Creating Connected Educators with Online Portfolios

Abstract

The authors explore ethical considerations, as well as logistical concerns of online portfolio creation by teacher candidates by examining how the Reading Faculty in one university instituted a cross-course online portfolio that followed students as they progressed through their Master's degree in Teaching (MAT) program. This grassroots online portfolio initiative, while collegial, became a microcosm of technology use in education today where faculty attempted to provide students with a job-seeking tool while also encouraging reflection on their growth in the teaching profession. This tenuous line in an environment of hyper-standardization and accountability left unanswered questions. Faculty worked to transparently examine costs and benefits to stake-holders. This chapter describes how the online portfolio project developed, and offers vignettes that illustrate some of these issues faced by the teacher educators who implemented the project across their courses.

Developing Teachers as Critical Curators: Investigating Elementary Preservice Teachers’ Inspirations for Lesson Planning

“…TEs can help PSTs develop the vocabulary, language, deep thinking, research, problem solving, and collaboration skills necessary to go from being passive consumers to well-informed information producers (Alvermann et al, 2015; Lapp, Fisher, Frey, & Gonzalez, 2014). To encourage this transformation, TEs can converse with PSTs to learn and to understand where they glean knowledge (Dredger, Myers, Sullivan, & Loveless, 2017; Loveless, Griffith, Berci, Ortleib, & Sullivan, 2014). Not only does this conversation support the student-centered nature of what has perennially been considered best practice in education, it is more important than ever due to the availability of online resources, fake news, and biased information (Berkowitz & Schwartz, 2016; Stanford History Education Group, 2016).…”

“…Not only does this conversation support the student-centered nature of what has perennially been considered best practice in education, it is more important than ever due to the availability of online resources, fake news, and biased information (Berkowitz & Schwartz, 2016; Stanford History Education Group, 2016). Researchers have investigated the curation process (Dredger et al, 2017; Loveless et al, 2014), and learners’ access to resources (Hylén, 2006; Kelly, 2014), yet the need remains to develop PST skills in the curation process for online resources.…”