epossibilities: the power of a grassroots approach to student-curated eportfolios in an urban high...

7/29/2019 ePossibilities: The power of a grassroots approach to student-curated ePortfolios in an urban high school

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ePossibilties: The power of a grassroots approach to student-curated ePortfolios in an urban high school

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

IntroductionA year ago, one of Somervilles most beloved and successful teachers sat sandwiched between twostudents, one a senior and one a junior, responding to their barrage of unselfconsciously profferedadvice about how to design a Google Site template for Somerville High School ePortfolios. Thethree labored intensely for three hours, showing they not only understood the concepts ofresponsibility, teamwork, inquiry, and creativity, but also that they could plan and listen to eachother across cultural barriers (of language, class and age). Those 21st century skills were theorganizing 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 couldunderstand, 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 developedways 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 gatesto new kinds of learning and teaching for success. Somerville High School is an urban public highschool with a vibrant, creative school culture which has more than twice the state average of lowincome, African American, Latino, and Asian students, scoring 10-20 percent lower on standardizedexams than comparable districts. The school needed tools to show the extraordinary quality of theirstudents skills.

This chapter describes what ePortfolios catalyzed for students and teachers, in classrooms and theentire 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 behelped 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 atSomerville High School (SHS), just outside of the City of Boston. To understand the emergenceand 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 highstakes testing, now called MCAS (the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System). It alsocalled for School Improvement Councils, which include panels of parents, teachers, administrators,students and community representatives. These panels would review and approve annual SchoolImprovement Plans. The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education calledfor the use of portfolios as an alternative pathway for students with severe disabilities todemonstrate mastery of curriculum standards. At the time Somerville High School decided toimplement portfolios school-wide.


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Unfortunately, portfolios increasingly became a pure formality. The cumbersome quarterlycollection of paper portfolio entries in every subject for every student was coordinated by theGuidance Department. Teachers pointed out that the Portfolios were stored in lonely file cabinetsin 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 wasin urgent need of change! While creating their 2010 School Improvement Plan, the Councilexpanded the definition of a portfolio entry and resolved to computerize this process to makeportfolios live beyond a students graduation. Technology offered the means to make portfoliosmore convenient, inclusive of various media, and transportable to colleges and employers.

A local community education organizer who served on the School Improvement Council saw anopportunity to realize ePortfolios by collaborating with OneVille,2 a community research projectfunded 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 ePortfoliosthat was well received, and the collaborative OneVille ePortfolio research project at Somerville HighSchool began. Groundwork for change was laid through six months of joint planning by theePortfolio project team, the School Improvement Council, and he school principal. This wasfollowed by a yearlong critical participatory design research ePortfolio project involving 12Somerville High School teachers and 25 students purposely chosen to represent a cross section ofthe 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 youbelieve what you know will help you succeed. Samples of work in an ePortfolio shouldconvince others that your story is valid, interesting and worthwhile.

1This list comes from a Somerville High School teacher and student brainstorm in response to the wordportfolio.2The 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 mightenable community cooperation in young people's success. The OneVille research project was based out ofthe Harvard Graduate School of Education, funded through a generous two-year grant from the FordFoundation, and led by Principal Investigator Dr. Mica Pollock.3Paulson, 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) SocialNetworks and Interactive Portfolios: Blurring the Boundaries TEDxASB(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckcSegrwjkA)


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This ePortfolio research used critical participatory design ethnography, a research approachpromoted 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 excellenteducation tool that represents the unique Somerville High School culture andto create conditionsthat 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 andeducational pioneers provided with stipends to explore grassroots-based ePortfolio design using freeand open source Web 2.0 tools. An afterschool setting was used to create a space that was bothinside and outside the school and incorporated a process for seeding ePortfolio leadershipamong teachers and students so that ePortfolios could be implemented schoolwide. The ePortfolioteam deliberately limited their role to observer-participants who elicited and recognized good ideasand helped solve challenges.

Three distinctive characteristics of our high school ePortfolio project were: a community organizingsensibility, 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 agrassroots 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 theirschool. To promote equity and accessibility we resolved to build ePortfolios using only free andopen source technology, software, and platforms. We believed that catalyzing genuine changewould require us to take a patient open source approach, sustain a collaborative effort in whichparticipants conceived, built upon and improved ePortfolios and shared their changes andinnovations with the community. We knew that having teachers and students develop ePortfoliosfrom the ground up (rather than having them apply canned template products) would notnecessarily 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 supportof the Somerville High School headmaster who also recognized that if teachers and students wereempowered in the decision-making, the outcome would not only be significant but also could berevolutionary.

An organizing sensibility focuses on collegeality and relationships as important components ofePortfolio process and use. When we brought the initial group of teachers and students together toorganize an ePortfolio process and product themselves, it challenged their expectation that theywould be told what to do and how to do it. They adjusted and even became assertive, reflecting theirgradual ownership of the whole process from deciding on online ePortfolio platforms to when andhow 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 orhad time. This, they believed, would accommodate the widest continuum of student learning styles,

4Barab, 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.


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from those who could work quite independently to those who needed a lot of assistance andcoaching.

The drop-in sessions were informal. Teachers and students dropped by for as little as 15 minutesor 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 totalk through their concerns about ePortfolios, and for other teachers to learn to enjoy learning fromstudents (who often had more facility with some of the Web 2.0 tools than teachers!). This was alsoan opportunity for students to see each other as wonderful resources as they taught and encouragedeach 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 ePortfoliosand in classrooms. Having each participant choose their own ePortfolio platform produced somefamiliar choices such as Google Sites and Wikispaces, but also led to the discovery of a new multi-media-friendly platform, Posterous,5 that allowed postings via email and text. While many studentscreated 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 programmedanimations and media projects, to highlight multidisciplinary talents that they had not yet had anopportunity to express in or outside of classrooms. When students struggled with what to put ontheir front pages, innovative ideas emerged and spread across the ePorfolios. Some produced digitalcollages with Picnik6 to express their aspirations and others produced a question and answer entrysimilar to those found in popular magazines.7 ePortfolio students also began making suggestions totheir classroom teachers about how to use Web 2.0 tools which led to a math teacher postingproblem solutions online via Blueberry8 and a social studies teacher using online blogs instead ofpaper 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, studentsand teachers continued to experiment. To implement ePortfolios school-wide, teachers came toconsensus that a Google Site template would be useful and one returning teacher from the pilotphase led this effort. Two other pilot phase teachers assumed leadership of the second cohort ofteachers 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/6Picnik is an online photo-editing tool popularly used to create visual Facebook posts:

http://www.picnik.com/ 7Students 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 questionsstudents chose to include surprised us: how do I learn best? Their answers were surprising and teachersfound them fascinating, as well as useful.8Blueberry is a flashback screen recorder that can be used to record tutorials via smartboards:

http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/


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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 VerifiedResume focused on eight skills: responsibility, teamwork, working with cultural diversity, acquiring

and evaluating information, interpreting information, creativity and listening. Teachers and studentsworked 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 andstudent participants that ensued. To everyones surprise, students loved talking about what they didbest using the verified resume as an organizing tool. These conversations became central toePortfolio entry planning. Typically, we looked at the three or four skills that each student scoredthemselves highest on and brainstormed about how they could create entries that demonstratedthose 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 compellingto students, they also made it easy to synergize school subject work across disciplines with out ofschool experiences. For instance, one student included not only her artwork, but also photos of herscience and social studies projects as evidence under her creativity ePortfolio category.

Using constructionism to build more reflection into ePortfolios and into a schoolePortfolio culture

Reflection on learning is widely considered to be a fundamental ingredient in great ePortfolios.10What made our ePortfolio process distinctive and contributed to a culture of opportunity foreducational change was using constructionism to build in an extra layer of reflective complexity andopportunity into both the learning and design process. Constructionism11 says that people learnbest while making things, and for the greatest learning to happen, both the design process and whatis made must be shared in meaningful ways with others. One of the research organizers madesuggestions based on constructionism that were enthusiastically adopted into the ePortfolioprocess.12 The informal nature of the drop-in sessions provided opportunities for students andteachers to share their ongoing design process and insights as they created ePortfolios. At the endof the pilot and second phases, the high school and wider Somerville community were invited to anePortfolio 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

9AVerified 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 skillsnow 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 aconstructionism approach to get underrepresented youth engaged in learning, building and teaching withscience, technology, engineering and math.


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short talks, students came up with themes that best represented their ePortfolios, such as Makingthe impossible possible: Hard work and determination pay off, Outgoing and enjoying life anddiversity: Journey across different kinds of education in Brazil and the United States, and Drivinginto the Future: How my academic, vocational and personal life show a keen interest for automotiveengineering. Having public presentations allowed students to develop confidence using an

ePortfolio to promote themselves. The presentations gave them credibility and recognition in thecommunity and encouraged many stakeholder groups to actively participate and engage in theproject.

Participant stories

We believe that the best research insights about our ePortfolio project can be communicatedthrough participant stories. The following stories weave insights with rich context and communicatesome of the impact of ePortfolios.

Michelle Li, English teacher and ePortfolio project leader, discusses how the project revitalized her connection withteaching 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 thedaily grind of teachering, I lament that I dont have time to do the things I once dreamed I wouldin my life as a teacher. Instead I spend my time in the grind covering the prescribed curriculum thebest I can in the time given with the varied academic backgrounds of my students, creating a papertrail to document incidents that detract from time on learning, responding to e-mails aboutconcussions and other unfortunate mishaps that take away from time on learning, chasing afterstudents and parents for various reasons.

Enter ePortfolios. I can honestly say that ePortfolios allows me to do what I became a teacher to doandwhat 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 andmechanics. 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, findsways to work with others, and is able to tell her unique story of what she does best in front of anaudience.

Take the case of my student, Karina13 whose family are new Bostonians from Central America. As aninth grader, Karina rarely spoke in class and when she did was barely audible. She was earning Dsand Cs in her classes and had an Individualized Education Program. Karina also was sweet andcooperative, and elusive and evasive, all at the same time. In the first four weeks, Karina producednothing 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 ofnothing to show her creativity. Then in week five, she brought in a poem written on her iPod whilestargazing from a hammock on a summer visit to Central America. Karina had never shown thepoem to anyone, and only reluctantly showed it to one of us and we recognized its beauty. This washow Karina found her voice.

13Students under the age of 18 have been assigned pseudonyms.


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We interviewed Karina to elicit an artists statement, cajoling what Karina had never shared with herteachers, peers, or family. Soon Karina found that she could create an original ePortfolio entry todemonstrate her creative expression by recording herself reading the poem aloud with Audacity14and putting together a set of images using Animoto15 to go with it. She spent hours choosing exactlythe right sad violin music as an accompaniment.16

After many recording sessions, Karina had an entry ready for our community ePortfoliopresentation night. As a ninth grader Karina needed to be pushed and prodded to get up in front ofan audience to show her work and was amazed at how her work impressed people. Tellingly, thetheme Karina chose to talk about in her ePortfolio presentation was Its not what you see on theoutside. . . there is more on the inside! A year later, Karina stood with presence in front of scholarsfor an invited ePortfolio project presentation at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society atHarvard University. She blew a number of the gathered scholars away with her confidence as sheshowed her poem to the group and fielded questions from many who assumed she was anexceptional 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 timegave me goosebumps. By all accounts, Karina has just blossomed academically and continues togrow as a reader and writer. I have no doubt her experience in ePortfolios has impacted her abilityto take a standardized test with confidence. It is truly gratifying to have both the goosebumps andthe tangible evidence of a students improved critical thinking and writing skills as a result ofePortfolios.

Social studies teacher and ePortfolio leader Chris Glynn likes how ePortfolios help him know about students beforethey even arrive so he can find ways to engage them. He tells a story about changing and greatly improving a classroomassignment 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. Myteaching philosophy has always centered around the idea of preparing students for the manyimportant 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 SchoolImprovement Council. What seemed to be at the center of this experiment was that students wouldbe taking control of their education and making decisions about what they see as importantrepresentations of who they are and what they think they are good at. What I saw throughout theprocess 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 meillustrate this with a couple of anecdotes.

14Audacity 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 clipsand 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 MP3recording of the tune from a YouTube recording using a free audio capture application(http://www.listentoyoutube.com/).


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One student, Vanessa, who was participating in the pilot phase of the ePortfolio project also was amember of one of my classes on American Government. In this class, we had been studying a uniton the media and public policy, and how the interplay between the media, the public, and thegovernment works. I assigned them a media journaling project, in which they would record theirdaily impressions of media presentation (the howof the presentation, not necessarily the content of

stories alone) by handwriting in a marble composition notebook. They would examine differenttypes of media, analyze the characteristics and styles of news presentation, and hopefully draw someconclusions about what types of sources are reliable for learning something, which are more likely tobe biased, and so on.

After one day of journaling, Vanessa came to me with a suggestion. She asked if it would be all rightfor her to design her own media blog online in which she would present her findings, which shecould also link to her GoogleSite ePortfolio. Instantly, I said, Of course! Not only that, I tookher 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. Ihad students post their blog links to an already established secure school system. What resulted wasa 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 tobe looking at what their children were doing in class. This all came from Vanessa who, thanks tobeginning her own ePortfolio, thought about better and more valuable ways to think about herschool assignments. She truly was at the center of her own education, thinking critically and makingdecisions 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 teachingincreased my ability to engage a student. At the beginning of this school year, while looking over myincoming student rosters, I recognized one name as a student who had participated in the ePortfolioproject the previous year. The first thing I did after that was go straight to his ePortfolio to remindmyself 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 yearbecause 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 learningstyles, I was able to see how unbelievably artistic this student was by viewing the pictures he haduploaded and embedded into his Googlesite ePortfolio. Right off the bat, I was able to tailorassignments that I believed would engage him from the beginning of the course by allowing him tobe artistic in his presentations and projects. Already, his performance in social studies has out-shined his previous years performances. It seems to have given him confidence; the student hascome 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 havean ePortfolio available for allincoming 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

17As 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 thoseplatforms allowed them to post from their smartphones and even via text when they were not near acomputer.


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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 tocreate engaging ePortfolios. My greatest curiosity about ePortfolios was in discovering theirstrengths and limitations for supporting at-risk students. What we found for these at riskstudents was that indeed some were able to dive quickly into the process and thrive. Other moretentative students like Karina, needed a tremendous amount of adult and career coaching beforethey were able to create an entry that sparked and inspired other entries and an impressiveePortfolio. Then, there were still a few at risk students who were unable to find a way to find agenuine spark from their experiences that lit up a path to full ePortfolio success. I believe thatusing some of the Web 2.0 tools we discovered in ePortfolios can help teachers engage at riskstudents 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, Icreated an assignment in which students used Pixton,18 a software with which they create interactivecartoon strips. To my delight, an at risk student who had been very frustrated got engaged and notonly finished the project first but also produced the best cartoon of the class. He put what helearned into the online interactive cartoon in a thoughtful and creative way. For my students, usingPixton 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 exerciseson worksheets!

Al Willis discusses IT aspects of ePortfolios. He describes the qualities, experiences, and teaching strategies that workto support ePortfolio IT.

The best advice I can give about working with the technology involved in ePortfolios is to beresourceful and creative in making the best use of the equipment and tools that are available, nomatter how limited or meager. An effective IT educator needs to be patient, open-minded, andresourceful. He also has to hold back on his role as an expert, help others articulate what theywant to do, and allow teachers and students to experience obstacles and challenges and come upwith their own solutions. Most often, the challenge is to point the student in the right direction witha 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 Ivedone my job well when I am the lastperson a teacher or student asks for help. After all, no onelearns if you solve the problemforthem.

In fact, a person who is a technology coach, doesnt even have to be an IT expert. They just have toprovoke kids to tinker. It helps to be a little bit of a generalist with knowledge about what differentkinds of computers do, how to get content off cameras and flip videos, how to reformat various

18Pixton 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 toalso record voice-overs for their comic strips to enhance learning.


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

ConclusionsFor Somerville High School, ePortfolios presented ePossibilities for telling the story of who youare, 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 studentsand teachers and created opportunities for new technologies to be used in both ePortfolios andclassrooms. Student curation of entries and taking a constructionist approach is what made ourproduct unique and allowed us to tailor ePortfolios and an ePortfolio process to the unique cultureand 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 SirKen Robinson entitled Changing Education Paradigms20 that helped us realize why planning andorganizing ePortfolios using 21st century skills was so important. Sir Ken demonstrated how schoolsare modeled after factory lines and how this structure stifles creativity and innovation. We believethe same is true when ePortfolios are organized in the same subject silos as schools. Organizing by21st century skills empowers students and makes them realize how much they know and havesucceeded even if they did not earn As in Math, Science, or English. It also helps students makeconnections among different subject areas and encourages interdisciplinary learning.

This summer, every incoming 9th grader at Somerville High School began creating an ePortfolio inthe 2011 transition Summer Success program. The students enjoyed showing off their

accomplishments. The teachers were delighted that students understood the 21st century skills andwrote 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 committeehas 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 andsubjects, we proposed that ePortfolios be adopted by advisory groups.

There are a number of indications of our success. OneVille researchers could not be more pleasedthat they have been rendered obsolete as the seeds for leadership are taking ownership for thisproject as planned during the pilot phases. The District Administration and School Committee havebeen convinced of the efficacy of ePortfolios and enthusiastically support school-wide

implementation, as indicated by this excerpt from a School Committee members blog:

19For 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 videocontent so it could be embedded onto ePortfolio platforms.20http://sirkenrobinson.com/skr/rsa-animate-changing-education-paradigms


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This is a great innovation, sparked by Oneville, but really owned and grown by ourdedicated, creative teachers with the impressive thought, time, and effort they have pouredinto 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 herePortfolio to her Common Application. Recently students enacted the transformational powers ofePortfolios at a presentation before the Digital Media and Learning (DML) Working Group at theBerkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. At the conclusion of the event, astudent exclaimed, I think they were really impressed by us! Indeed they were.

21Blog of Christine Rafal, School Committee Ward 4: http://rafalforward4.wordpress.com/

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