Social & Emotional Learning Archives | bulb

Coppell ISD Encourages Authentic Learning with bulb

Rachel Wood — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 20:01:39 +0000

Coppell ISD Encourages Authentic Learning with bulb

bulb Digital Portfolios recently partnered with Coppell Independent School District in northern Texas to provide their students with a platform to encourage authentic learning. bulb’s interactive portfolio construct and template features allows an easy way for teachers to seamlessly integrate bulb portfolios into lesson plans. The team at bulb is eager to see the growth in engagement put forward by the leaders at Coppell ISD.

Coppell isd

Coppell ISD is a leading public school district in north Texas that serves 13,000 students across 18 campuses. The independent school district caters to students from Pre K to Grade 12 and includes eleven elementary schools, three middle schools, two high schools, one ninth grade campus, and an alternative campus. With a 15 to 1 teacher to student ratio, Coppell ISD is able to create profound learning experiences for each student to directly correlate with the district’s mission statement.

Goal

Coppell ISD’s mission and values are based on working together to positively impact the lives of their students and the world around them. They believe collective engagement and great teaching is key to deep learning and want to utilize the necessary resources to help achieve their values. To continue alignment with their values, Coppell’s goal was to develop an authentic way to collect information throughout a lesson that could easily be reflected on later and incorporate engagement inside and outside of school.

A digital portfolio provides a personalized, living collection of artifacts that empowers all [Coppell ISD] learners to curate, document, and communicate beyond the classroom the progression of their authentic learning and passions through evidence of experiences, reflections, and actionable goals.

Solution

For Coppell Independent School District, bulb Digital Portfolios has been a key player for authentic learning. The partnership that Coppell ISD has established with bulb has provided support for Digital Learning Coaches and the district’s educators in understanding and leveraging the importance that portfolios play in a learner’s academic experience.

The professional and digital learning team recognized that many of the district’s initiatives, including small group instruction, fit perfectly with the use of portfolios. Schools within the district continue to use bulb as a space to capture artifacts of learning and reflection throughout the learning process.

With a focus on reflective practices, Amanda Mask, Coordinator of Digital Learning and Nancy Garvey, Director of Professional Learning, led a professional learning experience with principals where they modeled the use of digital portfolios as a part of the learning process.

outcome

Principals used a group to access and easily copy a template to guide and reflect on the learning experience. They participated in various physical activities such as a Table Top Tweet, Window Pane Reflection, and more while having the opportunity to collect evidence through the learning process, experiencing the many dynamic tools and rich media options available in bulb to capture and reflect on their learning. We explored how digital portfolios could be used during small group instruction to capture evidence of understanding in the moment and document this growth over a period of time. This hands-on learning experience resonated with principals and many decided to take this same experience back to their educators to model the role digital portfolios play in the learning process.

bulb is an award-winning digital portfolio & resume platform

bulb is used by students and educators to create, curate and showcase their passions, growth and best school work. bulb Digital Portfolios started as a tool for students to show they’re more than a test score. As the product has grown, it has turned into a global hub where students, professionals, and individuals showcase their skills through beautiful, multimedia content on an incredibly easy-to-use platform.

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DMIMS Documents Professional Growth with bulb

Rachel Wood — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 15:37:51 +0000

DMIMS Documents Professional Growth in the Medical Field with bulb

bulb Digital Portfolios recently partnered with The Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences in Wardha, India to provide students with a space to document professional and personal growth in the medical field. bulb’s various upload and share features create excellent opportunities for students to display, share, and receive comments on their posts.

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Viewpoint STEM Scholars Program Showcases Student Projects with bulb

Rachel Wood — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 17:02:40 +0000

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HAN University College of Education Partners with bulb

Rachel Wood — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 16:45:37 +0000

HAN University College of Education Partners with bulb

HAN University and bulb Digital Portfolio established a partnership to provide a space to support students in the School of Education, with a way to record experiences, assignments, and resources in a more organized fashion.

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The Uruguayan American School Uses bulb to Showcase Student Work in Innovation Fair

Rachel Wood — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 17:16:20 +0000

The Uruguayan American School Uses bulb to Showcase Student Work in Innovation Fair

The Uruguayan American School in Montevideo, Uruguay is partnering with bulb Digital Portfolios to provide their students with a platform to display and share their work across a multitude of subjects. bulb’s easily editable portfolio layout and extensive support of embedded media offers an unmatched opportunity for students at UAS to document, organize, and creatively show their work. The team at bulb is excited to see how the students and faculty utilize bulb to enrich their educational experience.

The Uruguayan American School

The Uruguayan American School is an international, private American school in Carrasco, Montevideo founded by Uruguayan and U.S. citizens. As a way to promote an intercultural understanding between Uruguay and the United States, UAS includes programs from both countries and also uses the International Baccalaureate program in grades 11 & 12. The Pre-K – Grade 12 school has over 35 nationalities represented in the student body and is continuing to expand each year.

Goal

The Uruguayan American School is aiming to improve their students’ ability to collect and display information for projects. Students at UAS require the ability to upload multimedia content–such as audio and video–while still exhibiting the information in a neat structure. Their goal was to find a well-rounded, easy to use platform that allowed students of all ages to document their multi-subject school work while also integrating project interaction.

Solution

Where other platforms fell short, bulb is able to provide all of the necessary requirements for UAS and has been a beneficial platform to support cross-curricular projects. Students can add clarity and structure to their projects by adding audio and video using bulb’s simple editor.

When presenting their work, UAS students attach QR codes to their bulb pages that can be scanned in order to access relevant content. Parents and peers observing the student presentations can easily scan the QR code to interact with the documentation. This method is utilized for students at UAS presenting multiple subjects as well as students of all ages within the Art Department to achieve an immersive experience.

The Uruguayan American School’s partnership with bulb continues to flourish as their usage of the platform expands to a number of subjects across many grades. To support younger students using bulb at UAS, older students and teachers who are familiar with bulb collect and create the content for the younger students so that they have a tangible end product to show their parents and keep forever.

outcome

In the last academic year, bulb housed the Innovation Fair content. Many UAS students participated and it was an impressive opportunity where students wrote up their experiences and enjoyed being able to add audio, video, and other multimedia content that other platforms had not allowed as easily. The Art Department at UAS also participated in the creation of an Art Show that featured multiple student artists and explored different ideas. bulb usage throughout UAS has expanded to more students in multiple grades, and UAS is excited that their students’ portfolios will grow and go with their students as they journey through the rest of school.

bulb is an award-winning digital portfolio & resume platform

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The Peddie School Engages in Social Emotional Growth with bulb

Rachel Wood — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 19:34:35 +0000

The Peddie School Engages in Social Emotional Growth with bulb

bulb Digital Portfolios recently partnered with the renowned Peddie School in N.J. to provide a platform to support the social emotional growth of their students. bulb’s digital portfolio construct and template features offer an excellent opportunity for students to document and share their academic and personal reflections. The bulb team is thrilled to be working with the esteemed faculty and students of Peddie.

The Peddie school

Founded in 1864, The Peddie School is a private, independent, coeducational boarding and day school for grades 9-12 and postgraduate located in Highstown, N.J. Peddie is one of the most highly regarded private schools in the nation, receiving regular acclimation from online publications. Students participate in robust academics, arts, and athletics programs designed to cultivate personal growth and independent-mindedness. Countless alumni have gone on to attend prestigious universities and pursue meaningful careers, a testament to the excellence of a Peddie School education.

Goal

Peddie was in search of a unique way for students to reflect on personal experiences and educational moments that would otherwise go unrecognized in student records. Their goal was to develop a safe-space that would help students develop strong reflection skills in a way that allowed students to be unencumbered by grades but also wouldn’t add any unfair burdens to the teachers or alter the structure of the schools set curriculum.

This year at Peddie, ninth graders are participating in a reflection portfolio project, utilizing bulb as the platform. These digital portfolios of reflections, both spontaneous and assigned, hope to capture significant experiential and educational moments that occur throughout our community.

-Emily Miller, Director of Academic Technology

Solution

The Peddie School partnered with bulb Digital Portfolios and recently initiated a 9th Grade Portfolio Project. This project encourages incoming freshmen to collect and organize experiences throughout their first year at the school. bulb provides a space that students can capture and store written, visual, and auditory reflections of their freshman year.

Key members of leadership were selected to create resource collections of journal prompts that students would be able to access through a publicly shared bulb Portfolio and copy into their own accounts using bulb’s template feature. This library of prompts was designed as a model to guide the creation of collections, naming conventions, and page organization within the student’s writing portfolios. The team at bulb coordinated with those key leaders to provide guidance and support to ensure this approach was successful.

To support the teachers involved with the project, Peddie set up structured advisory periods so that teachers would not be required to set aside class time to allow students the opportunity to journal about their 9th grade experiences in bulb. While the teachers will take on the important role of monitoring and guiding students during their reflection time, they are not charged with collecting or grading any of the completed prompts.

Within the areas of Athletics, Community Life, Arts Foundations, Humanities, and Residential Life, freshmen will capture and store written, visual and auditory reflections of their year. In addition, they are encouraged to create their own reflections on activities and experiences they find meaningful and potentially memorable. We hope that students will be able to permanently capture and reflect on the many ways that they demonstrate growth outside of the classroom, as grades serve to capture what happens inside the classroom.

-Leigh Wood, Advisory Coordinator

outcome

Peddie’s 9th grade portfolio project is underway, providing students and educators with a dynamic framework for academic and personal reflection. Additionally, teachers at the Peddie school were provided personal bulb accounts that can be used to develop activities, create learning opportunities, and showcase their own skills and growth as educators. Administrators and leaders continue to lend their support in monitoring and creating prompts. The ongoing 9th Grade Portfolio Project at The Peddie School serves as an example of the amazing opportunities afforded to students when leadership, classroom educators, and technology partners share responsibility and work together toward a collective goal to support student needs.

We arrived at bulb as a platform because among other features, bulb’s easy to use web-based interface and permission structure make us confident that students have a safe, feature-rich space to capture and reflect upon their experiences.

-Leigh Wood and Emily Miller

bulb is an award-winning digital portfolio & resume platform

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Digital Learning Day at Dallas ISD

Rachel Mogan — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 20:15:23 +0000

Digital Learning Day at Dallas ISD

K-12, Personalized Learning, Social & Emotional Learning

Published March 24, 2022

Photo by Duane Loux on Unsplash. Edited.

Digital Learning Day at Dallas ISD

Dallas ISD participates in DLDay 2022 with a day-long series of digital activities for educators and students.

What is Digital Learning Day?

The digital learning landscape has changed so much in the past few years. No longer confined to the walls of the classroom, digital learning can take place any time, any place, in more ways than ever before. DLDay is an initiative led by All4Ed, is a day to highlight the digital resources available and to celebrate the educators on the cutting edge who are taking digital learning to new heights.

Dallas ISD’s #DLDay Success

At Dallas ISD, Executive Director of Professional and Digital Learning Dr. Charissa Govan and her team celebrated DLDay in a big way. On February 22, 2022, Dr. Govan and her team organized and facilitated a day-long series of digital learning experiences. Teachers and students chose from a menu of digital learning options and participated in live sessions via Zoom or asynchronous sessions using guided resources.

One such session, presented by bulb Customer Success Manager Sam JK Neal, brought student dreams and goals to life with a vision board activity. Vision boards are powerful because visualization is powerful — it’s one of the most popular and effective mind exercises you can do and is now considered by many to be a staple of creative thought exercises.

The vision board activity, completed in 30-minute sessions with Dallas students, was inspired by hello bulb week.

Participating classes, like Zenitra Martinez-Smith’s Pathways to College and Career Readiness classes from Dallas Environmental Science Academy, created multimodal vision boards using images, audio recordings, and more to bring goals and ambitions to life.

What did the students think?

One of the biggest things students enjoyed during their DLDay activities was experimenting with different multimedia tools to express goals and capture ideas using their unique voices.

They liked having creative freedom and control over their content, especially considering how easily they were able to follow along with the activities in bulb and discover new features on their own in the process.

You can see students’ personalities come to life with Jinny and Jason’s digital portfolio pages from the day’s activities. These example pages are were recreated for public viewing by request to protect students’ privacy.

Great day of learning w/ @PDL_DallasISD our @BFMSFalcons began making digital portfolios w/ @bulbapp Can’t wait to see what they create @DISD_Libraries @DallasISDMedia @dallasschools @DISDREO @MarshallforDISD pic.twitter.com/xK5acrSLuY

Lynnetta Williams (@ms_williams57) February 22, 2022

DLDay preparation involved many factors, including creating learning themes and determining which digital applications to showcase. Bulb quickly jumped to mind and was a seamless addition as a follow-up to a larger January teacher-facing student digital portfolio training. Students and teachers who attended Bulb's DLDay sessions were impressed with the platform. A student's takeaway from the session highlighted the purpose of the vision board activity: "(One thing I learned was) that you need a lot of things to get a job.

Heather Marvel, M.Ed.

Try it for yourself

DLDay 2022 may have formally come and gone, but digital classrooms are becoming the standard in schools all across the globe, so there’s never a bad time to try out a new activity with your students. Using the resources from hello bulb week, this example vision board, and our Activity Guide, you can create your own DLDay today!

bulb For K-12

bulb For Higher Ed

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7 Reasons Students Need a Digital Portfolio

rosilynnyoon — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 15:44:46 +0000

7 Reasons Students Need a Digital Portfolio

College & Career Readiness, CTE, Jobs & Employment, Social & Emotional Learning, Student Voice

Published February 10, 2020

Every student needs a digital portfolio. It most accurately represents the student’s individuality and skills for academic and professional opportunities. The benefits of a digital portfolio are vast; from helping students get the job, or developing a deep love of learning. Here are the top seven reasons every student needs a digital portfolio.

7. See growth overtime.

Keeping your work in one place allows you to see growth over time. Seeing growth helps students realize where they began. It’s inspiring to see skills improving over time. This motivates students to put more effort into improving their skills and deepening their learning. A great example of this is this article where an “Artist Shows His Progress From 2 Years Old To 28” (photos included in the link).

6. Tell a student’s story beyond GPA.

What exactly does GPA measure—good study habits, strong test-taking skills and on-time completion of assignments? A high GPA is rewarding, but the fact will always be that GPA is a number. Numbers can’t express individuality, passions and skills like a digital portfolio can. Numbers are unfavorable to students that are poor test takers or who don’t perform well in structured environments Unlike GPAs, digital portfolios are capable of telling a student’s whole story.

5. Identify learning methods.

Traditionally, students are not taught in a classroom setting how to identify their learning style. It takes time and consistent effort and resources to discover how a student learns best. Digital portfolios provide students with the tools to explore their learning preferences. Being able to work with any type of media gives the student options in displaying their work, and helps the educator identify more productive ways to teach the individual student. This article goes more into detail about why “It’s Worth Taking The Time to Figure It Out”.

"Some information changes over time but the ability to learn lasts forever. That's why we need to focus more of our time on the process of learning, not just the product."

George Couros

4. Focus on the learning process.

Learning with digital portfolios helps students capture and reflect on their process, which:

Allows students to explain their thinking, find ways to improve, and come up with new ways to solve problems.
Helps identify strengths and weaknesses, refine skills, and find a career the student can be passionate about.
“Fosters a growth mindset, creates a student-centered environment and reduces stress for students”
(Focus on the Process and Results Will Follow).

3. Leave school with a lifetime tool.

When students consistently use digital portfolios over the course of their learning, they graduate with more than a transcript. Research shows that student engagement increases by 33% when digital portfolios are used in a classroom. A more engaged student means better retention of the materials covered. Students are also building a practical tool that can be used to apply for internships, jobs and educational opportunities.

2. Build critical skills for a career.

Using a digital portfolio requires skills that are needed in the workforce. Behind the creation of e-portfolios lie skills of ordering, planning, selecting, synthesizing, discussing, reflecting, and designing content to present to different audiences. While developing this content, learners may also give and receive feedback and will almost certainly improve their digital capability.

1. Digital portfolios are the new resume.

“Here’s What Employers Are Looking at When They Google You”: an online portfolio. Today’s students need a digital portfolio. Not only are modern demands in education and the workforce moving students towards creating digital portfolios, a resume that’s accompanied by an ePortfolio also helps students:

Stand out from the competition
Establish an online presence beyond a social media
Show individuality and professionalism
Provides evidence of accomplishments and skills

Employers want to see proof of the skills on resumes, as well as individuality.

"Resumes are a point in time and are not reflective of the human."

Penny Queller, SVP and GM of Monster's staffing business unit

It’s no wonder “57% of employers are less likely to interview a candidate they can’t find online,” A resume is not enough. A digital presence is needed.

Digital portfolios are not only the foundation of a student’s continuing education and employability but an integral component of classroom instruction, right here and right now.

Explore the Resource Center for more helpful resources. Or contact us to set up a demo.

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How to Use Digital Portfolios for Reflection

stevemiller — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 20:00:23 +0000

How to Use Digital Portfolios for Reflection

Classroom Tips, Professional Development, Social & Emotional Learning

Published April 17, 2019

How to Use Digital Portfolios for Reflection

Reflection is not simply a part of the learning process—it is the learning process.

[Template Below]

Reflection facilitates growth, refinement of ideas, deep thinking and the evaluation of experiences. This essential metacognitive practice is used to apply meaningful knowledge to shape future decisions, thoughts and actions.

“Metacognition is really about leveraging what we know about our person and our strengths and weaknesses, understanding the task and how it relates to our person (how long will it takes us to read or comprehend), and the strategies we have to process and make sense of information, tasks, and experiences to be successful in school and beyond.”

—Lisa Johnson, Cultivating Communication in the Classroom

Studies prove the monumental benefits of learning by thinking.

It boosts your confidence in what you do and increases endurance in striving toward your goals. [Harvard Business School]
It helps reveal pedagogy that works and to challenge practices that don’t.
It inspires growth and transformation.
It recognizes achievement, bestows personal satisfaction in a job well done and instills conviction in your personal path to success. [Hibajene M. Shandomo, Buffalo State College]
It nurtures student and educator engagement in any environment. [The National Survey of Student Engagement]

The jury is out and it’s a unanimous decision: direct experience + intentional reflection = true learning.

“Reflection is the instrument by which experiences are translated into dynamic knowledge.”

—Fred Korthagen, professor emeritus of the pedagogy of teacher

education at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

All sorts of industries like to talk about reflection—it’s a popular topic today. But let’s take what could be pie in the sky and get down to brass tacks: how do we reflect?

There are many methods and models you can find to help you develop a fruitful reflection practice. We find the Gibbs Reflective Cycle to be really effective. This method was developed by Professor Graham Gibbs in his 1988 book “Learning by Doing” and focuses on experiential learning.

The six-step process can easily be applied to any activity, lesson or daily practice.

Description: recreate the situation, event or activity in detail, without drawing any conclusions right away.
Feelings: become aware of the emotions and thoughts you experienced at the time of the event or activity.
Evaluation: ask yourself what went well and what did not.
Analysis: determine your attitude toward the evaluation and develop critical opinions of the experience.
Conclusion: take a step back to ask yourself what else you could have done in this situation.
Action Plan: develop specific actions to take in the future and commit yourself to growth in the relevant areas.

“We do not learn from experience; we learn from reflecting on experience.”

—John Dewey

It might be the end of the school year for students, but it’s just the beginning of your personal and professional growth. This transition provides a delightfully tangible milestone to pause and reflect. We’ve developed a template for you to use as you shift your focus from serving others to investing in yourself.

Use this Reflection Template.

We hope this template will support you in walking more confidently in the direction of your dreams. Now, bring on the summer!

Explore the Resource Center for more helpful resources. Or contact us to set up a demo.

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