Sixth-grade students at Kyrene del Pueblo Middle School are putting aside paper and pencils to enter the digital landscape of today’s education.
During parent conferences, the traditional teacher-led talks accompanied by binders of past assignments, tests and projects are gone. For this group of about 100 sixth graders, students now lead the conferences, assessing their own work on a computer and toggling through past assignments on a template they developed to track their own progress.
“One of the main advantages of doing the portfolios in a digital format is that you can bring in all of those types of work they’ve done, and observe the whole thing at the end of the year and really see their progress,” Stephanie Leake, technology services specialist for the Kyrene School District, said.
And, the sixth graders didn’t hesitate to start working with new software. Many students are already linking test scores and scanned projects to their pages, surprising teachers with their ability to adapt to the software’s tools.
“The students jump right in,” Leake said. “They don’t feel the anxiety associated with it – they quickly start pushing buttons and navigate through it themselves.”
Students will learn to embed videos of multi-media projects, including a newscast that will soon be produced by the students.
Conor Thorne, a student on the sixth-grade Power Team at Pueblo, said he it was easy for him to develop his portfolio using the software.
“It’s really cool because you get to create your own design,” he said. “I’ve shown my friends, and I can look at all my projects.”
Arushi Dubey, another student on Team Power, quickly linked projects and test scores to her page in the matter of minutes.
“It’s really easy to use,” she said. “I showed my mom the disease project I posted under my science class, and she thought it was awesome.”
Science teacher Becky Reeser said students are beginning to create digital poster-board projects using computers, instead of actual paper posters, along with timelines using the software’s tools.
Reeser is on Team Power at Pueblo, along with teachers Brian Pollard, Yolanda Williams and Jeff Fulkerson.
Together, they implemented the new technology for the first time this year, empowering the students to reflect on their work, Pollard, a math teacher at Pueblo, said.
“All of us came from different teams last year, but we all did portfolios in a unique way,” he said. “I remember saying, there’s got to be a way we can do what we are doing on paper in a digital form.”
Soon after, they contacted Leake who was eager to get the teachers started on the new software that was recently purchased district-wide.
“What this software does is allows you to create a template for the students, and they can attach any type of document, such as Word document, PowerPoint or audio file they created,” Leake said. “So, they’re taking ownership of it, but also they’re seeing work from a variety of classes throughout the year.”
Already the Pueblo kids are becoming more engaged in reflecting on their work and setting goals for themselves, Pollard said.
“They grow up on this and become life-long learners,” he said. “They’re probably more engaged to it than we are.”
Students can show their parents and family members a digital portfolio of their work via a BlackBoard application available on the school’s Web site.
“One of my kids had parents with double conferences and couldn’t come in that evening, so the student brought it home on BlackBoard,” Reeser said.
“That way, they can go through it with grandma and grandpa.”
Some of your readers might like to know that “the software” the students are using is called Share. It is from a company called Tech4Learning (www.tech4learnnig.com/share)