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These stories demonstrate Three Ring’s potential as both an instructional application and an assessment tool.
“Chief Education Officer” Steve Silvius reached out to introduce EmergingEdTech readers to Three Ring [2], a free application that allows teachers to quickly and easily create digital portfolios of student work, using a wide variety of devices for input. Knowing that the best way to understand how an application can be used in a meaningful way by teachers is to learn about real world uses of the tool in an academic setting, Steve shared these examples of ways in which this recently introduced application is being used in the classroom.
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- A High School STEM teacher had students presenting on a project they had worked on all year to build a new product and market it. He taped each group’s presentation, gave feedback after on the tape, and had the students watch the tape at home that night…all in a few clicks. The class iterated this process over and over, incorporating peer feedback and self assessment before finally presenting to the judges a few weeks later.
- An Elementary Music Teacher taped short segments of students singing solos, improvising beats, and similar skills aligned to the state music standards. She then re-taped the skills later in the year. Since the skills are all tagged using Three Ring’s tagging functionality, it is just a matter of searching for the tag and the student’s name and you can immediately juxtapose the videos to see student growth.
- An elementary math teacher had students working in groups on an involved application problem. They did the work with blocks and on large sheets of rolled paper. Both the teacher and a student-recorder circulated the room and documented the block work and the paperwork for each group, tagged to the applicable standard and the new CC Standard for Mathematical Practice that the students were demonstrating.
- A 3rd Grade SPED teacher had a small group of students completing sentences. She immediately took a picture of all the papers and then projected her Three Ring account on the smart board. The students then conducted peer reviews, deciding if each other’s work was an appropriate way to complete the sentence, and having a dialogue about other possibilities around the task.
- A middle school art teacher finishing a project and had every student line up and quickly hold their work against the white board while she took a picture before they left class. Moving through the line in just minutes, she created the next entry in their progress portfolios despite having only one device for the class (imagine how easy this can be done in 1-1 and BYOD classes).
- A HS English teacher documented exemplary character sketches while students were studying The Crucible, then shared these exemplars at a later class as students re-worked their first attempt. She plans to use the exemplars next year as well. Later in that class, the students began debating the themes of the book and she other students immediately start recording the debate which was seamlessly added to the participating students’ portfolios.
To learn more about Three Ring check out this brief product demo video [3] and these reviews from Hacked Education [4] and Mashable [5].
Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
Using Google Sites to create e-portfolios for students
4 New Technology Tools for Measuring Learning Outcomes [6]
E-Portfolios are the cover story for Campus Technology for November
About Kelly Walsh [11]
Kelly Walsh is Chief Information Officer at The College of Westchester, in White Plains, NY, where he also teaches. In 2009, Walsh founded EmergingEdTech.com. As an education and instructional technology advocate, he frequently delivers presentations on a variety of related topics at schools and conferences across the U.S. Walsh is also an author, and online educator, regularly running Flipped Class Workshops [12] online. His eBook, the Flipped Classroom Workshop-in-a-Book is available here [13]. Kelly also writes, records, and performs original music ... stop by kwalshmusic.com [14] and have a listen!
[Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, or those of other writers, and not those of my employer. - K. Walsh]