A few weeks ago I left the students in Mrs. Pundt's class to continue working on their reflections for e portfolios. This process of creating e portfolios is time consuming, yet so worth it to build students' meta- cognitive skills. When I left the students I reflected on what we did that first day together and here are a few A-HAs: it's difficult for students to look back at their work and reflect on what they learned from a particular assignment or project; no matter the venue for writing students still need the teacher to model what is expected. Some technical A-Has we had were that due to bandwidth and server in the school, students should not all blog at the same time, it took a very long time for students to load images and write reflections if they were all trying to do it at once on their iPads.
Once we realized how challenging it was for students to look back at work from the beginning of the year to reflect on, Mrs. Pundt decided to have her students do The Marshmallow Challenge and blog about that process including reflections on what they learned from it. This worked well. When I returned to the class they were ready to show me what they had done and could talk to me about the process they experienced in The Marshmallow Challenge, as well as their reflective writing skills!
Since this was an experiment towards the end of the school year, we definitely learned some things so that we can assist teachers in implementing digital portfolios for next school year. The best thing was students took ownership of their learning and were excited to share their work with others