Abstract:

In the United Kingdom teachers are trained through a one year Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) university course. Both the subject and professional training take place in university but sixty six percent of the course time consists of practical experience in school for which students are required to keep detailed records. Reflective self-evaluations of their classroom teaching and observations by their school mentors can be used as evidence towards a set of 33 national teaching standards. Alongside reports and grades from the school this evidence is used by university tutors to assess student progress. Assessment requires a clear overview of an extensive range of documentation, not easy to achieve with paper-based documents. University tutors visit students two or three times during the year but rely on electronic communication to monitor student progress.

At The University of Reading's Institute of Education specialist trainee teachers in information technology have experimented with various combinations of Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) based E-Portfolios and Web 2.0 technologies including blogs and wikis. Initially students were required to build their e-portfolio on the University's secure VLE, Blackboard. However, after one year, the next cohort of students were given the option to use any other form of web-based e-portfolio. Some, for example, chose to use Google Sites, others used Moodle. Some constructed portfolios in their own domain. While such environments are generally less secure than that offered by the University, they have the advantage of being faster than most proprietary VLEs, particularly for uploading and downloading documents. For this reason they have been widely preferred by students who are less concerned about the level of privacy or security of their documented school experience.

One of the most interesting challenges was to find an effective way to streamline the process of recording evidence towards the national standards. Before Web 2.0 innovations this was recorded chronologically on a spreadsheet, updated and uploaded periodically to the e-portfolio. The tutor could then use the spreadsheet filter to collate and view evidence for any specific standard. However, when certain blog sites such as Word Press started to offer a tagging facility this opened up the possibility of recording evaluations of teaching and evidence for standards simultaneously. Many students abandoned the spreadsheet and started to record their evidence as daily blog entries which they would then tag to the national standards. The University tutor could then simply click on any given standard tag link to see a complete record of all evidence recorded for that standard. The best student e-portfolios have, not only reflective blog journals tagged to a set of National Standards, but also further extensive use of hyperlinking of documents and files such as lesson plans or audio/video material. This makes the process of assessment quick, efficient and simple and allows the tutor to make important associations between documents which would otherwise go unnoticed. This represents a great advance on the use of paper-based portfolios to gain a holistic view of student progress.

The use of blog tagging, integrated into an e-portfolio, offers great potential in recording and monitoring progress which is likely to have a wide range of applications in educational monitoring and assessment.

Keywords:

Blog, tag, tagging, e-portfolio, monitoring, assessment.