Last week I met with students taking part in the Presidential Leadership Academy at the Schreyer Honors College. If you aren't familiar with the three-year program, I urge you to visit the site and have a look. What I'm excited about is this year, the new students (sophomores) are creating and keeping e-portfolios/blogs in addition to their required coursework and activities. Why is this addition important? For one, these students are a sample of the best on campus. They are leaders now, and future leaders in the workforce. Creating an e-portfolio with three years left of school is going to help them start to keep track of who they are (interests, studies, thoughts) currently and where they are going (growth, reflection) in the future.
Keeping an e-portfolio was just one reason that the Presidential Leadership Academy decided to implement the Blogs at Penn State platform. The other was simply to blog. These students attend a lot of speeches and outside activities that they'll want to write up (both for others and for their future use). What better way to keep track of what they've seen and heard than to add that information to their portfolio for others to watch ideas unfold.
A key component of the program is to share learning opportunities with others. Faculty will also be keeping track of what the students are attending, working on, and posting information about. The Blogs at Penn State's PSU Voices makes this simple. By going to the Blog Search page, anyone can search the tags that people have added to their posts. The Presidential Leadership Academy decided on PLA for their main tag and if I punch that into the search I can see several pages of results already! By adding additional tags to their posts, they can further break down the results to those relevant to a specific topic such as a speech or field trip.
Probably my favorite part of working with these students was the sheer interest in learning the platform. The questions were very high-level as they wanted to know the best way to make the space work for them. Also, it was great to see growth and "a ha" moments right in the training. One student was especially hesitant about signing into the platform for fear of "breaking something." By the end, she was past the worry and quite happy blogging away. I look forward to searching their blogs in the future and seeing the different directions they'll be taking as they start to grow!
Keeping an e-portfolio was just one reason that the Presidential Leadership Academy decided to implement the Blogs at Penn State platform. The other was simply to blog. These students attend a lot of speeches and outside activities that they'll want to write up (both for others and for their future use). What better way to keep track of what they've seen and heard than to add that information to their portfolio for others to watch ideas unfold.
A key component of the program is to share learning opportunities with others. Faculty will also be keeping track of what the students are attending, working on, and posting information about. The Blogs at Penn State's PSU Voices makes this simple. By going to the Blog Search page, anyone can search the tags that people have added to their posts. The Presidential Leadership Academy decided on PLA for their main tag and if I punch that into the search I can see several pages of results already! By adding additional tags to their posts, they can further break down the results to those relevant to a specific topic such as a speech or field trip.
Probably my favorite part of working with these students was the sheer interest in learning the platform. The questions were very high-level as they wanted to know the best way to make the space work for them. Also, it was great to see growth and "a ha" moments right in the training. One student was especially hesitant about signing into the platform for fear of "breaking something." By the end, she was past the worry and quite happy blogging away. I look forward to searching their blogs in the future and seeing the different directions they'll be taking as they start to grow!
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