E-Portfolios using OneNote

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E-Portfolios using OneNote

A number of students already had their E-Portfolios saved into a previous desktop version of OneNote. This had been working extremely well, although at times some of the students somehow saved their e-portfolios into different locations. Part of the reason for this was that we were saving all our work onto the server and although the students had their own saving locations, things happened!! Another reason was that the students share computers (we are not 1 to 1), so they couldn't leave their OneNote E-Portfolio saved onto any one computer.
Some teachers (and students) were becoming frustrated when they couldn't find their E-Portfolio.

Once we had set up Office 365 for the students and they had their own accounts  things became easier. A student could now use any computer, anywhere, and log on to Office 365 to access their work.
After seeing how the OneNote Creator could be easily used to set up Notebooks for students we decided to set up new portfolios using it. 

Steps taken 

1. Using the OneNote Class Notebook Creator we set up E-Portfolios for the students in years 4, 5 and 6. (141 Notebooks were created initially).
It was a breeze to set this up. They were set up as a whole group - it was decided that individual classroom teachers wouldn't be responsible for setting up the class groups, but we would set them up as year groups and then the children would share them with their teachers. Students wedre also free to share with other teachers if they wished. I had the ability to be able to view all Notebooks.

2. We removed the shared pages, as we felt that these were superfluous to what we wanted. 
We weren't looking for collaborative spaces at this stage. We wanted to use the Notebooks as  individual E-Portfolios and felt that the extra spaces were unnecessary and could be confusing to the students (and maybe the other teachers!)

3. We set up the Notebooks to contain individual sections for Year 4, Year 5, and Year 6.
As the students progress through the school they will be able to put the relevant information into the correct Year section. Year 3 students will be introduced to these in 2015

4. The students were then given the link to their individual E-Portfolio Notebook.
The students had to have an easy way of finding their portfolios! The link to the portfolio was shared via email.

5. Also an E-Portfolio site was created, containing a link to My Notebook.
This was just another way the students could find their portfolios

6. A link was also placed on the desktop to link to the Portfolios.

7. Students transferred to their earlier electronic E-Portfolios into their Notebooks.
Generally this went well, although some students had difficulty with video. Once we trained up buddies to help the less able students we were able to more quickly get them all copied over.

8. These were shared with their individual teacher.
They also had the ability to share it with another teacher if required. Teachers wrote comments on the E-Portfolios where necessary.

So where are we at now?

All Year 4,5, and 6 students have their portfolios in varying degrees of completion!  Some teachers successfully shared these with the student's parents during their end of year conferences. At this stage we are not sure what to do with the portfolios of the students who have left at the end of the year.

2015 is going to be a year that all our Year 3 - 6 students finally have their E-Portfolios on OneNote, and are able to access them from anywhere.
We still have to have a discussion about more devices available when the students need/want to access their work. 

Main Issues with using OneNote as E-Portfolios

The main issue I believe is that it isn't easy for the students to share their work with their parents.  I think that this is an area that the OneNote team need to look at - especially in a primary school situation, where students share all their work with their parents, and we rely on the parents to give honest written or verbal feedback.
We aim to have the student, teachers and parents all share in the learning that is taking place, and feedback is an incredibly powerful and important part of this learning.
While privacy and ownership may be more of an issue in a secondary school, I think that there is a case for parents to have the ability to peruse their child's work at their leisure with or without their child, and to have the ability to comment and collaborate.

Another issue that we found was that some of the teachers didn't always allow their students to update their E-Portfolios. We are still working through this issue with the teachers!!

Images from student's E- portfolios