Building a Digital Portfolio

We're in the midst of designing our Digital Portfolio, a place where students will be able to build and curate a rich repository of their learning and their proudest accomplishments while at Millennium School. As we shared in our "Our Take on Assessment" blog, we believe this portfolio is the basis for a much more accurate and motivating form of assessment. We recently read a beautiful article by David Hawley, Chief Academic Officer of the International Baccalaureate, that sums this up beautifully:

Humanity cannot wait for students to graduate...and get started on doing things that contribute to a better world. We need to give students in every school, at every age, real agency and authentic opportunities to make a difference in this volatile, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous world. With this in mind, we cannot be satisfied only with students learning about the world and developing deep conceptual understanding of multiple disciplines. We need young people building an ever-expanding portfolio of skills and experiences of things that they have done, created, and contributed to -- things that matter to them, to others, and to the world we share.

His full piece is available here, on Edutopia, and is well worth a read. To us this points to the future of both learning and assessment, in which students are doers, creators, contributors, not simply receivers of imparted knowledge.