In 2009, a new core unit was introduced into the new South Australian Certificate of Education (SACE) called ‘Personal Learning Plan‘ (PLP).  This Stage 1 subject is “designed to help students make decisions about their personal development, education and training.”

To support the teaching and learning in the PLP subject, the SACE Board decided to introduce the Studywiz e-portfolio system, to allow students to “gather and store evidence of their learning, while being able to refine and add to their body of evidence during their SACE studies. The tool also allows teachers to deliver the Personal Learning Plan in a contemporary way for students, with the flexibility to access their work anywhere, anytime.”

Currently there are around 60 South Australian (SA) Secondary schools using an e-portfolio with their students for the PLP subject, with 40 more schools’ staff trained and ready to go, and an additional 40 schools will start in 2nd semester 2010 and 2011.

Paul Heinrich, Project Manager for the roll out of the SACE PLP e-portfolio system says the key messages from the introduction of an e-portfolio includes:

• the introduction of the e-portfolio system has been a change management process which is offering teachers a 21st century approach to teaching and learning for the new millennium
• the most successful use of the e-portfolio for PLP is when the subject is NOT taught as an ‘ICT Subject’ where students are shown how to use the e-portfolio system, but when the class time is used to teach the skills of PLP, and the students access their e-portfolio outside of class time either at lunchtime or at home
• teachers using this facilitated approach recognise that this does take some getting used to at the start but after looking back over a semester of doing it this way they wonder how they ever did it the traditional way
• this highlights that the teacher need not be the expert in using technology anymore, as the students already have the ICT skills to use the e-portfolio

Paul notes that the PLP e-portfolio won’t be able to do everything that everyone wants, including being a ’social networking tool’, but this is about formal learning and we have ‘Facebook, etc.’ for socialising online.

The PLP E-portfolio is free to all SA Secondary Schools whether they are in the public, catholic or independent sectors.  This system has the capacity for up to 100,000 users. In the first semester of 2010 usage was approximately 2000 students and 400 teachers.

Although students can not continue to use their PLP e-portfolio after leaving secondary school, they are able to ‘export’ their work as a ’snapshot’ of their senior secondary schooling.

This blog post was written with the kind input from Paul Heinrich, Senior Consultant, Intec Group
Email: Paul.Heinrich@intecgroup.com.au
Website: www.intecgroup.com.au

Tags: 21st century teaching, careerportfolio, digifolio, digital portfolio, e-portfolio, e-portfolios, epf, eportfolio, eportfolios, facilitated learning, interactive portfolio, life portfolio, lifestream, online portfolio, Paul Heinrich, Personal Learning Plan, personal learning space, personal online space, PLP, SACE, SACE Board, Schools, social networking, Studywiz, virtual learning space, virtual portfolio

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 at 6:55 am and is filed under Tools, career development, e-portfolios, job seeking/hunting, personalised learning, social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.