I’m wiped out. This is not the first sentence I imagined would begin my inaugural blog post. It’s as if I forgot that during this time in a school community spring fever is abound and there is not a dwindling of responsibilities, but an uptick. So much is happening and changing quickly too in our librarian world and beyond. I write this to share the message that if you are feeling wiped out, you are not alone. Whatever you are feeling is more than okay. Embrace perceived imperfections, strengths, making mistakes, boundary setting, tuning out, acceptance, and deep nurturing rest. This is what I am doing here as I wrap my mind around some current, pressing school library and intellectual freedom issues and allow myself to write about something else entirely: archiving student work.
This year I joined a committee exploring best practices in archiving student work and portfolio creation from kindergarten to senior year and perhaps beyond. While our students have been archiving their work since the inception of our school as an essential tenet, the committee is searching for new ways to use one system K-12 to show growth over time. This committee work will be multi-year and I would like to highlight input and share resources from my librarian community throughout. In turn, my hope is that some of the resources we have been exploring might be useful to you and your work.
After several initial and productive brainstorming meetings our team of K-12 teachers, administrators and students came up with our why and we are now in the phase of exploring resources and systems. The tough part is finding one system to meet all needs K-12, yet exploring each resource supports our thinking around what we want and need and how we would dream to build our own. Aside from LMS and Google systems, here are some of the resources we have explored including brief descriptions from their sites:
Tomodachi is a social learning platform that enables students to create unique content and present work to audiences beyond the classroom.
An elegant new platform for curating and sharing learning evidence, gotLearning was born in the classroom, raised by educators, and focuses on the most important, often overlooked work: the learning conversations between students and teachers.
Art inventory simplified. Artwork Archive provides artists, collectors, and organizations with powerful tools to manage their artwork, career, or collection.
The ultimate platform for digital photography production and workflow. Our cloud-based enterprise-grade features save your time, slash your storage costs, and let your content shine.
If you have resources to add or portfolios that you believe are worthy of reviewing please share, and if not, I do hope that some of the above resources will give you ideas or be of use in your school communities.
And now, after you rest deeply, spring forward! There is much work to do (such as this from Tasha Bergson-Michelson) and we must continue to care for ourselves and renew in order to take action, support our communities as we love to do, and experience the wildflowers of spring while we are at it.