The Idea

Each new student, would be given a school created blog.  This blog would be an e-portfolio system that would consolidates all writing, digital media, and presentations done by the student during his tenure at Worcester Academy.  This blog would be a centerpiece for his work, used as a resume for college applications. 

Each class would have an online portal via Moodle or Netvibes where the feeds for each class would be aggregated along with student comments and pertinent course information and resources.  The student work as well as the course itself becomes transparent.  Not only does this promote the idea of "open education" but it puts the onus on the student to produce quality work as it is in the public domain and will be seen by colleges and potential employers.  


How It Works

Infrastructure

Each 9th grade student would be given a blog via Wordpress Mu.  This would allow the school to manage all of the blogs.  If a blog had to be removed for whatever reason, we would be able to do so.  This will require server space but allows the school to manage all blogs.


E-Portfolio System

All written work composed by the student would remain on the blog and categorized appropriately.  Work from any discipline could be found easily by clicking on the proper category.  There would be a page for each school year.  Within that page all digital media, presentations, or major written assignments would be posted and organized by discipline. 


Organizing

All written and digital media assignments would be posted on the blog.  This would include everything from op-eds, lab summaries, analytical essays, and reflection posts to videos, art, and presentations. 

All work on the blog would be organized to ensure that teachers received relevant work.  All posts and comments would be separated and aggregated using Yahoo Pipes and appropriate tags for each post.  All blog entries would be given a tag related to the work done in the post (e.g. malletbioA or murnaneusstudiesC).  The students would be taught to appropriately tag each post depending upon the content of the post.   Based upon the tags, the pipe would direct posts and comments to the appropriate course portal.


Grading

Not only would the work be sent to the course portal but also to the teacher.  Each teacher would take the feed for their class and put it into his blog reader. A folder in the reader would be created for each class feed so that the work could be separated from other classes. 

There would be appropriate rubrics on how to grade blog entries.  Any longer written assignments could either be put up as a blog post or a pdf of the document could be linked to an abstract summary of the essay. 


Managing The Blogs

We would hold an introduction to blogging at the beginning of each year.  The purpose would be to ensure that students understand the implication of misusing the blog.  The students would learn how the blog is an virtual representation of them and that it is in the public domain which means it can be seen by colleges as well as potential employers.  At the beginning of each year, the students would learn about managing their online presence.  Returning students could help lead the sessions as they teach new students in their grade.  The purpose of these sessions would be to not only learn how to manage their blog but also why it is important to create a professional public representation of their work.  To bring the community of blogs together via a monitored social network, we could use Buddypress. 




Intellectual Property Issues

In order to prevent plagiarism of student work, all blogs would use a Creative Commons license.  If we teach our students about the importance of attribution and sharing work we will not only decrease plagiarism but be practicing the idea of "open education" and ethical digital behavior.  Here are some examples of how this is being used:

1.  George Siemiens (scholar)*
http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/index.htm

His Creative Commons License (posted at the bottom of his blog)
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/

2.  Student 2.0 (blog written by students from around the world)
http://students2oh.org/

Their Creative Commons agreement (again found at the bottom of the page)
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

3.  How To Teach Digital Ethics
http://projectnml.ning.com/page/page/show?id=2085148%3APage%3A1965

4.  Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Media Literacy Education
http://mediaeducationlab.com/code-best-practices-fair-use-media-literacy-education

5.  The Cost of Copyright Confusion
http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/publications/the_cost_of_copyright_confusion_for_media_literacy



*Siemiens wrote a blog post about transparent learning that ties directly to this idea:
http://www.connectivism.ca/?p=122