miércoles, 7 de agosto de 2013

THE USE OF PORTFOLIOS O GOOD WAY TO ASSESS


When I started taking assessment class I did not think that it would be one of the subjects in which I would learn too much about my career. For many teachers assessment is not an important issue, especially for those that are a little bit older. For then assessment and evaluation are the same and both are related to testing. Now I can say that I have a lot of tools or at list I know a lot of information about assessment and in this text I would like to discuss about the use of portfolios in the classroom.

Using portfolios give as a big picture about what are the students are doing. A portfolio is an organized collection of student work designed to represent students' efforts and academic achievements over a period of time. Portfolios are a powerful assessment tool that provide a record of accomplishments and encourage students to reflect on their progress. Students typically take responsibility for organizing their portfolio and selecting the most appropriate content, depending on the purpose of the portfolio assessment task.

There are some things that we as teachers need to take into account, for instance establishing the purpose of the portfolio, it is very important otherwise the learner can fell lost doing something that does not have sense.
Another important thing  that we cannot leave out is the stage in which the teacher gives feedback; of course it is time consuming bur learners need to know about their process, as it is a new way to assess some of them need scaffolding and guidance.

 Students may not engage with portfolios if they are not formally assessed. You may need to consider creative ways of integrating these assessment activities into your curriculum so that students know that they are valued.

So now we have a clear view about the use of portfolios in the classroom, the idea is to put  into practice all this knowledge and start using authentic way to assess our students.

3 comentarios:

  1. You are right Yenny, portfolios are a really interesting and powerful assessment tools to use with our students.
    But there is something that concerns me and is that sometimes teachers don't use it properly. They just want to assign activities to students in order to get grades.
    For example, They just tell students to make a portfolio without receiving any guidelines and even without knowing what a portfolio is.

    Thus, teachers need to have the guidelines of the portfolios very clear to get successful results. We can not skip any step if we want to go through this process, otherwise this exercise wouldn't make sense.

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  2. I agree about using portfolios in our classrooms. I think portfolios is very useful in the process to assess our students. We can know about their learning using this tool. But we as a teachers must have clear the purposes or objectives of using that. We need to explain to our students that through this tool, they can be more aware about their learning. We have to make them feel that at the moment to create a portfolio we are providing them a different way to learn.

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  3. The use of portfolios it is a great way to encourage students' creativity, something that not only them , but teachers can enjoy. As our task is diffuclt to achieve we have to be in the constant search for innovative methods to use during the process, and protfolios undoubtely are.

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