The purpose of this electronic course portfolio assignment is to give you an opportunity to demonstrate the degree to which you have met the course objectives detailed in the course syllabus. It is also designed to assist you in your growth as a reflective teacher and to assist me in my assessment of your progress. A major goal of the University's Professional Education Program is that you become an educator who is able to carefully consider and reconsider beliefs about teaching, learning, and your subject matter; make thoughtful decisions about what and how you teach; and learn strategies for solving problems and decision making you will encounter throughout your teaching career. This type of reflection, research suggests, contributes heavily to becoming an effective teacher. The portfolio is to be prepared electronically in order to increase your knowledge of the appropriate use of technology in education and to give you opportunities to learn and practice using certain kinds of technology that will be productive in your classroom.
Your portfolio should reflect a great deal of your own thinking, writing, and learning regarding the course. It should reflect your effort, creativity, attitudes, knowledges, skills, personal learning goals, and personal interests. It should also be aligned with the course objectives. Specifically, you are to provide evidence of any type you deem appropriate to demonstrate that you have achieved each course objective. The more variety, the better. Please include specific evidence (with the objective in which it fits) indicating that you are prepared in the ten areas in which you will be tested by the RICA.
Some examples of "kinds" of evidence you might include in the electronic portfolio are: written text, pictures (art work), photographs, video clips, audio clips, or multimedia presentations. You may use the Computer Lab to work on your portfolio materials. The graduate assistant in the lab can give you help in: scanning and preparing pictures, preparing sound files, capturing and preparing video files, and preparing multimedia presentations. This portfolio was designed in HTML so that it would be easy for you to cross platforms (use IBM or Machintosh). There is a copy of Netscape Gold 3.0 for IBM, and one for Machintosh, in your packet so that you may use them to create portfolio pages at home. We have chosen Netscape Gold 3.0 because it enables you to switch back and forth from a browse mode to an edit mode, and thus create pages. If you have a program that helps you create web pages on your computer (such as PageMill or Front Page) that you already use and like, you may use it, but be sure that files are saved with appropriate HTML tags. To avoid problems, always save a copy of every file created with a word processor as a text (ASCII) file. If you are using an IBM computer, please access the folder in this packet named "weblearn" before preparing materials.
You are to:
1. Gather, collect and organize your evidence for each objective (some people refer to the evidence in portfolios as "artifacts"). Evidence (or artifacts) may include completed (or extended) notes from class sessions including videos, notes or brief excerpts from readings (texts, handouts, journal articles), lesson plans, other class assignments, and even information from other classes and out of class experiences where appropriate. You may create pieces of evidence (artifacts) specifically for the portfolio. You will have to convert many of your artifacts to an electronic format in order to use them (pictures, pieces of work done by students, papers or notes from courses or articles, etc.)
2. For each objective, please produce an introductory page with an explanation and rationale for your choices of evidence, specifying each piece you chose to submit, what you learned from it and why you chose it--approximately 50-100 words for each artifact. If you wish to cite the same piece of evidence in more than one objective, you may do so, only reference it again in your explanation/rationale for any successive objective and provide a link to the artifact's original location.
3. I encourage you to use a medium other than expository text for as many of your pieces of evidence, and/or explanation/rationale statements as possible, i.e. write a poem, draw a picture, make a collage of images, write or compile song lyrics and record them, create a multimedia presentation, etc. You may also include web addresses (links) to resources you have used/found on the Web.
4. Include a conclusion section (approximately 250 words) in which you reflect upon your overall growth in this course. Some questions you might want to consider while developing this section are:
a. In what ways did compiling this portfolio aid you in clarifying the meanings of the course objectives and help you in evaluating your growth and development in these areas?b. In what ways did compiling this portfolio encourage you to reflect on what it means to assist students in developing reading and writing skills and lifelong reading habits?
c. In what ways did the preparation of this electronic portfolio increase your awareness, expertise and/or interest in using computer technology in your future curriculum development and teaching?