Standards Referenced. Artifact-Centered. Personal Bragbook.
In my last posting, Digital Portfolios: Why Do We Do them?, I discussed digital portfolios and how their primary function needs to be to act as personal testimonials about your strengths rather than a standards check sheet to satisfy “the powers that be.”
These are all interesting ideas, but how will your administrator or governing body feel about this? We may want to redefine our portfolios, but what do we do about demonstrating that we have satisfied the standards that we have been asked to address?
Enter the Artifact Matrix:
This tool is designed to bring organization to potential chaos. Notice how the artifacts are listed in the second column followed by 11 columns to the right. Each of these columns correlates with a standard. Notice that it isn’t like a standard-based notebook portfolio where the standards are “front and center.” The matrix allows you to place the artifacts in the center of it all and then align them with the standards.
Based upon the strategy that I suggested for selecting your artifacts to demonstrate your strengths, you would probably see a collection of artifacts that address a specific area of interest. The rest of the artifacts would be ones that the educator used to fill-in the standards that weren’t addressed by primary collection. Unfortunately, the example above doesn’t fit this suggestion, but it wasn’t created when I was advocating this new approach.
If you want to see more about this, you will want to visit our website at www.dpme.org. More specifically, you will want to read about this in the artifact matrix-specific pages on the DPME site.
So we have a strategy for selecting artifacts and organizing them in your portfolio, how should we present the artifact? It’s more than just linking to the actual artifact, you need to provide a reflection about the artifact.
Stay tuned to this blog and we will discuss it in my next posting.
Z
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