Electronic Portfolios with Google Apps

Guest post: Dr. Helen Barrett is a retired teacher educator, an independent researcher, and international trainer/consultant on electronic portfolios and digital storytelling in education. This year, she is writing a book about using Web 2.0 tools to create Interactive Portfolios.

In schools and colleges across the world, students are developing "E-Portfolios" which include digital collections and reflections on their work, created for a wide variety of purposes. According to this website, "An e-portfolio is a learner-driven collection of digital objects demonstrating experiences, achievements and evidence of learning. E-portfolios provide learners with a structured way of recording their learning experiences... and can include a range of digital evidence such as audio, video, photographs and blogs."

An e-portfolio is created from many small, inter-connected pieces. Google's suite of web-based products offers a rich environment for creating e-portfolios, which incorporates several different elements and tools, depending on your purpose:
  • "E-Portfolios for Learning" provide an environment to reflect about your learning, telling your own story of growth over time. These working portfolios are often structured as journals or blogs where you can include samples of your work along with personal reflections. (This is my Blogger blog, where I document my activities, achievements, and reflections... my personal learning environment.)
  • "E-Portfolios for Personal Branding and Self-Marketing" let you develop a "resume on steroids" for showcasing skills and samples of your best work to potential employers, customers, or graduate schools. (This is my Google Site, set up with my own domain name in Google Apps, highlighting my professional achievements.)
  • "E-Portfolios for Assessment/Accountability" are used by educational institutions to document achievement, sometimes replacing or supplementing standardized tests, or more traditional forms of evaluation. (I don't have an example, because many of these highly structured portfolios are behind passwords and most universities use customized systems for this purpose.)
If you are interested in creating an e-portfolio for one of these purposes, here is a recommended process:
  • Begin with a working portfolio, that could be as simple as a reflective journal or blog in Blogger, the Announcements page type in Google Sites, or even a Google Docs document set up as a diary.
  • Using several Google tools, collect digital documents that represent your best or typical work:
    • Google Docs provides a great environment for developing and storing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations as well as PDFs. Google Docs also lets you share your work with others for commenting and feedback.
    • Share videos and images using YouTube and Picasa.
    • Upload other file types as attachments in Google Sites.
  • To create a more structured presentation of your work for a particular audience, select certain pieces to go into a more tailored portfolio/website. Google Sites can help you organize your work with a reflective narrative, telling your story while linking to supporting evidence (selected entries from your journal/blog and links to files in your digital archive) to meet your intended purpose. Here is a high school portfolio where a student documents his senior project.
To learn more about creating electronic portfolios using Google Docs and Google Sites, see a Google Site I set up to support e-portfolio development in both K-12 schools and Higher Education. As part of my research for my book, I am looking for K-12 teachers who want to create e-portfolios using GoogleApps for Education. Interested? Email me.

Counting Down to NFL Season? Let Google Docs Count for You.

Guest post: Beah Burger, a member of the Search Quality team here at Google, has an affinity for using lesser-known Google spreadsheet functions to solve everyday problems. A couple of months ago, Beah wrote in her personal blog about how her favorite Google spreadsheet function, GoogleLookup, helped her create a list of song recommendations for her friends' wedding. We asked Beah to write a guest post about another off-the-beaten-path use of Google spreadsheets.

Three years ago I packed up my sub-compact car, bid farewell to teary-eyed parents, and drove more 3,000 miles from Philadelphia to San Francisco. California is great, but I miss my hometown dearly. My coworkers -- most of whom think I'm "obsessed" -- allow me to hang a Pennsylvania state flag and various Philadelphia sports posters around the office. But I feel most connected with my hometown through my fanatical devotion to the Philadelphia Eagles.

Although Northern California weather doesn't really recognize the existence of seasons, my year is divided into two: NFL season and the off season. I've been anticipating the start of the 2009 season for months and recently decided I'd use Google to track just how much longer I need to wait.

A web search for "nfl schedule" revealed the Eagles' first regular season game is September 13th, but I wanted to know exactly how many days stand between me and Eagles' glory (or heartbreak). I'm a much bigger fan of the Eagles than I am of math, so I was relieved to find a pair of Google spreadsheets functions that not only count the days for me, but also keep that count updated over time. Here's how it works:

The DAYS360 function calculates the difference between two given dates. In this case, the dates we want to plug in (the "arguments") are:

1. Today's date
2. September 13th

To get the first argument, we will use the TODAY function. I could enter today's date, but using the TODAY function makes for a smarter spreadsheet because it will update automatically each day. The TODAY function is really simple and requires no inputs (or arguments); I just type "=TODAY()" into a cell in my spreadsheet, and the function returns "8/7/09."



Now I want to create a cell with the second argument for the DAYS360 function: the game date. I'll type "Sep 13" into cell B4. Google spreadsheets understand that I am typing a date and automatically convert the text to this format: "9/13/2009."

So far, so good. Now that we have our two arguments, we are ready to use the DAYS360 function. The syntax for DAYS360 is "=DAYS360(date_1, date_2, type)". Because date_1 is located in cell A2 and date_2 is located in cell B4, the function should look like this: "=DAYS360(A2, B4)". (The "type" argument is optional and not necessary here so I'll omit it). I could also have skipped typing "Aug 13" into its own cell and written the function like this: "=DAYS360(A2, "8/13/2009")".


Triumph! Upon hitting return, the function gives me the number of days between now and the Eagles' first regular season game: 36.



If you want to view an additional example of the DAYS360 function or see other useful functions, visit the Google spreadsheets function list. Otherwise, adjust your digital antennas and stock up on nacho supplies because the Eagles' season is almost here.

Using Google Docs to organize a karoake road trip

We're always excited to hear how people are using Google Docs to organize their lives. Tara Hunt, author of the The Whuffie Factor, recently told us about her experience using Google Docs to plan Whuffaoke or Bust, a karoake road trip across America:

Whuffaoke or Bust has been quite the undertaking to organize. The crew members reside in 4 different locations, with one of them in the UK. We have local ambassadors in the 14 city stops. We have 8 sponsors who are quite involved at some level. And everyone and everything is geographically spread out. Pretty much everything requires online collaboration tools.

We have been using Google Docs extensively to organize Whuffaoke or Bust. Almost all of the pieces of this complicated production require input from multiple parties. We also need to maintain a high level of transparency to make sure that every member of the crew, the sponsors and the ambassadors know what is going on because things change daily, it seems. The smallest of details is important. For example, we ran into a communication issue because RV specifications hadn't been updated with the fact that we are now adding an exterior stage. This changes where we can park the RV for the parties drastically. As soon as I updated our shared Google Doc, everyone knew the score.

My favorite part of Google Docs is the live collaboration, though. We have weekly conference calls with the crew where we use a live task list that we are all adding to and crossing off. It's really satisfying to see this document change as we are discussing the points. It really drives home that we are making progress. The added chat features and notes in the docs make them much easier to collaborate in as well. Any questions we have on tasks (who are they assigned to? progress updates?) can be made along the way without messing up the main document.

We also use Google Groups for our email correspondence. We have a group for the Whuffaoke crew and a group for the Whuffaoke local ambassadors. By using these groups, we don't forget who is where when.

Google Docs has made planning Whuffaoke or Bust easier.

Whuffaoke or Bust's first stop is in San Francisco on July 15th. Do you have a story about your experience using Google Docs? Let us know by sharing your story.