Champlain Today

For students in the Education program at Champlain College, paper résumés will be taking a backseat to ePortfolios. Multimedia savvy Champlain students are creating Web sites and videos to present their teaching strengths to potential employers.

Students in Champlain’s Elementary Education and Middle and High School Education programs can take up to three courses on integrating technology. As student teachers, they put these skills to work in several ways -- all the while creating content for their final licensing portfolio.

“They learn to design, edit and manage Web pages so they will be able to use these skills with their own students,” said faculty member Ken Reissig, the coordinator of the Middle and High School Education Program. “Anytime we teach a new technology skill to these students, we first ask how they will transfer the skill into their own classrooms.”

Elementary Education major Lisa Pleskach '05 demonstrates her ePortfolio at a spring event on campus.

As Champlain students teach in area schools, their professors use digital video to record the action in the classroom -- a math or social studies lesson, for example -- and they take it back to campus for review. “This technology allows us to view a teaching episode together and guide a student through a self-evaluation. It really has increased the reflection on the lessons,” Reissig said. “Video has the power of truly changing the way teachers teach.”

The student teachers then jump into the role of video editors. With some training under their belts, they use editing software to create a documentary of their teaching, adding a whole new dimension to their portfolio.

Over the course of their student teaching, the video, photos and text they’ve captured in the classroom are combined to create a deep ePortfolio that illustrates their understanding in six key areas: lesson planning, thematic units, teaching accommodations, special needs advocacy and teamwork, and their philosophy of teaching. “This is evidence that students have met Vermont teaching licensing standards,” Reissig said.

Peter Koutroulis ‘05 of Biddeford, Maine, worked with students at Tuttle Middle School in South Burlington as part of his extensive student teaching experience. He shared his ePortfolio with members of the faculty and staff during a springtime portfolio showing.

“I will definitely take this digital portfolio on interviews and I’ll send it to schools,” he said, clicking through the subpages of the site. One of the social studies lesson plans he documented in his ePortfolio showed sixth-graders navigating the Web to explore religious sites in Jerusalem. It was part of two-week unit on religions. The goals of the lesson? To have students use the World Wide Web as a research tool and to identify why Jerusalem is sacred to three major religions. To demonstrate their understanding, Koutroulis asked the students to write a postcard from Jerusalem describing the history of the sites and their significance to a particular religion.

With images and video, the ePortfolio transformed Koutroulis’ résumé from two dimensions to three. “It’s incredibly powerful to see a teaching candidate on video,” said Reissig, who is a former teacher and principal. And that might just mean the difference when new graduates are competing for teaching positions.