Student Ownership in Education - A Reflection

Over the past couple of months, my educational technology journey has focused on assessment and improving student achievement.  Topics explored included:

• formative and summative assessments
• personalized learning
• mastery learning
• digital portfolios
• student self-assessment
• rubrics
• using data to drive instruction
• game-based learning and gamification

Each of these topics has merit as a means of improving student achievement.  The real impact in achievement lies within students taking ownership in their education, but exactly how do we do that?  Based on all I've learned in the past few months, digital portfolios are a must.

A digital portfolio has the power to combine nearly all of the aforementioned topics for improving student achievement.  Alongside the teacher, students can use data to engage in goal setting.  Students and teachers can collect artifacts to document students' personalized or mastery learning pathways.  Our young learners can assess their work using rubrics to create written, audio, or video reflections.  Digital badging could even be housed on an online portfolio.

In the coming school year, I would really like to encourage student investment in their learning through a digital portfolio.  Best practices involve students setting goals and collecting documentation of learning through a portfolio.  This is easily achievable using free online tools such as Seesaw Learning Journal or Google Sites.  In a perfect world, I would love to roll out a school-wide digital learning portfolio that can be kept from year to year to document student progress over time.  

Collaborating with my colleagues, we drafted this sample Google site.  Student photos would be archived on the home page.  Each subsequent page would be tailored to what is most developmentally appropriate to document.  Grade level teams would collaborate on the "must-haves" -  the very least they want to have students include throughout the year.

Sample K-5 digital learning portfolio created on Google Sites.

Right now, teachers at my building are asked to pass on a piece of writing in response to reading to the next year's teacher.  That could be housed on such a site along with a rubric and/or a video/audio reflection completed by the student.  

A digital portfolio has the potential to warehouse:

• student goal setting
• student reflection on goals, achievements, projects, etc.
• work samples to document learning 
• projects students want to "show-off"
• written, audio, or video reflection of work samples
• multi-media projects that are otherwise difficult to share
• digital badges earned 

Let's consider something as basic as reading fluency.  Using a digital portfolio, students could upload a video or audio recording of themselves reading at several benchmark time periods throughout the school year.  After reading, students could listen to themselves and use a grade level rubric to assess their reading fluency.  Documentation of goals set for themselves and/or a reflection could then be included within the digital portfolio as well.  Reading fluency checks are already required.  Students are already doing this work, but the documentation and reflection are not currently part of the process.  Maintaining a digital portfolio adds that essential student reflection and ownership piece to the process that can boost student achievement.  This same process can document any sample of student learning that the school, grade level, teacher, or student chooses to include.

As a bonus, this process increases communication from school to home.  Parents can check in on their student's portfolio at any time. What a powerful tool to engage students in their own growth and achievement as a learner!