escrapbooking title

The Basics

China"I find out more and more every day how important it is for people to share their memories."
- Mister Rogers

Scraps are pieces of information, insights, emotions, thoughts, memories, and understandings. These elements can be combined into a visual, digital story.

The E in e-scrapbooking means:

E-scrapbooks are tools for reflecting on ideas and sharing perspectives. As such, they reflect both process and product. For teachers, e-scrapbooks are a wonderful to track student learning, thinking, and understandings. Because they can easily be graded using a rubric or checklist, e-scrapbooks are a great activity to determine whether students have met standards. They can also provide concrete evidence of teacher performance and student learning.

When working with students on inquiry-based projects, there is always a question of process vs product. What products can be used to demonstrate student learning? Journals and logs have become increasingly popular. When combined with visuals such as photographs and concept maps along with video and audio, a rich collection of evidence is available to track and evaluate student performance. E-scrapbooks are a wonderful way to combine these ideas into a single multimedia artifact.

Rather than focusing on the "correct answer" or a "product," an e-scrapbooking environment encourages students to explain their thinking, make comparisons, chronicle experiences, and make predictions.

While traditional scrapbooks focus on telling about the facts students have gathered, consider ways that these new e-scrapbooks can also reflect the learning that has taken place including the transformation of ideas. How can we see the process of student thinking in the project? How can an e-scrapbook demonstrate a change in thinking, depth in understanding, and ability to see different perspectives?

There's not a "best" way to create an e-scrapbook. It doesn't take a particular type of hardware or software. The key is taking scraps of information and ideas and making sense of these.

Reflection is one of the most important aspects of the learning process. It's a metacognitive process that involves thinking about thinking. This thoughtfulness can be expressed many ways. An e-scrapbook is a great way to record these understandings and transform them into an interesting, meaningful communication.

E-scrapbooking uses technology in a practical and effective way including:

E-scrapbooks are a great way for people to communicate their ideas, feelings, stories, and perspectives.

Questions lead to ideas, information, experiences, learning, understandings, and communication.

Analysis involves exploration, organization, and evaluation.

Synthesis helps people see how all the scraps come together into a meaningful communication.

E-scrapbooking leads to shared understandings and habits of mind that can be applied across the curriculum.

Return to Top

