This past week Pete Pasque came to speak to use about a couple new tools to use in student assessment, e-portfolio's and badges. These two processes really opened my perspective on how we should.could be thinking about student progress and achievement.
In our current school system a student could go through all four years of say English classes only being able to write at exactly the same level. Improvement from year to year is never really checked because teachers don't have access to past assignments and students rarely look back at their old work. With the E-portfolio system there would be a central digital location for all of these kinds of assignments to be held for the entire high school career. This E-Portfolio system that they have in place at Skyline High School is great, students have access to previous years work and progress can clearly be shown throughout. Not to mention that it is really cool that they are able to turn in so many assignments electronically, yay saving trees! This is one great way to emphasis to students that it is important to be able to have proof that they are able to do something beyond just the grade, for future college applications they can not only show that they got an A in their English 10 class, but that they also were able to write and awesome compare and contrast essay.
The next topic that Pete talked about, badging, was a little bit less intuitive to me. I, like most people I would imagine, am most comfortable doing things the way that I have seen them done before. Don't get me wrong, I am not stuck in my ways, but sometimes I need a little convincing. Badging is one of those topics for me, I like the idea of being able to see student achievements and skills simply by checking out the badges that they have received. In some ways it seems like a more accurate account of what a student knows than a grade in a class because quite frankly you have no idea what a teacher covered in a Biology class, it could be totally different from school to school. Badging provides the answer to the topics that were mastered. However in my mind grades mean something, this student really grasped the concept therefore they earned an A and this student has an OK understanding therefore they earned a C. That is how my brain is structured, therefore giving both of those students the same badge is a little hard for me to get my head around. It would mean a whole different understanding of education
While I don't think either of these electronic tools will be put to use in my classroom anytime soon, I think they are well worth another look, and hearing Pete talk made me really think about what it means to organize your digital life. I would love to learn more about all of those topics so that I can do a better job preparing my student's for the future, because I know that I am currently not informed enough to give them the support that they need.
