Author: Miss Abercrombie

e-Portfolios: create and maintaining

What is an E-Portfolio?

A digital portfolio or e-portfolio can take several forms, and have different purposes. Whether it’s a place to share a learning journey, record notable achievements, provide a platform for a learner’s reflections on progress, or to link to records/artefacts/evidence stored elsewhere of skills, examples of work or achievements, or chart future goals and stepping stones to objectives. It may provide opportunity for feedback by peers of learners or educators, and it can provide a means for a learner to collate aspects of their digital footprint as they journey through life.

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Wikis: creating wikis for the classroom

What’s a Wiki?

Probably the best known Wiki is Wikipedia, ranked in the top ten of all websites, attracting hundreds of millions of visitors a month to the reference articles by tens of thousands of contributors. And, in a nutshell, that’s an illustration of what sets a wiki apart from other websites, blogs and online spaces – a wiki provides the facility for creation and editing of an online space by multiple users, with a transparent trail of edits for all who visit, making changes (and who made them) visible to all, and providing the facility to set alerts to changes made on the wiki so that anyone can be notified of changes as soon as they are made.

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Simulations to engage pupils in their learning

15 Simulations to Gamify Your Class – this post by Jacqui Murray lists and describes a variety of online tools which let learners interact with a situation and make choices, which lead to different options depending on their choices. These include historical situations, life choices, enterprise activities and science and technology scenarios where the learner has to understand the situations, make choices based on their knowledge, then to see what happens based on their choice. Jacqui Murray has also helpfully added further suggestions and tips for teachers using these simulation tools in a classroom context.
29 Games Kids Can Play to Try Engineering – a post by Richard Byrne describing and linking to several online game simulations with an engineering focus on the Try Engineering website. This website also includes 114 lesson plans on a host of engineering themes, including those associated with the simulation games.
More Online Learning Simulations– a post by Larry Ferlazzo listing and describing a range of online learning simulations with a focus on finance or economy at different stages, as well as providing a link to a further post by him of additional simulations sites.