Oregon+Middle+School+Team+1

Heartless Technology Kevin Connor, Sara Kissling, Kolleen Nesheim, Nate Mahr, Jason Symes, Kim Walker

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What is our goal for the whole project? Need to clearly define. Also how will progress be measured? Set up survey for after next week's SLC conferences for all students, to be repeated next year. Will compare data side to side next year as well as one year later.

1. Initial Discussion surrounding the needs of our building. Ideas centered around student technology and a learning community among faculty. During this initial conversation an anonymous lurker, "A Mom" added her opinions to our discussion. A Mom identified a need for schools to value the whole student and find ways to allow students to express who they were beyond their academic strengths and weaknesses. This pointed us to our schools current SLC Program. These are student led conferences that are run in the spring and are binders that are collections of work from the year.

2. Our primary concerns around the SLC's as they are were the lack of student buy in and the binder is a more of a catalog than a reflection. Our first step was to survey the staff to see what their perceptions of the current SLC setup was. The results of the survey can be found here: http://www.zoomerang.com/ Shared/ SharedResultsPasswordPage. aspx?ID=L24865RDZBMD

The written responses can be found here: []

3. After looking at the responses of the staff we felt that we were heading in the right direction with our idea for a more personalized, reflective, interactive student led conference process.

4. Our list for the goals of the SLC follow:
 * 1) FrontPage - Personalized section - pictures, videos, links, music, activities etc...
 * 2) Class sections - Highlighted Artifacts from each class, include demonstration, one of many reflection options, pic/video, etc...
 * 3) Portfolio - Warehouse for a larger selection of work from each of the classes. This will move with the students as they move to OHS and begin board mandated portfolio maintenance.
 * 4) Public and Private Sections - Allow students to determine what sections would be public and could be commented on by peers, as well as what material

5. Next: Discuss Tools that best meet the goals of the SLC
 * Blogger + Glogster or other embeddable product, VoiceThread, Voki, Video.
 * Wiki -
 * Google Sites -
 * Portfolio Warehouse (sara?) -

6. Set student goals that are specific to 7th and 8th grade for the SLC program.

7. Set up a model for staff demonstration, along with staff expectations for monitoring, scheduling, and training for the new SLC.

8. Line up volunteers to test drive the new process for the 2010-2011 school year.

Best meeting ever. . . Since we are being completely transparent, I would be remiss in my wiki duties if I did not mention somewhere in here that Kolleen totally made the best-ever cinnamon rolls for our meeting this morning. Any future success we may have is probably a direct result of this delicious treat.

Here is a link to the data that was collected during SLCs this Spring.

This is the link to the written comments for our SLC survey. Comments for both parents and students are in this document.
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The problem (and it is a problem) is that parents seem to have taken this as a reflection on how their children performed. . . not as a request for objective information on the process itself. So the results are skewed and not overly useful. For example, one question asked them if they would prefer: a) The current binder presentation is fine [//My inner sociologist is screaming at me right now!//]; b) An electronic version to be viewed on-line; or c) No strong preference [//again, ouch!//]
 * Reflection: **

When faced with this questionare right after their children presented, our proud parents naturally and understanably took this as an opportunity to rave about their child's performance. Therefore, we did not get they type of critical responses that we were anticipating. The students were a bit more forthright about the process, but still did not appear to want to make themselves look bad.

Not sure how this could be done differently in the future, but adjustments to the time/place of the survey would need to be made.

Ship's Log--5/6/10 Egads and drats! After working for hours on compiling YouTube videos for our presentation, I decided to just create my own Blogger site to make sure that the videos were current. GONG! Much has changed (as it does with technology). The folks at Blogger have decided to add an authentication layer that requires users to enter a phone number (they then send a verification code to the phone which users need to punch in to complete the registration process). We will not require students to volunteer their information this way, so it is back to the drawing board to look for a different server that will be more suitable for our e-portfolios.

I guess it would not be an adventure if it all went smoothly, right?!

We are definitely not alone out there. . . . 

Our fearless leader and resident blog addict, Jason, came across this video recently. It is an overview of another Lawson Middle School's drive to institute e-portfolios. Over in Cupertino, California, the intent is the same; however, what they have done here is delinearize (totally just made up a word!) the process by breaking it down into areas of improvement/development rather than have kids upload solely by area of study.

media type="custom" key="6173115"  We fully intend to use components of their project when it comes to our students' reflection process. Imitation is still the sincerest form of flattery, right?

The "How-to's" of Blogging 

Blog-junkie Jason does it again! As we look forward to next year's staff development and students working semi-independently to create their portfolios, it became very clear that we needed to create a warehouse of information containing tutorials and examples of the types of things we are expecting to be present.

This will also serve as a location for schedules, expectations and other process-related news that everyone will need to know as we move forward.

Although we have a good jump on categories and some links to videos, etc., we will definitely be adding to this site as we encounter issues or anticipate questions. This may very well be the most all-encompassing resource known to man. If we ever go public, you may want to join Jason's Google Reader feed for up-to-the-minute additions to the moodle (and any other Wilco-related news).

Props to Lawson Middle School, Cupertino, CA!

Just out of curiosity, we did a little more digging into the Lawson model of e-portfolios and. . . WOW. If you follow the link below, you can see how they have turned the idea of e-portfolios into a huge community event.

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Clearly, they have been at this longer than we have and their school is very technologically advanced. However, more than any of that, the real human component comes through in the way that they have dedicated themselves to making this a really big deal for their kids.

After viewing the site (yes, an entire site just dedicated to "Portfolio Day"), it has impressed upon us the responsibility we have to not just make this something that kids need to do for its own sake. We owe it to our kids to make this relevant, purposeful and something they will be proud of.