Success Stories
ePortfolio Rewrites the Rules for e-Learning in the UK
The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) advice to learning communities in the UK paints a vision of ICT as a core element of delivering and assisting learning for all UK learners from all parts of society. A clear component of this vision is that each learner should have their own personal learning portfolio online, where work-in-progress, exemplar completed work, and more can be stored and accessed from any connected platform. With this in mind, Wolverhampton City Council and Spider Networks teamed to deliver such a service to learners in the city.
The Issues
Wolverhampton City Council was keenly aware that any service vital to the delivery of core objectives required a strategic approach that engaged the learner at the heart of the service. Ownership was vital. Simplicity, security and customisation would be essential for the continued use by learners. In the schools environment, the varying degrees of ICT skill and the low levels of current parental involvement would need to be addressed for the continued success of any deployment.
The Solution
Spider Networks worked closely with Wolverhampton's Education Authority staff to set clear project objectives. Delivery platforms, software functionality and the ethos behind the service were all established early on. Emerging from these discussions came a web-based application, driven and managed by the learner themselves, with limited teacher viewing access and accessible either via a standard PC web browser or via a bespoke PDA application giving handheld access to the same service.
During beta testing, the application was released to teaching and ICT professionals and further refined to reflect the daily learning experience of students at home and in schools. At all times, the student remained at the centre of the service, rather than the teacher-driven ethos, which normally drives e-learning applications.
At launch, Wolverhampton experienced a dramatic transformation in attitude amongst not only staff, but students and parents too. The success of the service can best be described by Wolverhampton's e-Learning Co-ordinator, Rebecca Orszulan, who says, "A month after the launch, the ePortfolio service has become the service-of-choice for all of our pupils. The pride in their work, and in displaying and showing off their work, that we see in the students has been a revelation. Not only that, but parents have taken the time to write to the school, expressing their delight at being able to see their children's work progress every evening."
Not only have the students taken the service to heart, but they have exceeded the requirements of the curriculum. As Ms. Orszulan explains. "We have been bringing ePortfolio to the students using five standard lessons, and the outcome far exceeds QCA objectives for this age group. Students have flown through the lessons and experienced no problems grasping the technology and how to use it to support their classwork."
Not only have students demonstrated that they can easily take the new technology to heart, they have also generated their own momentum for integrating the full power of their ePortfolio with other services already in place. Without prompting, one student worked to complete work over several days, using ePortfolio to store draft work securely between home and school. When complete, the student used Spider's integrated email service to deliver the finished homework to the teacher. "When word got round the class that this had happened, before we knew it the staff inboxes were filling up with completed homework!" commented Ms. Orszulan.
Asked what ensured this unprecedented success, with over 1400 ePortfolios created and used in the first few weeks, Ms Orszulan is absolutely clear: "Students own the service. Even as teachers we can only look in from outside. The content stored there is their responsibility, their work, and the material that they are most proud of. There is recreation space, homework space, and the customisation options really make it feel like their own home. "
And has the introduction of ePortfolio changed the way the students view life at school? "Absolutely," says Ms Orszulan, "the traditional Show & Tell now happens online, with students emailing in their digital pictures instead of bringing in items. And at our last Worship, a 7 year-old student went to a study site, generated some picture content, copied them across to their ePortfolio and bookmarked the study site, in front of a hall full of his peers!"