Band Portfolios with Google Sites

Portfolios have come and gone and come again over the years as a way to track student growth. For our non-music colleagues, these were a little easier to maintain. Tracking and storing evidence like paper or pictures of projects was definitely much less complicated than tapes (both audio or VHS), mini disks, or CDs.  Technology though has now opened up a huge number of options for tracking music student progress over time by creating digital portfolios.

I claim zero credit for any of these ideas. In fact, it was a colleague who introduced me to the idea last fall. I know that many people are looking at ways to incorporate this though, so I wanted to share one way it could be done.

This video shows how our middle school students set portfolios up using a Google Site.  Since we use Google Classroom for all of our assignments, it's very easy to get videos from students' Drive to their Site.

A few quick tips I did not mention in video:

• Make sure your students are renaming their videos as they go along. They are often uploaded with generic number/letter names that make them difficult to sort through later.
• Check your district's policies on student created sites. Ours can create them, but their default setting is private and they can only be shared with people in our domain. This is beneficial for student protection and privacy, but unless they open their sharing with me I cannot see their site.
• I used Screencastify to make this video. When this was first assigned, I did a similar one that was a little more specific for students, then loaded it as an assignment in Google Classroom along with a list of the specific assignments and tests I wanted added to their portfolio. It's free and fairly easy to use and may be a good way to help your students with their initial set up.
• Each semester I posted a list of assignments that students needed to add to their portfolio in Google Classroom. The list usually included a couple of playing tests (every beginner added Hot Cross Buns to their portfolio), some of their written work, a practice reflection, and then I let them choose something else to add.

While a Google Site makes the most sense for our students with our current technology set up, this can easily be done with a variety of other hosting platforms such as Weebly. It could even be done through something like KidBlog because students can also add from their Drive to a blog post. The great thing is that no matter what platform you use, there are lots of options to help your students track their progress over time!

How are you doing digital portfolios? Please share your ideas in the comments!