The computer mastery exercise for grade eleven consists of compiling an electronic portfolio of some of your most important achievements. This portfolio will be presented as a series of web pages suitable for posting on the world-wide web. The portfolio consists of the following elements:

• An overview that introduces your accomplishments, and discusses, based on these accomplishments, several of your most important strengths.

• A table that conveys at a glance the accomplishments included in the portfolio and the strengths demonstrated by each accomplishment.

• The accomplishments themselves, including text, photos, drawings, and description that convey the details of what you did. If the accomplishment is a great paper you wrote, include the entire paper. If you built or drew or painted something, you should include that. In addition, the presentation of each accomplishment includes an explanation of how the accomplishment is a demonstration of one or more of your strengths.

• See some of the pages that 11th graders have made.

• Day by day planner/syllabus

The strengths you include can be chosen from the list below or can be others that you identify. If you want to add one of your own, please discuss it with your instructor before you commit yourself. The faculty refers to these strengths as habits of mind. A habit of mind, to the noted educator Theodore Sizer, is "the willingness to use one’s mind well when no one is looking." Here is a list of habits of mind that has been the focus of recent faculty discussions.

• Creativity
  How do you know if you are being creative? There are many answers. One that we like is from the writer, John Updike. He writes, "An activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better." To Updike, you can be creative in the arts, in the sciences, in mathematics or history, or, for that matter, while cleaning your room. To highlight your creativity, identify projects or activities during which you truly cared about doing the work as well as it could be done. You can often tell when you are in creative mode because you can work for hours at a time without being aware of the passage of time, and there is an energy and intensity that is exciting and rewarding. What was the activity? How did your focus on quality and improvement result in a better product?

• Persistence
  There is a popular T-shirt logo that says, "Steps for success: 1. Learn your limitations 2. Exceed them 3. Repeat #1 and #2" To highlight persistence, you would look for projects or activities in which you did something you had never done before, or for which you had to learn something new, or during which you continued after initial failure. What did you do that others said you couldn’t do? How did you do it? What did you learn? A classic example of persistence is the case of the student who was truly a non-athelete who, after three years of hard work and training, was transformed from the slowest runner on the cross-country team into a magic circle member.

• Initiative
  Which of your accomplishments came about, at least in part, because you went beyond what others told you, or what others had done, and defined the task in a new way? When have you read beyond the course assignments or organized a new club or simply decided on your own that something could be better, and then acted by yourself or with others to make it happen? One wonderful example of this came in the lower division last year when a fourth grader received unsatisfactory responses to a survey his class was conducting, and modified the questions rather than coming in and seeking guidance. As a result, the survey was completed on time with excellent responses. When you combine initiative with cooperation you get leadership.

• Cooperation
  This is a most important strength, involving your ability to work with others to get a job done. Achievements that illustrate your ability to cooperate would provide evidence that you are a good team member; that you do your share as well as you can and in a timely way; or that when you are taking an initiative, and you need others to work with you, you can bring people on board without force, serving their needs as well as your own.

• Problem Solving
  Simply, how well do you solve problems? We’re talking about having to find ways to learn new things or get things done when there is no set of steps given to you. Solving the fifth identical math or chem problem doesn’t count. Learning a set of steps that works with a certain type of problem doesn’t count. This attribute refers to the things you are able to do when you don’t know what to do. When given a project, do you ask questions that define the work, develop a strategy to get the answers or complete the task? Most students have done this; not all are aware of it. There’s probably an example of great problem solving lurking in your past.

• Seeking Patterns and Connections
  Many of the most interesting problems around involve information and approaches generated by more than one discipline. When you read about a time in history, do you think of literature from that period? Or, do you make the connection the other way around? A study of history can illuminate literature, and the best writings of a period contribute much to an understanding of history. When have you made the connection? Can you describe learning about persistence from participation in a sport and how you then applied to learning math? In other words, do you try to step back from the details of day-to-day studenting and see the larger themes and relationships that give learning deeper substance and meaning? Tell about it in your web pages.

• Reasoning from Data to a Conclusion
  The weakest essays and class contributions are based upon biases and predispositions, rather than on information. For your portfolio, try to find evidence that you can use texts, documents, experimental results, and other information sources to support the conclusions you reach in the classroom, the laboratory, and in all your written work. The best portfolio achievements would show how you were able to reason from data consistently over an extended period to influence others, or to succeed in one of your courses.

• Sensitivity to Feedback
  The response to your efforts from teachers, parents, advisers, coaches, classmates, teammates, club or activity participants, and friends often provides information that can help you improve your performance or behavior. Which of your accomplishments was gained with the help of advice or suggestions from others? How did you incorporate the input of others into your work? Show us the final version of the work.

• Resource Management
  No, we’re not talking about oil and coal, but rather about your ability to manage the resources you have as a student. Some of these include the people around you and your time. How do you schedule your time and work with the people around you to do your best work?

The work you do on your web portfolio can benefit you in a number of ways. Not every student will benefit in the same way. Here are some of the possible positive outcomes for you. It is likely that you will benefit in ways that we have not anticipated. We hope you will describe these benefits or outcomes in your portfolio. Among other things, building the web portfolio can:

• help you articulate and track your accomplishments
• help you to make connections among your experiences and achievements
• cause you to record and contemplate experiences you might otherwise forget or undervalue
• increase your level of self-understanding and confidence
• cause you to see patterns emerging in your choices of activities and achievements, and aid in planning your commitments at HM and elsewhere
• help you to demonstrate competencies and capabilities as you pursue jobs, internships on and off campus, leadership positions on and off campus, and off-campus study and research opportunities
• help you to set goals for the future

There are many people who are available to help you identify the achievements that you will incorporate into your portfolio, prepare presentations of the achievements and complete the work. These people include the computer faculty, your teachers, parents, advisers, coaches and friends. We encourage you to consult everyone and to show preliminary versions of your portfolio to a few people who know you well. Use the feedback you get to make your portfolio as wonderful as it can be. Good luck!!

Thanks to Kalamazoo College for their help in developing this project.

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