Destination Postcard
After watching and reading the Essential Elements for Digital Citizens, and hearing young students and participants share how they are using technology during the live cast #DigCit conference, I have been completely inspired to change my thinking about digital citizenship and participation. I started this course thinking students needed to be proficient in their technology use to find information and connect with others. Now, I can see they need much more.
I believe our young people need to see themselves as owners and active evaluators of their digital production and consumption. Creation of responsible content needs to become a practice and skill our young people learn. After reading Chapter 7 in Learning Supercharged, the shift from just utilizing and evaluating content to creating and innovating aligns with the highest levels of thinking and understanding in Bloom's Taxonomy.
The destination I hope to see for our young learners will be to have student created online portfolios as early as grade 2, with family access to portfolios from school age on. These student created content portfolios could be shared with one another and a broader outside community as students get older, eventually showcasing growth and dedication. If students chose, they could link their portfolios to an ongoing service project that could include their own destination they might seek at the end of their k-12 career. I believe this would be highly motivating for our students to track their own progress and reflect on their learning in an authentic way, while helping to teach them in a semi-safe context about online etiquette when commenting on another's work or collaborating with someone on a project. Knowing the human behind the ideas as a peer they go to school with, students would grow with technology always bearing in mind the real person behind the words. Responsible discourse would be a school wide expectation, and hopefully become a habit by graduation. Of course, this would be linked to their appropriate developmental level with teachers helping to scaffold what they keep in their portfolios at a younger age.
The first shift towards this venturesome goal would be to find the bright spots. In our school district, students are expected to show evidence of proficiency of VT standards. They are moving towards an online portfolio at the high school level so many are already on board with this idea for older students. Also, as young as 5th grade, students are choosing Capstone projects to follow a particular interest outside the academic schedule.
The bright spots then lead me to the Critical Move, which would be to suggest that each grade level teacher begin to collect 3 pieces of writing (or storytelling in the youngest grades) a year, at the beginning, middle and end of the year. The collection could be kept in a student's file on Google Drive and submitted through a platform like Google Classroom. The writing or storytelling could be done orally, pictorially, handwritten and photographed, or typed. But this specific and attainable expectation could help shift people's minds and alleviate some trepidation surrounding starting this collection task. My hope would be that as students' curiosity and access to new programs and ideas grows, their projects and submissions to this portfolio would become increasingly sophisticated and apropos to their own interests. Our goal, after all as educators, is to create lifelong learners.
It would be challenging to shift this thinking with a staff without being able to see immediate results. We'd have to go through the shift from "best practices" to "next practices". But I believe this would really allow our students not just to have a collection of their work for each year, but to help them see their growth and reflect on their thinking. Perhaps, if we as a faculty become inspired, we could shift towards more interactive content collection tools, such as RSS feeds. No matter what the platform, hopefully as our students grow, they would have increasing opportunities to collaborate with one another, seeing the benefit of sharing ideas and learning from one another's work and content. This will build their capacity to see others' perspectives, gain them empathy, and help them grow as digital consumers, creators, and ultimately citizens.
Rachael, This is a very cool idea. Your specificity definitely directs with sufficient clarity. I can tell you that one of our kindergarten teachers is trying this out this year. She has created digital portfolios for her students and uploads videos to document progress towards learning goals. If there is one thing that motivates my students more than anything it's reminding them where they started. In the fall you were able to read this book, look at the book you can read now! All of that hard work has really paid off! It would be amazing to engage students in this kind of self-reflection using digital portfolios. The prospect of having students consider goals beyond K-12 from an early age could also increase motivation and make it easier for teachers to differentiate experiences based on desired outcomes and interests.
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