LiveText Student Portfolios

As part of ISU’s First-Year Programs, new students begin to capture their student experience and learn about technology by developing online portfolios. College LiveText^TM is the online system where students log in and add to pre-designed templates for their major or college. These templates can be for assignments, projects, lesson plans, and portfolios. The program allows a relatively easy way for faculty and students to align standards with coursework.  Faculty members in the College of Education are already using these portfolios for assessment and accreditation purposes.  This method of assessment keeps students’ artifacts and the assessment outcomes in one location.  This allows students to easily revisit previous work and note growth over time.  Additionally, this allows administration to aggregate data for program evaluation and to meet the growing need to provide student outcome data for accreditation purposes.

Ultimately, students will complete assignments and projects in LiveText for several courses.  These documents can then be linked into one portfolio that the student will present at the completion of his/her degree.  Work done outside of LiveText can also be attached into any LiveText document; this includes such electronic documents as Microsoft Word documents and Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.  The ability to link standards to assignments and to the portfolio itself is particularly important for the certification process.

Through the sharing process, students submit their work to professors.  Depending on the rights the student gives the professor, the work can be viewed, edited, or reviewed and assessed.  For assessment, professors can design their own course specific or assignment specific assessments, which they are able to use to evaluate student work.  Once student work has been reviewed and assessed, it is submitted back to the student.

Another important advantage to LiveText is the private domain.  Student work and personal information is not searchable or accessible to anyone unless the student has given him/her access to his/her information.  Students do have the ability to share work with individuals without a LiveText account by creating a visitor account which allows for the portfolio to be viewed by any individual who is given the visitor code.

To learn more, visit http://www.livetext.com.