Skills for the Future

Minding the GapMeasuring what matters means looking beyond standardized tests and scores. It’s time we start telling a student’s whole story.

Our traditional means of evaluating student growth and performance are lacking and, quite simply, out of fashion. Eighty-two percent of parents and teachers support job or career skills classes, even if it means students might spend less time in academic classes. (PDK Poll 2018) The demand for workers with all types of technical skills is expected to jump by 55% in the next decade, according to a report by The McKinsey Global Institute. This gaping chasm between what even our best schools are teaching and the expected competencies of the future is what Dr. Tony Wagner of Harvard’s Change Leadership Group calls “The Global Achievement Gap.” Closing this gap, and doing it quickly, means today’s education leaders must pause to rethink and redesign education.

Studies are clear: today’s educational paradigm has not yet bridged the gap. U.S. high school teachers estimate 63% of their graduating seniors will be adequately prepared for college- level coursework. In reality, only 25% are prepared for what is happening on the higher education frontier. (CCRSCenter) And, according to National Center for Education statistics, currently, only 32% of first-time, bachelor’s degree-seeking students graduate from university within six years.

We can no longer afford to preserve an archaic educational system that still functions much the same as it did 50 years ago – even if it used to work. The modern classroom needs to introduce and develop future ready skills in students today for a successful tomorrow. bulb Digital Portfolios believes this means handing students the reigns and appointing them as owners of their learning. It means adopting an alternative method for assessing student success. We think the answer is digital portfolios. Why? Because while digital portfolios can make hard-to-get-your-hands-on concepts visible – like process, growth over time, and soft skills – their positive effects on students are still indisputable and data-driven. Schools who faithfully implement a digital portfolio program see a 33% increase in student completion rates and 10% increase in GPA. (International Journal of ePortfolio)

“Careers education helps young people to better understand the relationship between educational goals and occupational outcomes, increasing pupil motivation and application.”

— Dr. Deirdre Hughes, Adviser to UK Minister for Transport (Skills)

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Parents and teachers support job or career skills classes even if it means students might

spend less time in academic classes.

82%

25%55%

49%Graduating seniors who are prepared for what is happening on the higher education frontier.

Schools who faithfully implement a digital portfolio program see a 33% increase in student completion rates and 10% increase in GPA.

Increase in demand for workers with all types of technical skills in the next decade.

Adults who say that standardized tests do not measure what’s really important.

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(Sources: PDK Poll 2017 & 2018, The McKinsey Global Institute, CCRSCenter & International Journal of ePortfolio)

Skills for the FutureThe soft and digital skills your students need to succeed.

The technological forecast of the future requires a shift to more modern, digital learning environments that is neither minor nor optional.

According to OECD’s Future of Work report, the two most important and growing skills for the future are:

1. Soft skills. 2. Digital skills.

Soft skills include communication, working in teams, leading, solving problems, self-organizing and critical thinking. In a press release, the Dean of Admissions of Kenyon College Diane Anci added empathic and generative selves, analytical strength, and inner lives of reflection, values, and aspirations.

Digital skills include learning to operate technology in creative ways to achieve specific outcomes and an expansive understanding of the new era of big data.

Some of the seismic shifts from traditional to modern skills that are already in motion include:

• Individual » Collaborative

• Knowledge based » Skills based

• Teacher centered » Student centered

• Learning from authorities » Learning from experience

• Limited to the classroom » Limitless—any time and any place

• Student repetition » Student creation

• Turn it in » Publish it

(@TeachingTechNix)

Unfortunately, the frameworks education currently has in place for teaching and assessing student success – namely standardized tests and textbook standards – won’t support the nuances of these new skills.

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Derrell Walker Student

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Jack LiuStudent

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If the desired destination for our students is shifting from a one-size-fits-all educational system to more personalized programs, technical schools, self-directed education and evolving careers, we need new means of getting them there.

Skills for the Future (cont.)

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“Education is about so very much more than the onramp to college or than college itself. It’s an ongoing, all-encompassing, lifelong thing. The people who flourish over time instinctively know that or behave in a way that recognizes that. They keep asking, they keep pushing, they keep expanding... One of my great worries about the college admissions mania is that it perverts the true meaning of education and collapses the true scope of it into a transcript that’s just an artificial snapshot of one moment in time.”

— Frank Bruni, University Admissions Guru and Author of Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania.

Students need new learning methods and tools to help liberate them from soulless, stagnant standards and help facilitate the acquisition of new skills.

The future depends on it.

A Tool for the Future, TodayWhy Digital Portfolios?

Today’s world is asking for unprecedented adaptability and creativity from students – and we think we should be asking the same from our teaching and learning tools. The answer is digital portfolios.

Digital portfolios teach students the digital skills necessary to adapt to and thrive in the world today and bring the often invisible soft skills to life. This means digital portfolios are not only at the foundation of student’s higher education and career pursuits, but an integral component of classroom instruction, right here and right now.

“Research (also) shows that students benefit from an awareness of the processes and strategies involved in writing, solving a problem, researching a topic, analyzing information, or describing their own observations,” a U.S Department of Education Consumer Guide reports. “Portfolios can serve as a vehicle for enhancing student awareness of these strategies for thinking about and producing work–both inside and beyond the classroom.”

Digital portfolios support primary and secondary student and educator efforts on their quest to capture and master the digital and soft skills of the future, today. How?

They improve traditional student performance and learning retention, while expanding our ideas of student success to include their future potential.• They give students grit.• They help answer the paramount questions “Who am I?” and “How do I Iearn?”

• They help students make connections, transform information into meaningful knowledge and narrate their learning journey.

• They give students and teachers “the long view” and connect their classrooms to other important areas of life.

• Digital portfolios help students nurture a digital identity.• They open the door to metacognitive learning. • They facilitate the transition from being a digital consumer to a digital contributor.• They provide opportunities for more expansive, full time and personalized learning.

• They create the opportunity for reflection.• Portfolio initiatives catalyze learning-centered institutional change.

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Why bulb Digital Portfolios?bulb was built with the future in mind.

bulb Digital Portfolios are designed to improve the way students learn and teachers teach, allowing students to express understanding over time and be able to refine, share, receive feedback and showcase the best work for a lifetime of learning.

At bulb Digital Portfolios, we make this process easy for students and teachers to create beautiful portfolios where their knowledge, understanding and accomplishments are expressed completely and accurately. It is a space where students practice voicing their opinions, presenting solutions to challenges and displaying their finest work beautifully, simply and powerfully.

As students and educators turn a keener eye to technical education and career formation, digital portfolios will play a continually deeper role in classroom life. All the time, students are employing “invisible” and 3-dimensional skills that are hard to demonstrate and evaluate on paper. Therefore, student ability cannot be reduced to a score, but rather must be told as a story.

bulb Digital Portfolios specializes in making the somewhat “invisible” achievements and competencies accessible, assessable and adoptable.

Here are some of the ways students and educators are using bulb Digital Portfolios to document, enrich and leverage student competency in skills for the future:

Display process and growth over time Proving your potential to a future school or employer means documenting evidence of your growth. With bulb Digital Portfolios, capture the sometimes elusive and less visible process work that goes into long projects and big ideas. Use bulb to:• Document your process • Reflect on where you started and where you are now• Ideate goals for the future• Prove your past success and future potential

Internship Logs and JournalsPreparing students for a future in higher education and career means giving them opportunities

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Yasmeen TizaniStudent

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to shadow and work in different professional disciplines. Using bulb Digital Portfolios, students can capture their experience as a student-teacher or nurse-in-training, for example, with first-hand documentation such as images, video and audio.

Career Exploration Students can conduct research on an area they are interested in working in through facilitating interviews with professionals in their fields, producing training literature, watching informative videos – and pulling these multimedia resources into bulb for reflection and presentation.

Competitions and Moments of AchievementStudents are creating and competing in specialized clubs and teams at incredible levels, from FFA to DECA. bulb Digital Portfolios provides a beautiful space to not only document student awards and successes from these events, but to capture all their work in action. Make student awards and achievements come to life by showcasing video clips of their presentations or photos of their final submissions.

Badges and Credentialing A bulb digital portfolio is a professional place for students to showcase their rigorous and relevant career skills, experiences and certifications. By documenting projects, journaling about experiences, showcasing certifications and curating best work, they are building evidence for their potential and ability in continuing education and career work. This sets them apart from a crowd and creates more paths to college and career opportunities.

“Work experience and other forms of employer engagement demonstrate to young people the links between what they do in the classroom and how those skills ultimately will be used in the labour market.”

— Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills at OECD cited in (Mann and Huddleston 2015, 28).

“While other programs come and go, bulb Digital Portfolios stays with students for life. My students continue to leverage their portfolio well into their college and professional years.”

— Dawn Feinberg, Teacher at Greeley West High School

Why bulb Digital Portfolios? (cont.)

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Chris TayorEducator

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Partnering with You to Create Paths to the Future for All StudentsHow to leverage bulb to rethink and redesign education.

A bulb digital portfolio is as dynamic as you are. Whether you’re an educator trying to land your first teaching job, a student completing your internship at the hospital, or a beginner simply working at your technology fluency, bulb is the professional place to be documenting your experiences, collecting artifacts of your learning and promoting your skills, interests and future goals.

Ultimately, the goal of education is to develop the hearts and minds of our students so they can have a positive, lasting impact on our communities and the world. When our world changes, our students change, and so should our means of educating them.

The reformation of education has long been overdue – and we believe digital portfolios are the harbingers of such hope.

“It’s (digital portfolios) just one more thing to set them apart from other students who don’t have electronic portfolios. I showed students my portfolio and explained that it actually exempted me from an entry level education course in college and it also got me my first teaching job.”

— Ashley Baker, Mentorship Teacher at Westlake High School in Eanes ISD in Austin, TX.

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©bulb Digital Portfolios, Inc., Fall 2018