- A question arose around the role of administration when they sit in during our sub group meetings. We are concerned that administrators can sometimes "take over" discussion when this is a teacher-driven process. Of course, we welcome and invite administration to sit in.
- Questions around students using the multiple programs to create their web sites also came up: what happens if a student has created a web site with Word but another teacher has been working with and is more familiar with Contribute? How is that teacher to deftly help a student? Is there a compatibility problem, if one has created a site with Word and tries to revise with another? Should we have a common program?
- Who is ultimately responsible for checking the content of a student's portfolio? That is, a student may work on it, say, during study in the Media Center without supervision. How do we handle the myriad of potential abuses? Moreover, who has the ultimate responsibility as the student moves from grade to grade?
- What are teachers (in this PLC who are piloting ePorts) actually responsible for? Are we simply responsible for our course-based ePort? Or, are we responsible for the students' templates, too? Shouldn't there be a standardized template?
- We continued to wrestle with issues associated with standardization
- Are there security issues with students bringing files from home? Are there protections from potential viruses, etc.
- While we have learned that our blog usernames are our email addresses, I was still unsure how to log on, especially if one goes directly to the ePort blog.
Last, we agreed we would move the sharing of potential artifacts from a given course to our next meeting, which is on Friday, October 31.
2 comments:
Sounds like you had a fascinating meeting! I think I can respond to the issue of Word vs Contribute. Ultimately the files are all html and it makes no difference which program the student uses. I think they should use what they are comfortable with. We should keep in mind that we are a long way off from figuring out roles of responsibility for the final product and should be focusing on our own course objectives and making sure that we are creating artifacts that students can select for their eportfolio.
And...students last year were encouraged to work on this project outside of class and while I suppose it is possible for there to be abuses, that is true in every educational environment.
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