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ASSESSMENT &
TECHNOLOGY FORUM
June 28, 2003

Contact:

Randall Eden � randall.eden@rsmart.com

What purpose does your assessment tool serve? 

The Mosaic� electronic portfolio is an open-source, Java-based electronic portfolio system designed for use mainly in secondary and higher education.  The flexible design of Mosaic� can be adapted to a variety of different purposes and audiences elsewhere as well. It can be hosted at or accessed by a school, district or institution as an adjunct to traditional methods of assessment, evaluation and professional development tracking.  Robust yet easy to use, the Mosaic� electronic portfolio was designed to empower individuals, or their teachers in earlier grades, to create purposeful records of accomplishment and collections of work that illustrate progress and achievement over time.  The key focus of the Mosaic� electronic portfolio is the individual:  the application helps users assume an active and central role in their own learning, development and management of information.  By using the Mosaic� electronic portfolio, individuals can manage their personal information on multiple levels throughout their academic careers and beyond using the principles of collection, reflection, selection and connection.

Mosaic� guides users in the collection and organization of the formative or summative evidence that chronicles how institutional, community or personal standards, goals, outcomes or competencies that have been addressed by the user.  Using a series of templates that can be customized by the institution, the system invites users to upload documents, multimedia or other files, create hyperlinks to relevant URLs or respond to pre-defined surveys or inventories. As these are being entered into Mosaic�, the system can be arranged to guide users to reflect upon particular pieces of evidence or the processes by which they were created.  Where appropriate, this collective record can be used to reinforce the value of an individual�s �academic currency� as measured by more traditional means.

Because frequent guidance from others is crucial to personal, academic and professional development, Mosaic� has a built-in feedback loop by which portfolio owners may create shared views of their personal information for others.  These shared views contain only those elements of a portfolio that the individual desires to share.   Peers, faculty, mentors, advisors, counselors or supervisors can then offer feedback in response to these �mini-portfolios� in real time.

In an era of shrinking budgets and service cuts, Mosaic� provides schools and districts with a common sense solution to track progress toward standards mastery for a variety of purposes.  If you are not familiar with the concept, open source software is initially developed by a single organization, but is then made available in source code format at little or no cost to any organization that wishes to use it.  Widely used open source software will have some central authority to which error fixes and improvements can be submitted for review and distribution.  Research supports the idea that open source software is more error free than proprietary software due to the large number of people reviewing and offering improvements to the code.  Users of open source software also cite other benefits to open source such as freedom from a single commercial vendor controlling the product and protection from a single source of support going out of business, as reasons for �going open source.� 

 

Please indicate which category best describes your tool:

a.        _____ Tools that allow users to ask questions of data (tools for collecting and disaggregating data, including surveys, self-reported data and standardized data)

b.       ____ Tools for observation (including teacher observation and observation of student behavior or performance)

c.        _X__ Tools for reviewing student products (including electronic or digital portfolios)

Who is the audience for this assessment tool?

K-12:                                               Students, peers, teachers, building level administrators, district level administrators

Colleges/Universities:                 Students, faculty, faculty developers, faculty/career/professional advisors, deans, provosts               

Other:                                             Accreditation organizations

What technology is used?

Operating System:       RedHat Linux 7.3 (fully patched).

Database:                      Oracle 8i/9i; MySQL.

JDK Version:   Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition

 (build 1.4.1-b21).

Web Server:                  Tomcat (standalone only)/Apache 1.3 fully patched through up2date. (Production).

Servlet Engine:             Jakarta-Tomcat version 4.1.18; connecter used is the mod_jk.so version comparable to the servlet engine version.

Hardware:                      At least 800 MHz Intel processor, 256 MB RAM and 100MB free hard drive space for install.  Allocated space for upload storage is variable.

Network:                        No special requirements.

 

Approximately how many people are currently using this system?

 

K-12 Students

 

K-12 Teachers

 

Teacher education students

 

Teacher education faculty

X

Other: Currently over 10,000 University students and faculty; product is now being made available for K-12 schools and districts

What professional development (for students or assessors) is required to use the tool?

As the only commercial provider of an open source ePortfolio solution, the r-smart group is proud to offer a wide array of optional implementation, customization, on-demand development, hosting, training and support services to K-12 schools and districts.   As with any technology-based initiative, some level of staff development is required to implement Mosaic�.  The r-smart group makes available several best practice-based workshops that address the goals for system implementation identified by the school or district.  Examples of structured training experiences include the use of Mosaic� for purposes of authentic assessment, self-assessment, re-certification, school accreditation, guidance and counseling, college entrance and job placement; each session is generally a day in duration.

 

To use the tool effectively, what else should the school have in place?

Staff development participants should be familiar with their state standards frameworks, certification requirements, or site goals established at the beginning of the current accreditation cycle.  Additionally, participants will maximize the benefit of Mosaic� for portfolio users by being familiar with the basic requirements of rubric creation and application prior to the sessions.  Familiarity with the use of hyperlink creation, the uploading of files in a web environment and the use of email are also required.

 

From a technical perspective, stakeholders should have a familiarity with the open source movement in software development.  System administrators should be familiar with the installation and configuration applications in environments with open source components. 

If you haven't already addressed it, how does your tool help students or teachers demonstrate that they are meeting standards?

Mosaic� helps districts, schools, teachers and students demonstrate mastery of state standards or other pre-defined goals by providing a customizable, easy to use copy of the relevant framework to which formative or summative evidence is referenced by portfolio owners.  If desired, Mosaic� may be structured to provide easy to use locations for recording reflections or other annotations that relate directly to each artifact.  As the body of evidence grows, various portions may be shared with peers, teachers or other assessors who provide feedback to the portfolio owner for a variety of purposes.

 

What questions would you like participants to address?

 

  • Are you planning on implementing an ePortfolio system at your site?
  • What role, if any, do you see for an electronic portfolio system, and authentic assessment in general, in assisting LEAs to address the mandates of No Child Left Behind?
  • What types of data at the class, school and district level would you like to see available within an ePortfolio system like Mosaic�?
  • Which systems already in existence at your school or district do you think should be integrated with an ePortfolio system like Mosaic�?
  • Do you think that an ePortfolio system like Mosaic has any role in the following processes:

o                    School accreditation?

o                    Evaluation of certified candidates for your school or district?

o                    Guidance and counseling?

o                    Job placement and college entrance?

o                    Initial teacher certification or recertification?

o                    Other?

  • Do you believe open source software is a reliable alternative to proprietary software?
  • Would the availability of professional implementation and support services of equal or better quality to those of proprietary products influence your acceptance/ adoption of open source software?