Wes Fryer interviews Kern Kelley

This is Wes Fryer's interview with Maine educator Kern Kelley about how students in his school district use iPod Touches, email, and Picassa Web albums to digitize content for their digital portfolios on Google Sites. Kern Kelley's school also gives students their own domain names when they graduate.

Earlier this year, Wes also posted a great article on how his 5th grade daughter digitized her writing folder with a microphone, iPad2 and Audioboo.

Evernote for Intermediate Portfolios

This blog attracts a lot of silent readers. Last November, one of my readers wrote to me with his story of how he was starting to use Evernote for ePortfolios in his grade 3-5 classroom. I am adding a version of the story about this school's experience into my book. Students in the intermediate classrooms (grades 3-5) in the Trillium Charter School (Portland, OR) are documenting their learning using Evernote on desktop computers, iPod Touch 4 (with the built-in camera), the teacher's iPhone and soon an iPad, with the addition of a wireless printer/scanner that can email scanned student work directly into their Evernote accounts. (They use a LexMark Pinnacle Pro 901 All-in-One that will scan paper on both sides... the biggest technical challenge was getting these printers set up, and adding all student Evernote email addresses). The Intermediate teachers have all adopted this process since the first of this calendar year, each adding one-to-three iPod Touch devices to supplement the three or four Free Geek donated Linux desktop computers in each classroom. I saw students choose the device they wanted to use to document their projects, with reflection scaffolded by a Portfolio Artifact and Reflection form that they could complete by hand and scan along with other paper or media.

The teachers assign time to work on Evernote every day, as a way for students to set goals and document their progress toward achieving their goals. On the day I visited, students were able to go to the only lab in the school, to work on their reflections. They preferred doing most of their writing with a regular keyboard, not the tiny keyboard on the iPod Touch, but they used its camera extensively to document their projects. This picture was taken with my iPhone directly into the Evernote app which uploaded to my account on the Evernote website. I was able to download the image from Evernote to my laptop to insert into this blog entry (I didn't figure out whether I could link to the image directly). What I found to be innovative about this process was the seamless way that the students could take a picture of a project with the iPod Touch, which automatically saved it to their Evernote accounts. They could add reflections and tags with either the iPod Touch or with one of the classroom  computers.

The students led parent conferences, and shared their Evernote accounts with their parents. Attached is their Conference Checklist. I also have permission to share part of a letter that was sent home to parents, to explain the use of Evernote. The students tag their work (with required tags plus their own) so that the teacher can easily review categories/collections of work; unfortunately, Evernote cannot be used to provide feedback... the teacher needs to send an email with feedback. The students are being encouraged to use Evernote over the summer if they see something cool (what I call "capturing the moment)!" The real advantage is the simplicity: students write directly into Evernote, and don't have to open a word processor on their home computers, and then copy/paste into a portfolio program. The students are developing "Working ePortfolios" to document learning anytime, anywhere. Imagine what would happen if every student had a mobile device...although having three or four in a classroom with classroom computers and occasional visits to a lab, seemed to work just fine! The students are not developing public presentation portfolios, although they could be shared with their teachers and families; they are documenting their learning and progress toward achieving their goals... and they were engaged and seemed to own the process!

A Device for Every Learner!

On Wednesday, Google announced Chromebook, a laptop computer that will be available to order on June 15, 2011; Price: $28-$33/month for businesses, $20-$23/month for education. I think the price is a little high for education, when looking at a device for every child, but very affordable for mobile labs or for individual families for a 3-year lease that includes all upgrades, maintenance, hardware refresh, and 100 MB 3G access per month. ReadWriteWeb provided an interesting cost analysis of the Chromebook in education. Combine the use of the Chromebook hardware with all of the Google Apps, and the barriers to e-portfolios are coming down. I wonder if my next purchase is a Chromebook ($20x36 months = $720) or one of the Android tablets coming out this summer (for around $500)?

But there are other options for giving each student internet access 24/7, at school and home. In addition to 1:1 laptop programs, there are other mobile devices that are being used in schools. For example, Canby (OR) and Escondido (CA) School Districts provide iPod/iPod Touch devices and/or iPads for student learning.  More schools are starting to explore student owned devices; according to eSchool News, 'Bring Your Own Device' is Catching on in schools.

Ed-tech access is an issue, but students' personal devices are an attractive option to a growing number of districts.

I am doing e-portfolio research this year on the variety of student-owned-or-loaned mobile devices that increase access to creative tools and the web, both from home and school. In addition to "capturing the moment" in image, video, audio and text formats, creating a digital story can be a powerful way to add reflection to a portfolio. The tools are becoming very creative and inexpensive on an iOS device (per my own experience last Christmas break with my iPod Touch); last weekend, the Center of Digital Storytelling sponsored the Blink Mobile Media Challenge:

The idea is to choose a moment to capture images/events, and then write and record a narration, and edit the movie on your mobile device.

Editing Google Apps from iOS devices is still not as easy as with Google's own ChromeOS, but there are many apps that can be used to support various components of e-portfolio development. I will be exploring specific iOS apps for supporting certain aspects of e-portfolio development at a preconference workshop at this summer's ISTE Conference. Maybe by the end of June, there will be more information about  emerging Google Chrome and Android devices.

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Tweets from @dorothyjburt in NZ:
- We are trialling 6 - without the Telco plan - using our own wifi. Lotsa fun
- Weekend story from an @ptengland 6yr old "In the weekend I went to the park and played on the Firefox" Thx SallyV for sharing :)

Audio in ePortfolios

Mobile devices are great at capturing the moment: audio reflection, video clip, text comment. I'm not sure they are good at organizing all of the data into a coherent presentation. It would be interesting to have an app that would show me the videos that I have uploaded to YouTube, or the blog entries I have written, or the audio clips I have stored online.

Audio is the major void in the space. We can use Aviary's Myna to capture and store audio, and give a link or embed code. But I think you need a desktop computer to use that tool. I wonder if Aviary is planning an App? The Aviary tools are now available as a menu in my Firefox browser and can be embedded into GoogleApps. Of course, if the software is based on Flash, it won't work on an iPad. I have AudioBoo on my iPhone (but haven't used it yet... maybe that is the solution?).

Here is are two common situations with a need for easy audio recording and embedding:

• ESL students need to be able to capture speaking samples, to compare their progress over time. When my daughter was teaching English at a High School in Budapest, we used their mobile phones and MP3 players to capture their speaking samples, but never went the whole way and create an ePortfolio that stored all of those speaking samples. I worked with a university in Mexico that was having students use Audacity to record their speaking samples, uploading them to a free storage site, and used Blogger to organize the links and reflections (it was an awkward process).
• Early readers need to capture their oral reading skills. Here is a 2006 Apple paper (PDF) on Language Acquisition with the iPod. Here is Wes Fryer's 2009 blog entry on Kathy Shirley's project on Transforming Reading and Language Acquisition using iPods.

There is a need for a web-based version of using audio this way (requiring just a microphone and Internet connection). I also think we need an easy way to record reflections. Before students can easily write, they can talk. How can we manage all of these audio files in an online repository, all dated and organized for easy retrieval, and embedding into a blog or ePortfolio page? Can it be made easy enough for a Kindergarten student to manage, but still sophisticated enough for adult learners? Just dreaming... and hoping.