Use digital communication and collaboration tools to communicate locally and globally with students, parents, peers, and the larger community. (ISTE, 2011)
As part of the SPU master’s program in Digital Education Leadership (DEL), each student builds a personal portfolio on the web that summarizes their learning and experiences. This is an incredibly valuable asset, and something I wanted for my computer science students. At first, this may seem like adding more work to an existing (probably full) lesson plan. However, most of the computer science lesson plans include a group project in which a set of students work on a significant application. In essence, my computer science students are already knowledge constructors, we just have to figure out how to communicate their work to other students, parents, peers, and the computing community.
I have started to move all of my group projects to GitHub Classroom. This is a version of the popular GitHub website that has been customized for education. One of the GitHub features is GitHub Pages, which provides members a free, digital portfolio website of their software projects. By having the students use the same GitHub account for all of their computer programming courses, they can build a significant project portfolio on GitHub Pages.
Using GitHub pages has provided multiple learning experiences for my students. The first one is familiarity with using Git source control software. Many software startups use Git in some form to manage their code base, and my students will be getting a head start on technology they are likely to encounter in the computer industry. Second, building a GitHub pages site will get students familiar with creating, managing, and maintaining an external website. Although some students take HTML and other web development courses, not all have actually built a website from the ground up. Third, the GitHub pages site gives students a way to communicate the great work they have done to other students, parents, and employers. Finally, GitHub is the entry point into the software open source community. Students that build their own GitHub site will have a vehicle to collaborate with the open source community on their work.
References
- International Society for Technology in Education. (ISTE; 2011). Standards for Coaches. https://id.iste.org/docs/pdfs/20-14_ISTE_Standards-C_PDF.pdf.
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