Feather River College K12 Project
Using technology to demonstrate mastery of competencies in student learning
Feather River College helps local school district meet K12 Curriculum Standards with ePortfolios.
A collaborative was forged between Feather River College (FRC) grant programs, [TRIO Education Talent Search (ETS) grant and SB70 CTE Community Collaborative grant, Plumas Unified School District (PUSD), Plumas County Office of Education Regional Occupational Program (ROP), and Westwood Unified School District (WUSD) to join the ePortfolio California pilot project.
Through this collaboration ePortfolio licenses were obtained for students in PUSD and WUSD. During the first semester, every senior in PUSD was trained to set up and build their ePortfolio in their capstone ROP Business and Finance course. Also during the upstart semester, an additional 160 students in grades 9 through 11 were trained to set up and build their e-portfolio in their English class using the TRIO Education Talent Search mobile lap top lab (30 computers).
The goals of the collaborative were:
• to prepare students for applying for college admissions and/or jobs.
• to showcase the skills learned in their ROP courses.
• to align the process of building an ePortfolio (collect, select, reflect, connect) with the English/Language Arts resume writing competency standard.
• to provide an opportunity for students to meet their computer literacy requirement using ePortfolios.
As often happens when introducing new educational technologies into a curriculum, the project faced some initial IT challenges. Incompatibility with existing hardware and software, scheduling IT support services, and overcoming application-specific limitations, proved to slow the overall adoption and implementation time.
However, according to FRC ETS/CTE advisor Audrey Peters, they are right on track with the first implementation and are scheduled to complete their target implementation of e-portfolios by the end of the school year.
"Most of the students have mastered the software pretty quickly", says Peters. "Ultimately, our hope is that by providing students with e-portfolio licenses, an understanding of portfolios as it relates to self marketing, and an opportunity to develop their computer literacy skills, we are equipping students with a few of the many tools they need to succeed in life after high school."