ePortfolio Mash Up with GoogleApps

Schools and universities can set up free Google Apps accounts with their own domain name, where they can give all student and faculty acces to a variety of tools, including a GMail account, iGoogle portal, Google Groups for collaboration, and Pages, for creating websites. Each user can also use their GMail account to activate other Google services, such as GoogleDocs.

Students can maintain a reflective journal (blog) of their learning activities and reflections with feedback through the commenting function that is a part of any blog tool.

Since blogspot.com websites are often blocked on school websites. As an alternative to a traditional blog, there is an "Announcements" page type that can be added to a Google Site (below) that could serve as a reflective journal of learning activities. Students can maintain a reflective journal in the form of "Posts" which can later be used as a link to reflection on a specific entry from a web page.

Students create word processing, spreadsheet or presentation artifacts in GoogleDocs. All GoogleDocs files can be shared for collaboration with other students in collaborative projects, or with teachers for feedback.

• Documents are the standard word processing files, where students can create online, or upload from an existing Microsoft Word or Open Office word processing file.
• Spreadsheets are the standard spreadsheet applications which can be imported from an exisrting Microsoft Excel or Open Office spreadsheet file.
• Presentations are the standard slide show application which can be imported from an existing Microsoft Powerpoint or Open Office presentation file. Other people can be sent the URL for the presentation, and they can view the presentation in real time.

Here is a short YouTube video about GoogleDocs that discusses the process. Here is a brief description of how to use Google Docs Spreadsheet to facilitate feedback from small group breakout discussions.
 

Students store their images in online albums. These could be scanned images or pictures taken with digital cameras.

Students have a tool to keep notes about their navigation on the WWW.

Students create presentation portfolios at different benchmarks to showcase their achievement of outcome, goals or standards. This tool is a web page creator, where students can link to different documents created in GoogleDocs or uploaded as another document type, such as PDF. There is a limit of 100 MB of uploaded files, which should be plenty of space, especially if images are stored in Picasa and videos are stored in YouTube.There is also no data management tool, to aggregate assessment data. There is not an interactivity feature to this program, such as found in a blog or wiki. Therefore, this tool would work for a presentation portfolio but not for formative or summative assessment.This tool is being discontinued by Google, replaced by Google Sites.

Google Sites is Google's version of a wiki, released in February 2008. Students could create presentation portfolios at different benchmarks to showcase their achievement of outcome, goals or standards. This tool is a web site creator, where students can embed different documents created in GoogleDocs or uploaded as another document type, such as PDF, or embed video (from Google Video or YouTube).The only data management tool is the GoogleDocs spreadsheet, to aggregate assessment data. There are lots of interactivity features to this program, such as the capability to subscribe to changes in sites or individual pages, or collaborate on pages in the same way as GoogleDocs. Therefore, this tool would work for both a presentation portfolio and for formative or summative assessment.

* Each document up to 500K, plus up to 2MB per embedded image.
* Each user has combined limit of 5000 documents and presentations and 5000 images.
* Upload presentations up to 10MB in size in both .ppt and .pps file formats