Evernote

Over the past few weeks I've been playing with Evernote.  I've been hearing good things about it for a while, but I was prompted by a colleague in another college to have a look at it.  As I was currently in the process of applying for an increase in my teaching grade, and needed to compile a portfolio of evidence, I wondered if Evernote might be the format I was looking for.

I wasn't disappointed.  I started by creating a few short notes, just to test the water.  I added an attachment or two, and asked our campus Director (who would be reviewing the portfolio) to check that he could see the files.  Once he confirmed that he could, it was full speed ahead.

One of the most useful things I've found about Evernote is the ability to use my smartphone to take photos of all my training certificates.  Having installed Evernote on my phone, I can then upload the certificates with one click.  Now, instead of having certificates all over the place - some one one campus, some on another, some at home - I will take a snap of them as soon as I receive them, upload it to Evernote, and then I'll have a copy of it ready to access whenever I need it.

The other thing I really like is the ease with which I can create links between notes.  This means that my index can point to relevant evidence by simply right-clicking the destination note and then pasting in the hyperlink.

Criticisms are few - currently my notebook seems to take a long time to load up for a visitor - I think this is because there are so many certificates (bragging not intended!) and snaps of my classroom obs and so on - perhaps there's a need for me to optimise the images prior to uploading them (I only did a quick resize).  I also ended up paying for a premium account (£4) - but this was because I had a lot to upload within a short space of time and there are monthly limits.  This is something I plan to avoid in the future as I will upload things as I receive them.

All in all, Evernote is an excellent tool, and one I will definitely be sharing with my students and colleagues.

e-Portfolios

I thought it would be useful to review my experiences of using e-Portfolios for the first time, as last week they successfully went through moderation.

After a Level 1 web design course, where there was a considerable volume of work produced, I decided that it would be more suitable to produce the work as an e-Portfolio.  This would more effectively demonstrate the skills the students had learned, as well as vastly reducing the amount of paperwork to submit.

Moodle

The course was already set up on Moodle, so for each session I added an area to upload the work that had been done.  I also set up all the course criteria so that I could add outcomes to each of the assignments as appropriate.  This took a while as I incorrectly set up one criteria initially and it took me a while to work out how to remove it and replace it with the correct one.

Building content

Early on, I discussed with the class how I wanted the portfolios to work.  I wanted them to create an over-arching website, which would include, in some format, a list of all the criteria which should be covered during the course.  This site would then contain subsites of all the websites they had created during the course, and the criteria list would have links to corresponding evidence throughout the subsites. I suggested that the students add to their over-arching site whenever possible, to avoid having a huge amount of compiling to do at the end of the course.

Completing the Portfolios

In the final few sessions of the course, I got the learners to upload working versions of their final portfolios, and I made suggestions for improvements where necessary.  Some of the portfolios were excellent, and the students had done exactly as asked.  A variety of cross-referencing methods were used.  Several students downloaded the criteria checklist as a Word document (as provided by me), and then made clickable links into the relevant area of their portfolio.  Another student practiced creating drop down menus using CSS, and used the menus as links to all the criteria.  Several others created a new web page at the front of the portfolio, and linked to all the criteria from this.

Moderation site

I then created a moderation website which included a few details about the course, along with a page for each student.  Within each student's page, there was then a link to their portfolio, which was packaged into my moderation site. 

Problems

There were just a couple of students who ran out of time to create their e-portfolio.  One student collated their work into a website, but didn't have any cross-referencing, another two failed to compile their work at all.  However, as all the work was on Moodle anyway, I was able to draw this together into a single folder, and incorporate it into my moderation site. Where evidence referencing was absent, I created the links from a standardised criteria page - and clearly marked this up in red so that any internal verifiers / moderators would be able to see what work was the students, and what I had added.  Even in some of the best portfolios, there may have been the odd cross-reference that was not linked correctly, so I used the same technique here, adding the link but marking it clearly in red.

Conclusion

The final moderation website passed internal verification and moderation without any problems, and the internal verifier commented that the evidence had been very easy to find.  There was a fair bit of work to do on my part in collating the portfolios into one site, but in many ways it was easier than ordering what would have been close to 100 sheets of paper for each student and adding page numbers and cross referencing manually.  Now the site is set up, it should be easier still to repeat the method. I will definitely use e-portfolios again.