PORTFOLIO
COMPARISONS
FRESH GRADE // PROS AND CONS
"FreshGrade forms a continuous glimpse into each child's progress that parents and students can share."
- Sir Ken Robinson
When choosing a hosting program for your classroom digital portfolios, FreshGrade has a lot of benefits. From an easy to use interface, to integrated assessment tools, there are many reasons why FreshGrade may be the right choice for you.
WHAT IS FRESHGRADE?
Let's look at a few of the features of FreshGrade in more detail. FreshGrade is a helpful tool that allows teachers to document, capture, and communicate student learning. It can also be used as a grading program and a learning-management system. To begin with, educators create a class list, choose a subject area, and select Common Core Standards to use as learning outcomes for that subject. Activities are then created and can be connected right to the learning outcomes. If teachers want to grade the activities, there are a number of options available. Activities can be graded based on percentage scores, mastery, marking criteria, anecdotal notes, and using conventional grades.
As the students begin their work on the assigned activity, the teacher can document or capture the learning by using their mobile devices. Photos, video, audio recordings, and other notes can quickly be uploaded to individual students, to groups, or even to the whole class. Students can get immediate feedback on their work habits or assignments and can review the teacher-collected data and comment on it. Students can then assemble the information or digital artifacts into an e-portfolio to document their learning journey.
Another tool that FreshGrade can generate is progress reports, which teachers have access to on their dashboards. Teachers can also choose to share information with parents and students using push notifications. Parents receive notifications and can view their own child's portfolio and leave comments as well.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS TO LEARNING?
FreshGrade allows teachers to easily assess the learning of their students and provide feedback that is much more immediate. When offered the opportunity to get timely feedback, students benefit immensely. This is one area that FreshGrade excels. Students receive push notifications when a teacher posts to their account and they have the opportunity to review the new data and comment on it immediately. Students and teachers can enter into meaningful dialogue based on the photos, video, or audio and even parents can be invited into the conversations, enriching the learning process.
The developers of FreshGrade promote its user friendly interface and simplistic tools. Most teachers should be able to navigate the site fairly easily and set up their classes quite quickly. For students, depending on their age, they may need some coaching on how to reply to comments, or add items to their portfolios. Most age groups should be able to figure out the program and even groups as young as kindergarten have used FreshGrade on their own.
ARE THERE ANY NEGATIVES TO USING FRESHGRADE?
Some areas where Fresh Grade could improve might be in the sign up process for students. It can be a bit time consuming at the present moment with each individual student having to sign up with a unique access code. The program might benefit from using a QR code for quicker account sign-up. Signing up for younger students is also a rather daunting task and can be very time consuming if the teacher has to sign up each student.
Also, having more tools to use for the e-portfolios such as a drawing tool, voice recorder, or emoji use might be useful for the program going forward to diversify the ways in which students are able to present their learning.
HOW ARE TEACHERS USING FRESHGRADE?
Although many teachers are required to use grading programs for report cards other than FreshGrade, the dashboard and reporting tools can still help create a more comprehensive view of student achievement. Teachers are able to use FreshGrade to document daily classroom activities and track grades. They are also able to use the mobile app to capture video, photos, and audio of classroom work, which can make documenting student learning much more efficient and interesting. This collected data can be sent through push notifications to let parents and students know where they are with their learning.
It is also an excellent way to open communication channels with parents more frequently and have them show more interest in the learning of the student. Teachers can also work with students to curate their own portfolios by selecting pieces and reflecting on them which can help improve self-evaluation. These student-created portfolios can also be used in student-led conferences and can help students set goals and track progress over time.
SEESAW //PROS AND CONS
Seesaw, an online application that aims at documenting students' work for assessment and sharing purposes, also shares the goal of futhering parental involvement. As Anderson & Minke (2007) state, "parent involvement (PI) in education has been associated with a variety of positive outcomes" (p. 311). Here we will take a look at the benefits and drawbacks of the online application Seesaw:
PROS
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CONS
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