AN OPEN STANDARD AND REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION FOR DIGITAL PORTFOLIOS

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AN OPEN STANDARD AND REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION FOR
DIGITAL PORTFOLIOS

• Georgiou Eleni
• Stassopoulou Athena
• Dikaiakos Marios
• Funding by the Research Promotion Foundation of
  Cyprus in the context of the APSIFAE project
• Project partners Intercollege (coordinator)
• University of Cyprus
• Pedagogical Institute
  of Cyprus

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Our Contribution

• Using XML and JAVA as platforms to support the
  development of open-standard environments for
  digital portfolios.

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Our Contribution

• Using XML and JAVA as platforms to support the
  development of open-standard environments for
  digital portfolios.
• A reference XML-grammar specification for DPs.

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Our Contribution

• Using XML and JAVA as platforms to support the
  development of open-standard environments for
  digital portfolios.
• A reference XML-grammar specification for DPs.
• A prototype implementation for a Digital
  Portfolio Development Environment supporting
• Open standards platforms.
• Portability across different Operating Systems.
• Accessibility through Universal Client Interface.
• A modular and extensible design.
• Easy portability to Internet and the Web.

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A Use-case Scenario
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Outline

• Introduction
• Design
• Implementation
• Extensibility
• Conclusions future work
• Acknowledgments

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Teacher Portfolios

• Teacher Portfolios are organized collections of
  information describing the major strengths and
  teaching achievements of educators.
• A teacher portfolio contains, organizes, and
  presents documents and artifacts related to the
  teachers educational activities.
• The adoption of teacher portfolios and portfolio
  assessment by educational systems can support
  performance-based education.
• Evidence from oneself This category presents all
  selected information on teaching responsibilities
  and activities along with solid evidence of their
  effectiveness, as well as any further information
  about the personality of the teacher, inside and
  outside the school.
• Evidence from others A common finding that
  emerged from the requirements analysis phase is
  the emphasis on documents describing the
  evaluations of others. Teachers assemble a body
  of evidence to demonstrate what other people have
  to say about their teaching competence across
  different areas

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Towards Digitized Portfolios

• Storage, maintenance and distribution of
  information.
• Multi-media presentation of information
• Most of the information is already in digital
  form

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Digital Portfolios challenges

• Many digital formats are proprietary
• Fast evolvement on storage media technologies
• Transforming old digital archives into modern
  formats
• Dealing with the digitization process
• Browsing digital information

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Digital Portfolios our vision

• a hypermedia presentation of information
  (documents and various artifacts) related to the
  educational activities of teachers, organized
  according to an open standard describing the
  organization and semantics of its contents.

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Information Architecture
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Outline

• Introduction
• Design
• Implementation
• Extensibility
• Conclusions future work
• Acknowledgments

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Basic functionalities
Log into system set workspace
Present information
Publish information
Update information
The System
Upload items material
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Functional requirements

• Inserting standardized information
• A complete and correct teachers portfolio must
  contain information from all nine categories
  mentioned above.
• Change, update, delete information
• This functionality is considered to be crucial
  for the system, since the easy update of
  information is what makes the DIGIPOE system more
  useful than the traditional portfolio.
• Set information privacy levels
• The user must be able to choose if a piece of
  information is public or private. This enables
  the user to have complete control over the data
  inside the portfolio. Private data cannot be
  published.
• Publish information
• The user should be able to choose which parts of
  the portfolio he/she wants to publish. The
  published portfolio should be user friendly and
  in a platform free format

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User Interface Requirements

• simple interface
• platform-independent interface with wide
  acceptance
• minimalist environment
• easy installation

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System design

• The diagram shows the main functionalities of
  the system divided into three levels, according
  to the requirements and specifications

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Outline

• Introduction
• Design
• Implementation
• Extensibility
• Conclusions future work
• Acknowledgments

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System technology
XML The systems database Is an
XML file
JAVA For user interaction and
interface, servlets are used

• What is XML
• Why XML
• What is JAVA
• Why JAVA

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XML JAVA
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Subsystems based on functionalities

• Present information on webpage level
• Update information on webpage level
• Uploading material on webpage level
• Publish information on webpage level

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Database description analysis

• The nine main nodes of the xml database
• 1. lessoninfo Lessons
• 2. activitiesinfo Activities
• 3. personal Personal information
• 4. studentworkinfo Students work information
• 5. cv Curriculum vitae
• 6. feedbackinfo Feedback
• 7. journalinfo Journal
• 8. teachingphilosophy Teaching philosophy
• 9. schoolproblems School problems

XML database
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Extensibility

• Changes in the information architecture and
  backward compatibility
• Use of Object Orientation and changes in the
  software
• Deployment on Internet

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Conclusions Future Work

• Conclusions
• a Digital Portfolio Development Environment opens
  many opportunities for enhancing the
  self-assessment and evaluation of educators
• Future work
• Add more features like search, advanced search
  etc
• Improve systems design

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Thanks!

• All members of the APSIFAE research group for
  their collaboration, feedback and work in the
  context of APSIFAE
• A. Constantinou
• Th. Gagatsis
• G. Giallourides
• M. Kallidou
• L. Kyriakides
• G. Makrides
• A. Papadopoulos
• A. Savva
• The Research Promotion Foundation of Cyprus for
  providing financial support.

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System overview

• VIDEO GOES HERE
• Too big (size)!!

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the end
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Personal information

• This category includes personal information of
  educators, such as communication information,
  personal photo, some comments or thoughts in
  general.

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Curriculum vitae

• The teacher can complete his/her CV, according
  to the European format. The teacher can also add
  reports from inspectors and letters of
  recommendations and copies of certificates
  acquired by a teacher from his/her participation
  to training activities, pre- and in-service.

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Teaching philosophy

• This category includes a reflective statement by
  the teacher, describing his/her personal teaching
  philosophy, strategies, objectives, and
  methodologies.

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Student work

• In student work section, the teacher can add
  tests and samples of student work.

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Lessons

• This section includes copies of lesson or unit
  plans, handouts given to students, assignments,
  worksheets, multimedia material recordings from
  teaching a typical class.

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Feedback

• This category includes feedback and comments by
  a teaching observer, peer or administrator,
  recommendations and student evaluations.

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Journal

• This a professional journal about what the
  teacher learned from teaching and learning.

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Activities

• Information and multimedia material from
  participation in out-of-school or in school
  activities is included here.

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School problems

• The teacher can add all the problems she/he
  encountered during the years of teaching, and how
  all those problems were solved.

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• User may browse the system to view existing
  information in his/her portfolio. The browse
  screen pulls the data from the database and
  presents the results to the user.

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• lt?xml version"1.0" encoding"ISO-8859-7"?gt
• ltapsifaegt
• ltlessoninfogt
• ltlesson sdate"" fdate"" mode"" title""
  context""gt
• ltlessonlink path"" type"" date"" title""
  description"" mode""/gt
• lt/lessongt
• lt/lessoninfogt
• ltactivitiesinfogt
• ltactivity date"" from"" score"" title""
  context"" mode""gt
• ltactivitylink path"" type"" date"" title""
  description"" mode""/gt
• lt/activitygt
• lt/activitiesinfogt
• ltpersonalgt
• ltnameinfo fname"" lname"" title""
  institution"" department""/gt
• ltphone phonenumber"" mode""/gt
• ltfax faxnumber"" mode""/gt
• ltemail eaddress"" mode""/gt

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• UpdateInformationServlet is responsible for
  receiving the new information or updates (insert,
  delete, change), and SuccessServlet is
  responsible for writing the new data in database,
  and at the same time provide success messages to
  the user.

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• All files are copied to workspace, and then
  described in the Dom tree. Next, all updated
  information is written back into database

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• Default is the basic class of the system, where
  the Dom tree is created from database. Next, all
  other class extend the Default and share the same
  information. PresentInformationServlet presents
  all info to the user.

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• This class simply prints in html files all
  information the user wants to publish. These
  files exist in the users workspace.

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JAVA servlets

• Efficiency
• Servlets are faster than cgi, because they use
  threads instead processes
• Portability
• Servlets are as portal as any other java
  application.
• Credibility
• Servlets will generally not crash the computer
  main frame, because they run in a Java Virtual
  Machine.
• Simplicity
• Servlets are easy to build and apply.
• Power
• A variety of free, Java-based software that can
  be used to parse XML grammars JDBC, RMI,
  JavaMail, ?.?p ...