ePossibilties: The power of a grassroots approach to studentcurated ePortfolios in an urban high school

Susan Klimczak, Chris Glynn, Michelle Li, and Joe Beckmann with contributions from Susan Olsen and Al Willis.

Introduction
A year ago, one of Somervilles most beloved and successful teachers sat sandwiched between two students, one a senior and one a junior, responding to their barrage of unselfconsciously proffered advice about how to design a Google Site template for Somerville High School ePortfolios. The three labored intensely for three hours, showing they not only understood the concepts of responsibility, teamwork, inquiry, and creativity, but also that they could plan and listen to each other across cultural barriers (of language, class and age). Those 21st century skills were the organizing categories for their ePortfolio. The teachers and students lived the skills, knew the skills, and used them collaboratively to solve the problem of producing a template that everybody could understand, use, adapt, and target to college, jobs, parents, and grandparents in almost every country. Working with a sense of collegiality rare between teachers and students, they developed ways to show others at their school how to get the most from the ePortfolio template. It was very funny to see the teacher working so hard to keep up with the advice of his students. Every ten minutes or so theyd all pull back, laugh, and return to the task refreshed. The outcome of their work was part of a novel demonstration of ePortfolios intended to open gates to new kinds of learning and teaching for success. Somerville High School is an urban public high school with a vibrant, creative school culture which has more than twice the state average of low income, African American, Latino, and Asian students, scoring 10-20 percent lower on standardized exams than comparable districts. The school needed tools to show the extraordinary quality of their students skills. This chapter describes what ePortfolios catalyzed for students and teachers, in classrooms and the entire school. Changes have gone viral in the best of ways, with students and teachers, bosses, parents and even some colleges realizing that students know best what they do best, and can be helped to show their best when engaged in this kind of critical reflection.

A perfect storm of opportunity for change

Our ePortfolio project emerged from a perfect storm of opportunity for educational change at Somerville High School (SHS), just outside of the City of Boston. To understand the emergence and success of ePortfolios, it helps to know a little history. The Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 was a signal piece of legislation that called for many changes, including statewide high stakes testing, now called MCAS (the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System). It also called for School Improvement Councils, which include panels of parents, teachers, administrators, students and community representatives. These panels would review and approve annual School Improvement Plans. The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education called for the use of portfolios as an alternative pathway for students with severe disabilities to demonstrate mastery of curriculum standards. At the time Somerville High School decided to implement portfolios school-wide.
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Unfortunately, portfolios increasingly became a pure formality. The cumbersome quarterly collection of paper portfolio entries in every subject for every student was coordinated by the Guidance Department. Teachers pointed out that the Portfolios were stored in lonely file cabinets in a dark room, but no one knows where they are! The word portfolio came to connote stressful noise, anxiety, imposed, static ritual without purpose, no dialogue, lack of communication, for accreditation officials, not for teachers/students/parents, black void, and even, joke.1 By 2009, unsurprisingly, the School Improvement Council recognized that the portfolio process was in urgent need of change! While creating their 2010 School Improvement Plan, the Council expanded the definition of a portfolio entry and resolved to computerize this process to make portfolios live beyond a students graduation. Technology offered the means to make portfolios more convenient, inclusive of various media, and transportable to colleges and employers. A local community education organizer who served on the School Improvement Council saw an opportunity to realize ePortfolios by collaborating with OneVille,2 a community research project funded by the Ford Foundation and based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. A research group from OneVille was invited to give a presentation about the potential of ePortfolios that was well received, and the collaborative OneVille ePortfolio research project at Somerville High School began. Groundwork for change was laid through six months of joint planning by the ePortfolio project team, the School Improvement Council, and he school principal. This was followed by a yearlong critical participatory design research ePortfolio project involving 12 Somerville High School teachers and 25 students purposely chosen to represent a cross section of the student body.

Using ePortfolios to realize educational change

The description of an ePortfolio that we developed together at Somerville High School blends a number of popular definitions:3 An ePortfolio tells the story of who you are, what you know you are good at, and how you believe what you know will help you succeed. Samples of work in an ePortfolio should convince others that your story is valid, interesting and worthwhile.

This list comes from a Somerville High School teacher and student brainstorm in response to the word portfolio. 2 The Somerville High School ePortfolio project was carried out under OneVille (http://oneville.org/), a community-wide multi-layer research project whose goal was to explore how commonplace technology might enable community cooperation in young people's success. The OneVille research project was based out of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, funded through a generous two-year grant from the Ford Foundation, and led by Principal Investigator Dr. Mica Pollock. 3 Paulson, F.L. & Paulson, P. (1994) Assessing Portfolios Using the Constructivist Paradigm in Fogarty, R. (ed.) (1996) Student Portfolios. Palatine: IRI Skylight Training & Publishing; Barrett, H. (2010) Social Networks and Interactive Portfolios: Blurring the Boundaries TEDxASB (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckcSegrwjkA) 2

This ePortfolio research used critical participatory design ethnography, a research approach promoted by anthropologists of education4 that combines critical ethnography, participatory design, action research, and education tool design. The goal for ePortfolios was both to build an excellent education tool that represents the unique Somerville High School culture and to create conditions that increase the potential for ePortfolios to catalyze change in the ways students and teachers teach and learn. To do this, we engaged teachers and students from the school as co-researchers and educational pioneers provided with stipends to explore grassroots-based ePortfolio design using free and open source Web 2.0 tools. An afterschool setting was used to create a space that was both inside and outside the school and incorporated a process for seeding ePortfolio leadership among teachers and students so that ePortfolios could be implemented schoolwide. The ePortfolio team deliberately limited their role to observer-participants who elicited and recognized good ideas and helped solve challenges. Three distinctive characteristics of our high school ePortfolio project were: a community organizing sensibility, a specific 21st century skill set, and a constructionist approach.

Bringing an organizing sensibility to a Web 2.0 project

One of the innovations we infused into the critical participatory design process was bringing a grassroots community-organizing sensibility to the development of ePortfolios using Web 2.0 tools. We trusted teachers and students to make decisions about ePortfolios for themselves and their school. To promote equity and accessibility we resolved to build ePortfolios using only free and open source technology, software, and platforms. We believed that catalyzing genuine change would require us to take a patient open source approach, sustain a collaborative effort in which participants conceived, built upon and improved ePortfolios and shared their changes and innovations with the community. We knew that having teachers and students develop ePortfolios from the ground up (rather than having them apply canned template products) would not necessarily be viewed as efficient and convenient in the particular kinds of ways that administrators often shortsightedly find compelling. What made this approach possible was the visionary support of the Somerville High School headmaster who also recognized that if teachers and students were empowered in the decision-making, the outcome would not only be significant but also could be revolutionary. An organizing sensibility focuses on collegeality and relationships as important components of ePortfolio process and use. When we brought the initial group of teachers and students together to organize an ePortfolio process and product themselves, it challenged their expectation that they would be told what to do and how to do it. They adjusted and even became assertive, reflecting their gradual ownership of the whole process from deciding on online ePortfolio platforms to when and how to meet to build ePortfolios. When the pilot began in October 2011, the first interesting decision teachers and students made was to schedule three 2-hour drop-in sessions each week. Students and teachers would come in for part or all of the drop-in sessions as they needed help or had time. This, they believed, would accommodate the widest continuum of student learning styles,

Barab, S., Thomas, M., Dodge, T., Squire, K., and M. Newell (2004). Critical Design Ethnography: Designing for Change, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 35:2, 254-268. 3

from those who could work quite independently to those who needed a lot of assistance and coaching. The drop-in sessions were informal. Teachers and students dropped by for as little as 15 minutes or as long as the full two hours, not only to work, but also to talk about ePortfolios with each other. This time offered a rare opportunity for teachers to talk across departments, for some teachers to talk through their concerns about ePortfolios, and for other teachers to learn to enjoy learning from students (who often had more facility with some of the Web 2.0 tools than teachers!). This was also an opportunity for students to see each other as wonderful resources as they taught and encouraged each other. Students seemed to truly enjoy developing true collaborative relationships with teachers, and teachers shared their joy. The pioneering, opened-ended nature of participation also led to innovations in both ePortfolios and in classrooms. Having each participant choose their own ePortfolio platform produced some familiar choices such as Google Sites and Wikispaces, but also led to the discovery of a new multimedia-friendly platform, Posterous,5 that allowed postings via email and text. While many students created the familiar kinds of ePortfolio entries to document their accomplishments, others came up with the idea of creating new entries just for their ePortfolios, such as computer programmed animations and media projects, to highlight multidisciplinary talents that they had not yet had an opportunity to express in or outside of classrooms. When students struggled with what to put on their front pages, innovative ideas emerged and spread across the ePorfolios. Some produced digital collages with Picnik6 to express their aspirations and others produced a question and answer entry similar to those found in popular magazines.7 ePortfolio students also began making suggestions to their classroom teachers about how to use Web 2.0 tools which led to a math teacher posting problem solutions online via Blueberry8 and a social studies teacher using online blogs instead of paper journals for a media studies project. This sense of colleageality and cooperation continued after the first phase of the ePortfolio project finished in February 2011. During the second phase, from March through June of 2011, students and teachers continued to experiment. To implement ePortfolios school-wide, teachers came to consensus that a Google Site template would be useful and one returning teacher from the pilot phase led this effort. Two other pilot phase teachers assumed leadership of the second cohort of teachers and students developing ePortfolios. A scheme was devised to allow pilot phase teachers, who were eager to continue with the project, to serve as mentors for new second phase teachers. Some students from the pilot phase also returned in the second phase to mentor other students.

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Posterous is an online content management platform: https://posterous.com/ Picnik is an online photo-editing tool popularly used to create visual Facebook posts: http://www.picnik.com/ 7 Students brainstormed questions together that they could answer about themselves. Some questions had a typical teenaged flavor like what is your favorite music? However one of the most popular questions students chose to include surprised us: how do I learn best? Their answers were surprising and teachers found them fascinating, as well as useful. 8 Blueberry is a flashback screen recorder that can be used to record tutorials via smartboards: http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/ 4

Using a set of 21st century skills to plan and organize ePortfolios

Instead of organizing ePortfolios by school subjects, relegating out of school activities as add ons, the Somerville High School ePortfolios used a Verified Resume tool as a guide.9 The Verified Resume focused on eight skills: responsibility, teamwork, working with cultural diversity, acquiring and evaluating information, interpreting information, creativity and listening. Teachers and students worked together to develop a verified resume rubric that would allow them to self-assess. This tool was useful, but not nearly as generative as the lively conversations between adult and student participants that ensued. To everyones surprise, students loved talking about what they did best using the verified resume as an organizing tool. These conversations became central to ePortfolio entry planning. Typically, we looked at the three or four skills that each student scored themselves highest on and brainstormed about how they could create entries that demonstrated those skills. These conversations became the most effective entry point for ePortfolio building. The eight 21st century skills in Verified Resumes proved not only highly accessible and compelling to students, they also made it easy to synergize school subject work across disciplines with out of school experiences. For instance, one student included not only her artwork, but also photos of her science and social studies projects as evidence under her creativity ePortfolio category.

Using constructionism to build more reflection into ePortfolios and into a school ePortfolio culture
Reflection on learning is widely considered to be a fundamental ingredient in great ePortfolios.10 What made our ePortfolio process distinctive and contributed to a culture of opportunity for educational change was using constructionism to build in an extra layer of reflective complexity and opportunity into both the learning and design process. Constructionism11 says that people learn best while making things, and for the greatest learning to happen, both the design process and what is made must be shared in meaningful ways with others. One of the research organizers made suggestions based on constructionism that were enthusiastically adopted into the ePortfolio process.12 The informal nature of the drop-in sessions provided opportunities for students and teachers to share their ongoing design process and insights as they created ePortfolios. At the end of the pilot and second phases, the high school and wider Somerville community were invited to an ePortfolio presentation event (and pizza party!), where students and teachers gave short talks, displayed their ePortfolios and received comments and feedback from attendees. As part of their
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A Verified Resume is an assessment system tool developed by Dr. Arnold Packer under a regional pilot sponsored by the Kellogg Foundation (www.wideanglemedia.org/mod/pages/display/91/index.php). Dr. Packer was a former Assistant Secretary of Labor and author of the SCANS report, a study that identified and then planned how to assess a range of necessary skills for 21st century employment. The 21st century skills now being promoted in education have a historical basis in SCANS. 10 This link from Helen Barretts ePortfolio resource website provides many sources: http://electronicportfolios.com/reflection.html 11 Originally developed by Seymour Papert at the MIT Media Lab: Papert, S. and I. Harel (1991) Constructionism, New York: Ablex Publishing Corporation. 12 The inspiration came from Bostons Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn program that has effectively used a constructionism approach to get underrepresented youth engaged in learning, building and teaching with science, technology, engineering and math.

short talks, students came up with themes that best represented their ePortfolios, such as Making the impossible possible: Hard work and determination pay off, Outgoing and enjoying life and diversity: Journey across different kinds of education in Brazil and the United States, and Driving into the Future: How my academic, vocational and personal life show a keen interest for automotive engineering. Having public presentations allowed students to develop confidence using an ePortfolio to promote themselves. The presentations gave them credibility and recognition in the community and encouraged many stakeholder groups to actively participate and engage in the project.

Participant stories
We believe that the best research insights about our ePortfolio project can be communicated through participant stories. The following stories weave insights with rich context and communicate some of the impact of ePortfolios. Michelle Li, English teacher and ePortfolio project leader, discusses how the project revitalized her connection with teaching and tells the story of a struggling student who found her voice through creating an entry for her ePortfolio. What happened with ePortfolios has brought me back to Why I Wanted to be a Teacher. In the daily grind of teachering, I lament that I dont have time to do the things I once dreamed I would in my life as a teacher. Instead I spend my time in the grind covering the prescribed curriculum the best I can in the time given with the varied academic backgrounds of my students, creating a paper trail to document incidents that detract from time on learning, responding to e-mails about concussions and other unfortunate mishaps that take away from time on learning, chasing after students and parents for various reasons. Enter ePortfolios. I can honestly say that ePortfolios allows me to do what I became a teacher to do and what the state and school want me to do at the same time! Its very nice if every student reads all the literature, thinks deeply about it, and writes about it using standardized grammar and mechanics. But what matters most to me is that she approaches the world with a curious mind, summons the courage to ask questions even when asking questions doesnt come easily to her, finds ways to work with others, and is able to tell her unique story of what she does best in front of an audience. Take the case of my student, Karina13 whose family are new Bostonians from Central America. As a ninth grader, Karina rarely spoke in class and when she did was barely audible. She was earning Ds and Cs in her classes and had an Individualized Education Program. Karina also was sweet and cooperative, and elusive and evasive, all at the same time. In the first four weeks, Karina produced nothing during drop-in hours at ePortfolios, but she did show up. In her planning process using the 21st century skills self-evaluation tool, Karina scored herself highest on creativity, yet could think of nothing to show her creativity. Then in week five, she brought in a poem written on her iPod while stargazing from a hammock on a summer visit to Central America. Karina had never shown the poem to anyone, and only reluctantly showed it to one of us and we recognized its beauty. This was how Karina found her voice.

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Students under the age of 18 have been assigned pseudonyms. 6

We interviewed Karina to elicit an artists statement, cajoling what Karina had never shared with her teachers, peers, or family. Soon Karina found that she could create an original ePortfolio entry to demonstrate her creative expression by recording herself reading the poem aloud with Audacity14 and putting together a set of images using Animoto15 to go with it. She spent hours choosing exactly the right sad violin music as an accompaniment.16 After many recording sessions, Karina had an entry ready for our community ePortfolio presentation night. As a ninth grader Karina needed to be pushed and prodded to get up in front of an audience to show her work and was amazed at how her work impressed people. Tellingly, the theme Karina chose to talk about in her ePortfolio presentation was Its not what you see on the outside. . . there is more on the inside! A year later, Karina stood with presence in front of scholars for an invited ePortfolio project presentation at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She blew a number of the gathered scholars away with her confidence as she showed her poem to the group and fielded questions from many who assumed she was an exceptional student--which she most certainly is! Just not in the traditional sense. Witnessing this transformation was beyond gratifying. Web 2.0 tools and caring adults helped Karina to demonstrate gifts she had that had not fit the prescribed curriculum of high school classrooms. To see it in action and to witness the young woman Karina grew into in such a short period of time gave me goosebumps. By all accounts, Karina has just blossomed academically and continues to grow as a reader and writer. I have no doubt her experience in ePortfolios has impacted her ability to take a standardized test with confidence. It is truly gratifying to have both the goosebumps and the tangible evidence of a students improved critical thinking and writing skills as a result of ePortfolios. Social studies teacher and ePortfolio leader Chris Glynn likes how ePortfolios help him know about students before they even arrive so he can find ways to engage them. He tells a story about changing and greatly improving a classroom assignment by using Web 2.0 tools as a result of an ePortfolio students request. ePorfolios have radically changed how I approach my classroom practice and instruction. My teaching philosophy has always centered around the idea of preparing students for the many important and difficult decisions they will have to make in their lives and in the world around them. That is why I was attracted to the ePortfolio project when it was proposed at our School Improvement Council. What seemed to be at the center of this experiment was that students would be taking control of their education and making decisions about what they see as important representations of who they are and what they think they are good at. What I saw throughout the process of creating these ePortfolios was that students felt empowered about their own education, and could even affect they way their teachers would approach their teaching practices. Let me illustrate this with a couple of anecdotes.

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Audacity is a free sound recording and editing software (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) that was installed on a laptop so that Karina could take it into a quiet classroom and record her poem: 15 Animoto was a software suggested by an ePortfolio student. Animoto helps people turn photos, video clips and music into videos (http://animoto.com/). Like many Web 2.0 tools, there is a free version. 16 With help from another student and a OneVille IT participant, Karina was able to extract an MP3 recording of the tune from a YouTube recording using a free audio capture application (http://www.listentoyoutube.com/). 7

One student, Vanessa, who was participating in the pilot phase of the ePortfolio project also was a member of one of my classes on American Government. In this class, we had been studying a unit on the media and public policy, and how the interplay between the media, the public, and the government works. I assigned them a media journaling project, in which they would record their daily impressions of media presentation (the how of the presentation, not necessarily the content of stories alone) by handwriting in a marble composition notebook. They would examine different types of media, analyze the characteristics and styles of news presentation, and hopefully draw some conclusions about what types of sources are reliable for learning something, which are more likely to be biased, and so on. After one day of journaling, Vanessa came to me with a suggestion. She asked if it would be all right for her to design her own media blog online in which she would present her findings, which she could also link to her GoogleSite ePortfolio. Instantly, I said, Of course! Not only that, I took her idea to the entire class. The students thought her suggestion about the project was a great one, and all began creating their own blogs17 to analyze media and think and write about media literacy. I had students post their blog links to an already established secure school system. What resulted was a classroom full of students who were creating this living entity that was their own (and on public display to boot!). I began receiving emails from their parents writing about how excited they were to be looking at what their children were doing in class. This all came from Vanessa who, thanks to beginning her own ePortfolio, thought about better and more valuable ways to think about her school assignments. She truly was at the center of her own education, thinking critically and making decisions about what she thought would benefit not only herself, but her classmates as well. Another memorable story about the way ePortfolios have changed how I think about teaching increased my ability to engage a student. At the beginning of this school year, while looking over my incoming student rosters, I recognized one name as a student who had participated in the ePortfolio project the previous year. The first thing I did after that was go straight to his ePortfolio to remind myself about who he was beyond name and year of graduation (the only things that appear on classroom rosters). I felt like I was at a significant advantage right from the beginning of the year because of being able to go through his ePortfolio before he walked into my room in September. Instead of spending a couple of months trying to get to know the students personality and learning styles, I was able to see how unbelievably artistic this student was by viewing the pictures he had uploaded and embedded into his Googlesite ePortfolio. Right off the bat, I was able to tailor assignments that I believed would engage him from the beginning of the course by allowing him to be artistic in his presentations and projects. Already, his performance in social studies has outshined his previous years performances. It seems to have given him confidence; the student has come out of his shell and seen his talents validated to the point where he is proud to show them. Seeing this students progress immediately made me think about how valuable it would be to have an ePortfolio available for all incoming students. What a great thing it would be to have a sense of who your new students are and what they believe is important before the year even begins! By changing
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As with the ePortfolio project, Chris Glynn gave his students a choice of online platforms on which to create their blogs. Some students like Vanessa, used Googlesites. Other students used Tumblr (https://www.tumblr.com/) and Posterous (https://posterous.com/), appreciating the ease with which those platforms allowed them to post from their smartphones and even via text when they were not near a computer. 8

my approach, thanks to the students ePortfolio, I believe I was more able to engage him in history, and allow him to express the content in the way that helped him learn best. Susan Olsen, a Spanish teacher, uses Web 2.0 tools to engage at-risk students. I knew that students who were thriving in school had enough confidence in their own abilities to create engaging ePortfolios. My greatest curiosity about ePortfolios was in discovering their strengths and limitations for supporting at-risk students. What we found for these at risk students was that indeed some were able to dive quickly into the process and thrive. Other more tentative students like Karina, needed a tremendous amount of adult and career coaching before they were able to create an entry that sparked and inspired other entries and an impressive ePortfolio. Then, there were still a few at risk students who were unable to find a way to find a genuine spark from their experiences that lit up a path to full ePortfolio success. I believe that using some of the Web 2.0 tools we discovered in ePortfolios can help teachers engage at risk students in exciting classroom assignments that would serve as such sparks. As a Spanish teacher, I have always been convinced of the usefulness of Web 2.0 tools in the World Languages classroom. Recently, inspired by the success of Web 2.0 tools in ePortfolio entries, I created an assignment in which students used Pixton,18 a software with which they create interactive cartoon strips. To my delight, an at risk student who had been very frustrated got engaged and not only finished the project first but also produced the best cartoon of the class. He put what he learned into the online interactive cartoon in a thoughtful and creative way. For my students, using Pixton was fun and easy, and they enjoyed the satisfyingly professional look and feel of their work. In a word, using Pixton was highly motivating in a new way. It sure beats doing grammar exercises on worksheets! Al Willis discusses IT aspects of ePortfolios. He describes the qualities, experiences, and teaching strategies that work to support ePortfolio IT. The best advice I can give about working with the technology involved in ePortfolios is to be resourceful and creative in making the best use of the equipment and tools that are available, no matter how limited or meager. An effective IT educator needs to be patient, open-minded, and resourceful. He also has to hold back on his role as an expert, help others articulate what they want to do, and allow teachers and students to experience obstacles and challenges and come up with their own solutions. Most often, the challenge is to point the student in the right direction with a hint or a question, or send a student to work with another student who faced a similar obstacle. This builds student confidence and develops a culture of collaborative problem solving. I know Ive done my job well when I am the last person a teacher or student asks for help. After all, no one learns if you solve the problem for them. In fact, a person who is a technology coach, doesnt even have to be an IT expert. They just have to provoke kids to tinker. It helps to be a little bit of a generalist with knowledge about what different kinds of computers do, how to get content off cameras and flip videos, how to reformat various

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Pixton is a sophisticated comic-making software (http://www.pixton.com/). Susan Olsen has had so much success with students that she has actually purchased Pixton for Schools, which enables students to also record voice-overs for their comic strips to enhance learning. 9

sources of video content.19 Being willing to have people watch while you learn is also good. To support the IT needs of an ePortfolio project means being comfortable learning by sitting down with students and teachers and experimenting, because you wont have learned every tool extensively.

Conclusions
For Somerville High School, ePortfolios presented ePossibilities for telling the story of who you are, what you know you are good at and how you believe what you know will help you succeed. And, this can all be done with free and open source platforms and Web 2.0 tools. Taking a grassroots approach really allowed us to build relationships among and between students and teachers and created opportunities for new technologies to be used in both ePortfolios and classrooms. Student curation of entries and taking a constructionist approach is what made our product unique and allowed us to tailor ePortfolios and an ePortfolio process to the unique culture and needs of students and teachers at Somerville High School. When participants met at the end of our formal research, we watched an RSAnimate video by Sir Ken Robinson entitled Changing Education Paradigms20 that helped us realize why planning and organizing ePortfolios using 21st century skills was so important. Sir Ken demonstrated how schools are modeled after factory lines and how this structure stifles creativity and innovation. We believe the same is true when ePortfolios are organized in the same subject silos as schools. Organizing by 21st century skills empowers students and makes them realize how much they know and have succeeded even if they did not earn As in Math, Science, or English. It also helps students make connections among different subject areas and encourages interdisciplinary learning. This summer, every incoming 9th grader at Somerville High School began creating an ePortfolio in the 2011 transition Summer Success program. The students enjoyed showing off their accomplishments. The teachers were delighted that students understood the 21st century skills and wrote sophisticated goal interpretation statements using the template. In the 2011-2012 school year, the Science department is piloting ePortfolios in all Science classes. An implementation committee has been formed to determine the best steps forward for schoolwide implementation in Fall 2012. In the spirit of breaking out of the silo-ed approach of ePortfolios organized by departments and subjects, we proposed that ePortfolios be adopted by advisory groups. There are a number of indications of our success. OneVille researchers could not be more pleased that they have been rendered obsolete as the seeds for leadership are taking ownership for this project as planned during the pilot phases. The District Administration and School Committee have been convinced of the efficacy of ePortfolios and enthusiastically support school-wide implementation, as indicated by this excerpt from a School Committee members blog:

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For instance, students and teachers had video content for ePortfolio entries stored on DVDs and Facebook and it took a little research and tinkering to figure out how to access and reformat the video content so it could be embedded onto ePortfolio platforms. 20 http://sirkenrobinson.com/skr/rsa-animate-changing-education-paradigms 10

This is a great innovation, sparked by Oneville, but really owned and grown by our dedicated, creative teachers with the impressive thought, time, and effort they have poured into it!21 Most importantly, students are benefiting from ePortfolios and using them in practical ways. One graduating senior used his ePortfolio in a university admissions interview. Another linked her ePortfolio to her Common Application. Recently students enacted the transformational powers of ePortfolios at a presentation before the Digital Media and Learning (DML) Working Group at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. At the conclusion of the event, a student exclaimed, I think they were really impressed by us! Indeed they were.

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Blog of Christine Rafal, School Committee Ward 4: http://rafalforward4.wordpress.com/ 11