In this blog post you will read about how Sandy Owen has successfully used the Pathbrite app in MindTap to help her students create a portfolio that they can take on job interviews for early childhood teaching positions. This can easily be applied to other fields, for example, business students using Pathbrite to build a robust portfolio of their presentations, spreadsheets, and other project work.
Sandra Owen is the Department Chair for Early Childhood Education, a NAEYC accredited program, at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College.
She uses MindTap program-wide and has matched and renamed all the MindTap Scenario assignments to both NAEYC standards as well as Ohio’s TAG standards.
As students complete these assignments, they are saved in their Pathbrite Portfolio which is integrated into MindTap. Because Pathbrite can save student media as well as documents, students can submit a variety of evidence, such as:
- lesson plans
- photos of their classroom set-ups
- weekly contracts
- video
These documents are proof that they understand the scenario, which are all tied back to the NAEYC standards.
So, not only are students proving that they are proficient in the NAEYC standards, they are automatically building a resume in Pathbrite that conforms to the NAEYC standards, giving them a big advantage over other job candidates.
NAEYC accreditation
For their NAEYC accreditation, Sandra’s program had to identify six key assessments that met all the standards, track the scores, and submit annual reports on how students performed on those assessments. Because she had matched those assessments to the standards, Sandra was able to easily pull the data from Pathbrite using its reporting features.
And because Sandra has also aligned all their outcomes to Ohio’s TAG standards, their students can take their courses to any public college in Ohio and get credit for them.
Additionally, Pathbrite is saving all their students’ work in a digital format, rather than in a box of “stuff”, allowing her students to take their work with them after graduation and have it available in their Pathbrite portfolio when they need it for teaching.
MindTap and the Pathbrite portfolio have made a tremendous difference in their program. The increase in their enrollment has been significant since adopting MindTap, especially in their online classes, which allows them to better support their non-traditional students.
MindTap’s course management, which allows Sandra to copy her Master courses for her faculty, provides greater consistency across sections and instructors, another significant benefit for her NAEYC accredited program.
Finally, Sandra loves the scenario-based approach to learning that her MindTap courses offer her students. It goes beyond memorization and forces students to connect the theory in their textbooks with their real-life experiences in the classroom.
“We are measuring knowledge not just by quizzing, but far more in-depth because the scenarios match their learning far better than any test.”