Week Four Reflection

My e-portfolio for this class will be the third portfolio I’ve created—though the first one that hasn’t been paper-based. I created a portfolio for my student teaching experience when I was an undergrad, and then I created another during my second year of teaching as part of the certification requirements in Connecticut. While creating a portfolio can be time-consuming, and occasionally frustrating, I think it’s a valuable experience and is helpful for reflecting on your past practices and future goals.

Like I said, however, this is my first electronic portfolio, which will be interesting. I like the idea of an electronic portfolio because of the potential ease in adding to the portfolio, revising and updating materials, and expanding it to reflect future work. I am also working on the e-portfolio for my practicum as a school library media specialist, and it has been an excellent opportunity to reflect upon what I have learned and created over the past year, and also what I would like to do with those skills in the future. I like that it’s something I’ll be able to use professionally, access and update easily, and continue to use to reflect on my professional development.

I think this is one of those instances where adaptation of new technology really does change how something is done, and is demonstrably superior to the old way of doing things. A paper portfolio was a static document; an e-portfolio is dynamic. Of course, a paper portfolio was potentially dynamic, and an e-portfolio can become static, but the mechanism for making it a dynamic document is integral to its form.

As I work on the portfolio I’m learning a lot about how e-portfolios differ from paper-based portfolios, and getting used to using FrontPage, which is a program I haven’t used before. I’m glad we have the templates to use; I’m not sure I could do this from scratch in such a short period of time!

Week Three Reflection

WebQuests were just coming into fashion when I left teaching—well, they were probably in fashion before then, but I had just become aware of how fashionable they were. I didn’t explore them much—they were always on my “To Do” list of things to check out, but I never quite got around to it. So I’m excited to be exploring them now, as it because the great potential they have in educating students and helping them develop critical thinking skills became immediately obvious.

My initial conception of a WebQuest was that it was, essentially, an online treasure hunt—go here, find this answer, then go to the next place to find the next answer—an idea which, frankly, did not much interest me. But in reading more about WebQuests this week I see that my initial ideas were not at all accurate. I know one of the reasons I did not explore WebQuests much when I was teaching was because it seemed just like a doing the same old thing, just with a different format. Now that I’ve explored them a bit more, however, I see their great potential for doing all those things that I struggled to integrate into my teaching—critical thinking, independent learning, higher-order thinking skills. One thing that appeals to me in particular, and that I had been completely unaware of, was that WebQuests are usually performed collaboratively, not individually. My notion of a WebQuest was that students worked on their own computers discovering information—I love, however, that they are collaborative. The collaborative aspect of WebQuests only adds to their appeal for me.

I think WebQuests, when created and used thoughtfully and reflectively, have amazing potential in education. As with incorporating anything new, however, I think the biggest stumbling block will be helping teachers see that this is not an additional burden, but something that can really help them teach. As a Library Media Specialist I hope to be able to work with other teachers to find and implement WebQuests into their teaching.