Abstract: Two innovations, performance assessment and information technology advancements, provide the prospect for wide-scale use of electronic portfolios as an assessment tool. In a time where national and state standards are recognizing and incorporating technology literacy requirements into preservice teacher education, electronic portfolios offer benefits beyond their ability to easily manage and store data. There is evidence that using hypertext and multimedia tools to create a presentations of one’s competency involves a range of higher order complex thinking skills. Putting the process of assessment in the hands of the student, portfolios produce tangible evidence of a preservice student’s ability to connect theory to practice to create meaningful learning experiences for their students. As technology tools and skills become more common place, and the expectation of technology literacy more universal, electronic portfolios can serve as an authentic assessment tool that provides a rich repository of information about teaching and learning.

Introduction

Portfolios represent the next logical step in applying performance assessment to constructivistic learning theory (Boulware & Hold, 1998; Richards, 1998; Barrett, 1999; Read & Cafolla, 1999; Tichnor & Sipek, 1999). According to constructivism, the learner plays an active role in knowledge building leading to deeper understanding and retention of this knowledge (Bruner, 1986; O’Neil, 1992, Leeman-Conley, 1999). Portfolio assessment models rely on the learner as an active player in representing what they have learned through a purposeful collection and explanation of their work (Wiedmer, 1998). Portfolios offer an on-going and summative documentation of a person’s knowledge, creativity, and personal perspectives.
In 1991-1992, Vermont became the first state to use portfolios on a state-wide basis for assessment of math and writing ability of 4th and 8th graders (O’Neil, 1993) and in 1995 extended this to a results-orientated program approval process for teacher certification, evaluation by portfolio, placing this evaluation in the hands of the institutions of higher education that serve those pre-service students (VISMT, 1995).
As states, districts, and schools are adapting portfolio assessment strategies corresponding problems associated with issues of storage, organization, dissemination, and inter-rater reliability have emerged (O’Neil, 1992; Barrett, 1998). How do we manage all this new information? How do we allow a personalized representation of knowledge yet develop uniform criteria to fairly assess it? How can we facilitate connections and reflections between theory and field experiences? and How can we be assured the learner can present their knowledge to an array of audiences?
Some solutions to these problems seem intertwined with our struggle to define and implement technology literacy standards for pre and inservice educators. (International Society for Technology in Education, 1999; National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, 1997). There is added value in using new technology to document pedagogical competency through electronic portfolios. Electronic models streamline storage, facilitate dissemination, organization, and easy updating of documentation (Wiedmer, 1998). Portfolios can be easily shared for feedback, models distributed to students, and the electronic nature facilitates documentation for research about patterns of what creates a good educator. There is evidence that electronic portfolio construction helps students focus more on the content and connections of theory and practice than traditional paper-based models. Hyperlinking allows the student to connect course work, applications, ideas and themes through a network of designed nodes, assisting them in reflection and enlightenment (Jonassen, 1996). Multimedia features support multi-intelligence theory allowing expression in text, video, animation, and sound (Moersch and Fisher III, 1995). Student’s portfolios can be richer, sharing work otherwise not possible and presenting what they’ve learned and who they are as a teacher in a creative, personal representation. Finally, what better way is there for students to document their technological competence than to create their final assessment using a hyperlinked, multimedia based instrument?

The Portfolio Process

To respond to this 1995 Vermont State requirement for teacher certification, the Elementary Education Program at the University of Vermont encourages students to use the power of multimedia to construct electronic portfolios. Beginning in their first year, students enroll for a required technology course, Computers in the Elementary Education Classroom. In this class students learn: basic computer skills, applications, and discuss technology related issues. One third of the class is dedicated to teaching HyperStudio, the software used for building portfolios. At this stage, students are taught how to use the program’s multimedia and hypertext tools to allow documentation of their work with children, travels, interests, and selected experiences and artifacts from their first year of course work. They are encouraged to select particular products that showcase their learning, and in a caption, provide the context of their document, and justify their selection with a reflective statement. They are taught how to design their presentations to include easy navigation, facilitate the reading of large text fields, scan, and work with digital photographs. They learn how to plan their presentation through story boarding, and how to organize their information with a sensitivity to layout techniques, color, and design.
Barrett (1998) has developed a matrix to help educators decide which portfolio tool meets their needs. These include a range of HTML and multimedia solutions corresponding to the level of technology proficiency and student-teacher control. Our interests were in creating a student-centered model and after exploring a number of programs, we selected HyperStudio. The program is popular in our neighboring schools, easy to use yet provides sophisticated features that offer flexibility for students to control what and how they represent their learning. The program is self-sufficent with built in multimedia tools and a player readily available on the internet in Mac and Window platforms to permit final products to be seen on almost any computer. The program allows for easy importation of text and sound and graphic files from many formats QuickTime video and slide shows can be brought in, animations constructed, and final products uploaded to the internet, saved to a variety of media, or mailed via FTP (file tranfer protocol).
Students’ electronic portfolios are maintained on the College of Education and Social Services’s server for easy access throughout the students’ academic and professional course work. All residence hall rooms are networked with access to the College’s server and a computer facility, The Technology for Teaching Lab. This is a college based lab supervised by a full time technology coordinator and staffed by workstudy students who support faculty and students working on computer based assignments, projects, or exploring technology tools. Most of the workstudy students are pre-service educators and have completed the required computer course and are thus familiar with the applications and student assignments. The lab has scanners, a writeable CD-ROM, and computer with the capacity to convert video movies into digital ones for incorporation into electronic presentations.
The use of HyperStudio to develop teaching materials is a new assignment recently introduced into a third year elementary education course in the inquiry block, an interdisciplinary based methodology course in science, social studies and art. In this assignment students develop a multimedia stack as one activity in a student constructed science center. Students build these around science content, set them up and leave them in their field placement classrooms for two weeks. Science Centers must be self-sufficent with activities and assessments about science content and processes. Creating a multimedia based resource helps preservice students demonstrate their ability to develop grade-appropriate content, organize information in a logical interesting way, and use technology tools to present this to an elementary audience. It also reestablishes student’s familiarity with HyperStudio, preparing them for their senior portfolio experience.
While students complete their internship in their final year of our program, they participate in a one credit portfolio course where they are given specific direction and skills related to assembling their final professional portfolio. At the University of Vermont, professional portfolios must be organized as a text, via themes of practice with student selected documentation that describes them as an emerging teacher. State and Program criteria are located in appendices and cross-referenced to the documentation. Students collect, select, and connect the artifacts. Documentation is captioned to explain the context and relevance of the evidence and invites the pre-service student to reflect about how it translates to a meaningful learning experience for their students. Pre-service students are expected to relate educational theory to practice, drawing upon their coursework, fieldwork, and community experiences to create personal profiles.
Portfolios showcase learning and demonstrate professional competency and electronic portfolios facilitate this process and scope of expression. Evidence includes a rich assortment of artifacts: papers, homework, video, pictures, projects, diagrams, notes, animation, student voices, and music. In constructing their portfolios, students learn from the process and product as well as demonstrate their ability to use integrated technology. Beginning portfolios electronically in their first year, ensures students possess the technology skills they need to succeed as undergraduate students at the university, in their field placements, and as prospective teachers. This serves as a vehicle for infusing technology throughout their college and field placements and begins their documentation of their education and professional competence.

Advantages

Teachers and administrators who have used electronic portfolio documentation have reported they make it possible to portray one’s educational philosophy by helping them summarize their beliefs and attitudes into a compact multidimensional product (Wiedmer, 1998). Electronic portfolios demonstrate organization and presentation skills, facilitate the ability to make cognitive connections between themes, offers multimedia for a rich choice of expressive modes, and serves to demonstrate technology fluency. There is also evidence that in creating multimedia based hypertext presentations, students practice complex thinking and express creativity (Jonassen, 1996).

Management
Electronic portfolio construction offers several advantages over traditional paper-based models. Distribution of portfolios to faculty and potential employers becomes simple with the ability to save to disk, CD-ROMS, and Zip and super disks in both Macintosh and Windows formats. Products can also be uploaded to an internet site or e-mailed to facilitate the ability for graduating students to seek employment in diverse and distant communities. In a study of school administrators’ reactions to electronic portfolios, portfolios were found to be powerful marketing tools during the interview process demonstrating technology expertise, presentational organization, content and pedagogy (Giuliano, 1997). Numerous copies can be easily and inexpensively duplicated, offsetting the risk of loss of the singular paper based format. They are easier to share making it possible for students to see a variety of exemplars and helping students “stand on the shoulders of giants” so they see other perspectives of teaching and learning and challenge their own practices and beliefs. Electronic portfolios are easy to edit permitting a continuity of documentation of growth with the control of distribution in the hands of the student. Yates (1999) reports that substantial revisions involve reflection on course content encompassing processes like reordering and reevaluating, resulting in new insights. If left on a server, assessment can be formative with a stream of faculty-student and student-student interactions that fine tune the portfolio. Electronic documentation also provides a reservoir of data about the teaching learning process that with analysis and organization offers an opportunity to understand what constitutes a good teacher and good teaching.
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Interactive Multimedia
Multimedia refers to communication from more than one media source such as text, audio, graphics, animated graphics and full motion video. (Sharp, 1999). In the past we have made presentations using different media but we had to combine slide projectors, cassette players, video players, and overhead projectors to achieve these effects. The change lies in a combination of all these different media handled by just one machine, the computer. The computer injects a level of interactivity into multimedia permitting an element of input via keyboard, mouse, and voice. Multimedia features allow students to include: sound, graphic, and video components, in addition to traditional textual data. According to multiple intelligences theory, not only do all individuals possess numerous mental representations and intellectual languages, but individuals also differ from one another in the forms of these representations, their relative strengths, and the ways in which (and ease with which) these representations can be changed. (Veenema and Gardner, 1996). Multimedia encourages a richer and more accurate presentation and interpretation of what one has learned. Multimedia presentations are more engaging because they stimulate many senses at a time and many educators believe this is essential when working with today’s video and net generations (Jonassen, 1996). Pre-service teachers have included video snippets that demonstrate portfolio criteria, scanned copies of student work, and voices of children reading. In constructing multimedia portfolios, students are actively engaged in creating representations of their understandings and have a variety of tools to use to make that representation accurate and unique (Jonassen, 1996). Educators who compiled their own portfolios noted growth in their self-confidence, collegiality, and sense of personal empowerment (Wiedmer, 1998). Portfolios materialize as creative personal products that represent a formative and summative assessment of progress as well as a clear picture of creativity, organizational ability, and pedagogical knowledge.

Hypertext and Hypermedia
Normal text is linear, proceeding from beginning to end. Hypertext presents information in a nonlinear fashion, without a predetermined sequence. Barnes (p. 29, 1994) describes it as “interactive reading” because students experience the text as part of a network of navigable relations instead of a linear sequence of ideas. The reader finds the experience more personally meaningful because they have greater control over what is read and the sequence in which it is read. Its organization is not imposed by the author (Jonassen, 1996). Hypertext is more closely related to how the human mind operates, by association, snapping from one item to another creating trails of information, suggested by the association of these thoughts (Bush, 1945). Hypertext usually refers to an environment limited to textual jumps from one chunk of information to another. Hypermedia extends this concept to include additional forms of media that may be linked as well so that text may link to a bird’s song or hear a student read. It may link to a video of a student teaching a lesson or a scanned image of a science test. The hypermedia component fosters connections between course work, concepts, and applications because it allows the individual to designate links between ideas and themes. It cultivates the development of association of content, theory, and practice helping students become thoughtful problem-solvers. Because the architecture of hypertext is open, the same set of data can be organized in many different ways to reflect different conceptual perspectives and orientations that facilitate the production of personalized products. One of the noteable initiatives of the 1990’s is the development of the World Wide Web. To those not familiar with a hypertext retrieval system, this may present a barrier (Barnes, 1994). As authors of a Hypermedia product, students become proficient hypermedia users in “a new kind of literacy prompted by jumps of intuition and association” (Heim, 1993, p.30) and a kind of literacy imperative for an educator to understand and demonstrate.

As a Mindtool
Jonassen (1996) describes mindtools as applications of computers in schools as tools for engaging learners in constructive, higher order thinking activities that help them become self-directed critical thinkers. In designing Hypermedia presentations, students are engaged in complex thinking skills and decision making: evaluating, analyzing, connecting, elaborating, synthesizing and imagining as they conceptualize and design their presentation. Adding hypertext capabilities creates another dimension of organization and interactivity, creativity, and complexity. Electronic Portfolios represent a challenging assignment that engage students in management , research skills, organization, presentation skills, and reflection. They select the multimedia tools they will use and essentially have “carte blanche” in representing what they know about teaching to faculty and potential employers. They must make numerous decisions about what to include, synthesize themes and help the viewer see their constructions. They use the technology to create: diversity and coherence, balance visual with textual, and stillness with movement. Learners are more mentally engaged in developing materials than by studying materials and the diversity of tools enables the student to express abstract concepts with concrete representations. According to Jonassen (1996, p.209), “...Hypermedia is the most compelling and potentially effective of all Mindtools” because of richness of representational forms available in designing with multimedia. The process of using this tool augments portfolio assessment by presenting a learning experience in itself.

Computer Literacy
In using electronic portfolios students are demonstrating their ability to manage their information with a computer, and use some complex applications and sophisticated techniques to prepare their products. They work with different graphic file formats, import data from a variety of applications, perform screen dumps, scan and crop photos, digitize video, create slide shows, and insert sound. HyperStudio has built in hyperlogo scripting capabilities allowing students to include fairly sophisticated programming techniques. Students learn to correctly name and connect their files, save them to a server, disk, or CD-ROM, or e-mail as an attachment or upload them to the internet. They use graphic tools, internet resources, peripheral devices and constantly problem-solve using technology tools to produce tangible evidence of their ability to teach in twenty first century classrooms.
 

Obstacles

There are some obstacles associated with electronic portfolio assessment to consider. Constructing any portfolio is a time-consuming process. Students begin with collecting and labeling artifacts, looking for patterns that express their educational philosophy and then need time to process these into coherent themes. It also takes time to translate all into an electronic format. Photos need to be scanned, videos digitized, and there is a limited amount of equipment available. Students attend to this assignment at the end of the semesters resulting in wait time for some equipment. Portfolios are also time consuming to grade and faculty have to know how to access these presentations and use hypermedia tools to understand the student’s theme development and documentation. Although using a network can facilitate communication and exchange of documents, it can represent some interesting challenges in running software and saving files. Files get corrupted, the system crashes, and data is lost and retrieving and reconstructing it is not always possible.
One must have hardware capable of handling multimedia software with the ability to input and record sound and video. Lots of storage space is also adviseable. Although students begin portfolios in their first year and learn the skills, they forget details and many need to work on them in a supported atmosphere and finally, although this is becoming less of an issue, there are still some schools that do not have the technology to view electronic portfolios.

Conclusion

New technologies have historically helped us do things better, and to do things not possible before. The printing press allowed books to reach the masses and cars enabled easier travel. Technology advancements in terms of the multimedia computer offer an assessment tool more aligned to accepted educational learning theory. Electronic portfolios can serve as an authentic assessment tool that provides a rich repository of information about teaching and learning. Electronic portfolio documentation using hypermedia software offers better management, storage, and distribution with the added value of providing a tool that promotes higher order thinking and creativity. Electronic portfolios offer a formative and summative assessment tool that simultaneously demonstrates technology skill. Putting the process of assessment in the hands of the student, portfolios produce tangible evidence of a student’s ability to connect theory to practice and use new technology tools in the process.

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