Overview — Portfolios

What’s this all about? How should I use it? Why should I care?

Abstract

Team: JoJo Boyle, Mia Drury, and Justin Luo (seniors at Dartmouth College)

Opportunity: Celebrate and share student and teacher work at Woodstock Union High School (WUHSMS) with the rest of the school and greater community

Solution: An online, easy-to-use portfolio system using the popular blogging platform Medium

Benefits: Public display of student and teacher success, engage community members and parents, unlock student voice and choice

Background

Through the Senior Design Challenge class at Dartmouth, we were asked to work with Raphael Adamek and the Windsor Central Supervisory Union (WCSU) to design a way to strengthen the educational experience for teachers and students in the school district. Following the design thinking process, we started with an extensive literature review of best practices in K-12 education, as well as looking through the school and district websites to learn about the specific environment that we would be designing in. Later, we had our first opportunity to visit the school, observe classrooms, and meet with students and teachers.

During that first visit, we were completely surprised by the awesome things going on at WUHSMS. From watching students create amazing projects in their new Innovation Lab, to learning about the various independent studies and internship opportunities that students had in the Community Connection Center, we were wowed. And finally, we were able to speak to six teachers after school. While we asked various questions about what it was like to teach at WUHSMS, we obviously saw a passion for education and student success in each of the teachers.

So we came away from that visit almost speechless.. To be completely honest, we didn’t have the highest expectations for a small school in the rural northeast. But after that visit, we saw so many amazing highlights and numerous opportunities for students that even we wished we had during our time in high school.

Even though there were amazing things happening, we didn’t know about any of it until we stepped into the classroom and observed. And we wondered how many other community members and parents were in the dark as well. So we thought, how might we celebrate and showcase these projects, accomplishments, and classroom activities for the community to see?

So we thought, how might we celebrate and showcase these projects, accomplishments, and classroom activities for the community to see?

Due to circumstances surrounding COVID-19, both Dartmouth and WUHSMS went to remote learning as we returned in the spring of 2020. Our project seemed to dive into uncertainty as we headed into the ideation and prototyping phases. But we saw this jump to remote learning as an opportunity. Instead of focusing on working around the constraints of remote learning, we saw the opportunity to build a online solution that would help WCSU and WUHSMS strengthen their online presence and make a lasting impact on their students and community beyond the walls of the school.

Idea

Our idea is to showcase and celebrate amazing student and teacher work through an online portfolio. After we explored several types of website-building and blogging platforms, we found that the platform Medium was the easiest to learn and allowed users to quickly get started writing.

After exploring the Publication features on Medium, we found that portfolios could be implement both at an individual level, as well as at a collaborative classroom level. Students could create an individual portfolio and share stories about their independent studies or internships, while teachers could create a collaborative publication for their classroom to display final projects and other individual assignments. To prototype our idea, we made mock student and classroom portfolios to visualize our idea and receive more detailed feedback from our stakeholders.

While the majority of the feedback was positive, we heard from several users that they were concerned about how this idea would be carried out, and what resources would be provided to help those who wanted to try it out.

The goal of this Medium publication is to create an online bank of resources to help students and teachers get started in Medium and create portfolios (very meta, yes we know).

Through this publication, we have included resources like video tutorials, getting started guides targeted at both teachers and students, as well as several other resources. We hope that this will provide a foundation for this idea to be enacted in the WCSU and WUHSMS community.