About PebblePad
Overview
PebblePad is much more than an eportfolio. It is a Personal Learning Space being used in learning contexts as diverse as schools, colleges, universities and professional bodies; by learners, teachers and assessors; for Personal Development Planning, Continuing Professional Development, and Learning, Teaching and Assessment.
PebblePad has been designed with the learner at the centre of the system. It provides scaffolding to help users create records of learning, achievement, and aspiration, and has a reflective structure underpinning all of its core elements.
PebblePad supports personal learning whilst providing a powerful suite of tools to improve learning in institutional contexts. Conversation, communication and collaboration are easy in PebblePad; items can be shared with trusted individuals, published to group pages, or made public to the world-wide web.
Over time users can create, store, and review multiple assets which can be aggregated into powerful presentational ‘eportfolios’ to provide rich stories of learning or achievement for myriad purposes including:
- Assessment (formal and informal)
- Advancement (promotion or transition)
- Appraisal (self - peer - 360)
- Accreditation (professional bodies)
- Application (course, job, funding)
- Articulation (informative story telling)
Definitions
There is still a great deal of debate about what an ‘ePortfolio’ actually is and this debate is unlikely to ease because ePortfolios come in many shapes, sizes and colours. To add to the confusion, the term ‘ePortfolio’ means different things to different people – a repository, a presentation, a system, a private space, a social networking space, or a combination of any of these. There are now many tools available that profess to be an ‘ePortfolio’ and all look different, have different purposes, or target different audiences.
Our concept of an ‘ePortfolio’, an ‘ePortfolio System’, and a ‘Personal Learning Space’, all of which are encompassed within PebblePad, is as follows:
ePortfolio – as an asset
An ‘ePortfolio’ is a purposeful aggregation of digital items – ideas, evidence, reflections, feedback, etc – which ‘presents’ a selected audience with evidence of a person’s learning and/or ability.
ePortfolio – as a system
An ideal ‘ePortfolio System’ provides the tools to create, present, and share eportfolios. It allows users, in any of their learning identities, to selectively upload and store records of experience, learning, and ability; it allows these records to be linked, augmented or evidenced by other data sources and allows the user to integrate institutional data with their personal data.
It facilitates self–awareness, promotes reflection, supports enrichment through commentary and feedback from the recipients of shared assets. It grows, develops and matures as the user accesses it, without constraint, over time. It provides tools for aggregating assets in multiple forms, for telling myriad stories to diverse audiences, and ensures absolute user–control over what is shared, with whom, for what purpose and for how long.
It is a personal repository; a personal journal; a feedback and collaboration system; and a digital theatre – where the audience is by invitation only.
NB: It is important to note that not all systems used for creating eportfolios, nor all those that claim to be ‘ePortfolio systems’, contain the full range of functionality as the above ‘ideal’ describes.
Personal Learning Space
A ‘Personal Learning Space’ does all of the above AND facilitates the process of life–long and life-wide learning. A personal learning space has inbuilt tools and functions that generate learning as distinct from simply recording and evidencing learning. Internal wizards prompt the user to consider diverse aspects of their experiences and facilitate the process of making sense of, and learning from, these experiences to a much deeper level.
It is not assumed that learners naturally have the skills widely associated with creating a ‘good’ eportfolio – collecting, selecting, reflecting, interpreting, synthesising, evidencing, and presenting. A personal learning space supports users in the development of these skills by scaffolding the process of creating meaningful assets. These skills are life-long and life–wide and their development is independent of formal learning environments and externally defined frameworks and criteria. This is what distinguishes a ‘Personal Learning Space’.
Design Philosophy
PebblePad is designed with flexibility and usability in mind. It is a generic system, designed to accommodate the recording of experience independent of place, time or context. It is as relevant to the new student as to the professional with years of work experience. The interface is purposely simple and friendly, making the system accessible even to those with minimal IT skills. There are, however, many options for customisation and personalisation for the more advanced and confident users.
While PebblePad has its origins in the university environment, its design philosophy is one of learner ownership and control:
- It is a space for personal learning that belongs to the learner not the institution;
- it is populated by the learner not their teacher;
- it is primarily concerned with supporting learning not assessment;
- it is for life-long and life–wide learning not a single episode or a single course;
- it allows learners to present multiple stories of learning rather than being a simple aggregation of competencies;
- and, importantly, access to it is controlled by the learner who is able to invite feedback to support personal growth and understanding.
To facilitate the use of PebblePad in an organisational context, additional ‘institution’ tools have been designed to enable submission of PebblePad tasks for feedback and/or assessment without compromising the privacy of the learner’s personal space.
A core component of the PebblePad design, and the factor that sets it apart from other ‘eportfolio systems’, are the inbuilt wizards that support the process of personal learning. These wizards prompt the learner to consider diverse aspects of their experience and provide a step–by–step process for the creation of assets (experience records) within the system. This scaffolded creation of assets, as distinct from uploading existing files, encourages the learner to make sense of and reflect on their experiences to a much deeper level.
Principles
- PebblePad supports personal learning
A group of people can share a common experience but may learn different things from it, make sense of their learning in different ways, and want to document or evidence their learning differently. The flexibility of the PebblePad interface supports all of these individual differences and enables you to engage in personal learning in your own way. - PebblePad offers a safe and private place which is owned and controlled by you, the user
PebblePad is totally private. It is a fundamental principle of PebblePad that nobody else can enter your PebblePad. There is no interface for an administrator to log into your account because that would contradict the core principle of personal ownership. You can choose, at any time, to allow others to view and interact with one or more of your assets but no–one ever has access to your entire PebblePad. - PebblePad is multi-purpose – but purposeful
Pebblepad can be used for any number of educational, professional and personal processes. It can be used by anyone who wants to record, reflect on and learn from experience. Regardless of who you are or what you are using PebblePad for, the structure and scaffolding within the system makes its use purposeful. Far from being a ‘file dump’, PebblePad helps you make sense of experience and create a record of that experience that you can draw upon for all sorts of reasons, for all kinds of audiences. - PebblePad supports learning wherever it happens, whenever it happens
Any experience offers opportunities for learning. Most institutional tools are typically designed to capture learning that takes place in formal places in structured ways. PebblePad supports the idea that learning is ‘context-free’: it takes place all the time, not only in the courses you study in educational settings. PebblePad helps you to identify, record, and create links between learning experiences wherever and whenever they occur. - PebblePad helps to scaffold and surface the process of learning
The wizards and forms in PebblePad support users through the process of creating meaningful records of experience and linking these records to develop rich understandings of learning. This scaffolding not only benefits users but also makes the process of learning evident for anyone with whom these records are shared. Supervisors, tutors and/or peers can assess not only the product of the learning activity but more importantly the process of skill and knowledge acquisition. Together with the capacity for ongoing formative feedback, PebblePad becomes a powerful tool for teaching and learning. - PebblePad is underpinned, and informed, by a reflective structure
At every step of the way PebblePad users are prompted to consider ‘Why?’, ‘So what?’, ‘What if?’ and ‘What now?’ This inbuilt reflective structure is what transforms PebblePad into a space where learning is generated rather than simply collected and evidenced. - PebblePad gets people talking and helps users construct their narratives
The reflective structure of PebblePad is conversational – it prompts further thought and exploration. Anything created in PebblePad can be shared with one or more others in both private and group spaces. The capacity for comments, feedback and collaboration facilitates dialogue between users in these spaces. This sharing and dialogue contributes to the creation of much richer, more meaningful records of learning. - PebblePad can accompany you throughout your life and across all your activities
Over time, your needs and interests will change but the assets you have stored in PebblePad are always there for you to revisit and to use in different ways. Because PebblePad is ‘context-free’ you can continue to evidence learning and experiences wherever you go and whatever you do. PebblePad has the flexibility to be of value to you in any environment and at any stage of your life. Ideally it is the place where you record, reflect on, and learn from your journey and share it with others.
Benefits
The following are some of the key benefits that our customers have identified through the use of PebblePad:
… for individual learners
- I have my own authoring and publishing tool that is entirely controlled by me, yet hosted within a secure environment.
- My account doesn’t just have to contain assignments – I can use it to record any experience, anywhere and anytime.
- With PebblePad there is no risk of losing my portfolio. If I lost a paper portfolio it would take a lot of time and effort to put together all the evidence again.
- I can easily share evidence of learning with a range of relevant people, e.g. prospective employees, professional bodies, admissions staff, supervisors, or colleagues.
- I don’t have a heavy paper portfolio to carry around.
- I can easily and quickly upload multimedia and include it as evidence. I can use videos, photos, audio files and diagrams to provide a rich account of my learning.
- I don’t have to bear the cost of producing a portfolio whilst I am a student – no more files to buy, no more reams of paper to print out.
- PebblePad is a great tool for recording important meetings including meetings for group assignments, supervision, and personal academic tutor meetings.
- The prompts within PebblePad encourage me to reflect upon my practice and learning.
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