So tonight I spent some more time working on my final project. I'm working to implement e-portfolios at the high school level and needed to see how my plans correlated with a piece of software that has been adopted by the school district. The schools are using Career Crusing to manage a number of guidance related tasks like education planning, potential career evaluation and the like. A few members from the guidance department at the high school also belong to the staff development group working on the e-portfolios so it came down to me to see if the two programs could utilize the software and make it dual purpose as students can house portfolios on this site.
While investigating, I was astonished at the multitude of resources available to students. They can access and search jobs, find schools, complete career aptitude tests, keep personal journals, be assigned tasks by an advisor etc. It made me think of it as content management software on steroids because of the reference materials and ready made links and information. The only aspect of the software that I wasn't impressed by was the method for students to collect and catalog artifacts for reflection within the portfolio section. Students are provided with two options - keeping a file cabinet with artifacts or linking to external web pages. Now, while this is probably a fairly well organized system and it prevents students from uploading tons of content into Career Cruiser, it won't allow students to really get the feel for working to create a portfolio that is unique and individual to each. They will also not get the opportunity to learn, use and practice skills like creating hotlinks or embedding elements - both skills that are required by the portfolio groups' plans. Frankly, I think the portfolio portion is completely canned... which means that at a minimum students would house links and files but will more likely mean that we'll have to use some other type of software, like GoogleSites for example, that allows great flexibility in creation yet remains extremely user friendly. Can anyone give me additional resources/tools that would allow students to create their own websites? Free? Without tons of issues due to restriction of email access?
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Ann,
ReplyDeleteYou may want to take a look at Weebly for creating websites. I have only previewed the site so it might be a shot in the dark. It looks like a tool that allows website creation for free. I would agree that Career Cruiser is a great tool with limitations for e-portfolio creation. My school uses Wiscareers, and the limitations are about the same. I would rather have my students create their portfolios using a tool that allows for more creativity or originality. As you have said, maybe Google Sites wouldn't be a bad way to go for this process. On your end, at least you have a familiarity with the tool so it would be easier to design tutorials for others to use. I will keep looking to see if a better tool can be utilized for your purposes. :)
Ann,
ReplyDeleteYour project sounds awesome. I am anxious to see how your district proposal turns out. I think it is an excellent idea. I think Google Sites might be your best bet. It's too bad that Ning is changing. I think Google Sites is the least likely to be "locked out" in the future. I will email you if I come across anything else that could be helpful to you and your project.
Thanks to the both of you. I thought about the "locked out" issue and you're right Ryan - I know Google Docs, those are two of the top two reasons I choose it. Another reason is that I found a way for students to log into iGoogle so they can get to GoogleSites without having to get a gmail account thereby circumventing the email issue. Thanks for your ideas - I'll look into Weebly too!
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