Proficiency Portfolio Re-design

You need a portfolio for two reasons: to reflect well and look good.

Reflection
Selecting work to go into a portfolio is a metacognitive process that requires you to compare what you have actually accomplished with the desired end. I would like students to do this more frequently than the end of each grading period, and I plan to make portfolio updating at least a biweekly process. To this end, I’ve created a whole page within my newly revamped site template for this reflective process (hint: this should also be a gold mine for Assessment of Student Work “time lapse artifacts” for me to show my fitness as an educator). I want students to see their progress in stages.

On the Reflection page, students will add updates at regular intervals wherein they 1) reflect on what they’ve accomplished recently with respect to each of the three modes of communication and 2) analyze their progress with respect to their personal goals and their proficiency levels. If they’re feeling froggy (and some are downright amphibious in this respect), they could also add what they’ve learned about culture or language structure since last time.

Impression
If I were an employer trying to assess a potential employee’s proficiency in Spanish, I would want to see solid examples of what he or she could do, in context, with explanations of what I was seeing in English. I would not want to sift through links for every single example for every single skill.

I would want the portfolio to be easy to navigate, to hit play and have the evidence right there in front of me without having to download or open anything extra (though it might be nice to have the option of opening extras to ensure consistency).

With that in mind, I set up overview pages by sub-mode. Or rather, I set up a listening page with objectives from Novice Low through Intermediate Low (again, I’ve never taught above Spanish III), and then just copied the corresponding sets of objectives from elinguafolio.org onto pages for each of the other sub-modes. I made an image (as seen above) that basically says “Replace me with one of these cool things!” with the idea that students would now seek to create one or two artifacts that sum up multiple objectives rather than a separate artifact for each objective. I mean, honestly, the best artifacts have always been the ones that combined more objectives than one.

Estudiantes then add the artifact’s title, highlight the corresponding objectives, and voila! Non-Linguafolio-literate audiences get what’s going on with the artifacts. They can link to more artifacts in, say, their Google Drive or blogs, either to fill in unhighlighted objectives or just, you know, to show off.

Oh, and get this: I’m going to take badges to the next level. Using either ClassBadges, OpenBadges, or ForAllBadges, I think, I’m going to set up badges for students to embed and display at the top of their mode pages for a quick way to show off their achievement levels. (I’ll probably use the same rubric, as before, only better because it’s on forallrubrics.com). Also, once they earn higher and higher badges, I’ll have them move their most advanced artifacts and objectives to the top so their audience can not only see their level at a glance of the badge, but see it in action, too, without scrolling.

Finally, to tie it all together, I set up a little introduction section on the first page (which, truthfully, will overlap with speaking at least), just for students to get used to presenting themselves in Spanish early on, but also to knock some proverbial socks off from square one.