 5-6)
celebrating teachingseminar09
ePortfolios and TPCK
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I think a lot of the problem with the implementation of
electronic portfolios is that they are being implemented
without TPCK. There isn't a lot of knowledge about the
pedagogical content of using portfolios for learning…
(Helen Barrett, Feb 2007)
Glenn’s cautions
 ‘Hoops’ and ‘hurdles’ – just another form of assessment
 Focus on select and reflect
 Avoid designing to a formula – what do I have to do to
pass the course? – consider digital timelines…
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Some reflections...
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Drawing upon my research on ePortfolios, this innovation
transformed the assessment from being traditional printbased to multimedia and hypermedia,
enabled a richer presentation of evidence of students’
deep learning
Positions students to achieve TPCK, QCT standards...
Student evaluations highlighted
the intellectual challenge ePortfolios created, and
many students presented powerful comments about
becoming inspired to teach from their learning
experiences.
celebrating teachingseminar09
Some reflections...
“For me, this course has been an absolute treasure, I started off
thinking, they are kidding right – design a website! After
cursing and grumbling, we started; we made mistakes; we
grumbled some more; we continued; …the final design is ready
now…the road I have travelled to get to where I am with my
web design has been the most stimulating, educational
experience I have had since starting my degree. …thanks for
the challenge and the learning experience, this is precisely why
I want to teach, to offer challenge, stimulation and excitement
– which you clearly set out to do and have attained with me.”
(Student Comment)
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Australian ePortfolio Project
Recommendation 6
It is recommended that academic policy in
higher education institutions recognises the
value of ePortfolio practice as a component of
different pedagogies that enhance the quality
of learning and teaching across the institution.
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Compared with many
other countries such
as the United
Kingdom, United
States of America and
the Netherlands,
Australia is in the
early stages of
ePortfolio practice and
research..
Recommendation 10
It is recommended that the Australian Learning
and Teaching Council adopt a leading role to
foster and support further research into the
educational benefits of ePortfolio practice.
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The hypothetical question...
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If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when
you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
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You have taught thousands to enable them to
improve their life prospects and the life prospects
of others.They are creating a better world...
celebrating teachingseminar09