Student Led Conferences & Digital Portfolios
Student led conferences are exactly what they sound like. Students lead their parents, teachers, administrators, and other observers through an exploration of their best work that they want to showcase for everyone to see. Creating the material needed for a student led conference involves the student choosing their best work and organizing it in a way that best shows their abilities and growth. This exercise helps students learn to set and organize goals and teaches students how to become leaders in their own learning. Teachers act as facilitators and coaches when assisting the student with preparing their conference material to share. Teachers can easily provide rubrics and guidelines of what should and needs to be included in their conferences. Also, teachers can provide a scripted guide to help students remember what points to share during their conferences. Students will take ownership of their learning and be proud to show their work samples of their best work that they have had the opportunity to choose to include.
In the first image above you can see how proud the student is to share their work during a student led conference. This activity gives the student a sense of pride and empowerment about their accomplishments. In the second image is an example of how a digital portfolio might be used to organize a student led conference. Almost looks like a website for the student, right? That's the idea. The student organizes their work and showcases that work and their learned skills about how to produce and publish that work. Privacy issues can be avoided by making all digital portfolios private so that parents, students, and teachers are still protected.
Whether student led conferences are driven by physical work samples or digital portfolios, parents become more involved and engaged in actually knowing what their children are learning and to what degree they are growing in that learning. These conferences are also a great way for students to share their individual interests with others. One of the greater benefits of digital portfolios is that they can be linked from year to year and progress can be compared. When digital portfolios are begun as early as Kindergarten or 1st grade, growth is easy to observe and goal setting becomes easier to teach to students. This goal setting ability goes beyond setting accelerated reading goals into goals in any and all areas. Specifically, students can become much more engaged in subjects that spark their interest by setting goals in those areas. Also, when digital portfolios are built they are much easier to share with extended family and friends that are interested in that student's progress.
There are many apps and websites to help you and your students get started with digital portfolios that are super easy to use. Freshgrade.com is a great resource that is featured in the short video linked above. It offers personalization to students, a learning journal for students to record their thoughts and ideas, and the use of diverse media. This app also allows teachers to evaluate students' portfolios and offer suggestions on improvement and/or changes to make directly to the student through the portfolio.
Whether you decide to use physical work samples or a digital portfolio for your student led conferences, these practices are highly successful in improving each student's motivations. Students take ownership of their work, learn how to reflect on what they have learned, become more motivated to learn, and will ultimately assist their teachers in setting higher expectations for themselves.
Thanks for reading,
Shannon
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