Interview: Digital Educational Creativity In Arteportfolio

Interview: Digital Educational Creativity In Arteportfolio
Summary: Arteportfolio is a platform for creating digital portfolios developed by Youder, a study of graphic design and online and offline audio visuals.

Arteportfolio: Digital Educational Creativity  

Through his participation in ZincShower, we met Alfonso Corral, software developer of Youder, who extended us the information about the educational software Arteportfolio:

"We have developed a new technology, which is the blank canvas that is in every browser. Today, everything you see on the internet is held in tables and cells. We wanted to get rid of tables and cells, so that you can use the browser wherever you want, in a simple way, without having computer or programming skills."

"This technology we have developed has been applied to education, and there is where Arteportfolio comes in. It is a digital portfolio. In English it is Art & Portfolio, digital art portfolio. What you do in that digital portfolio is putting everything you want: Videos, text, drawings you do at the moment, links... it's like if you had a notebook. Today, a kid has a notebook and maybe in a corner he puts a cartoon if he wants, or he adds something else. With this tool you can do this, because until now everything in education has been based on a file system, where you upload a page or a file, but everything is cloistered. Not here. Here the work is in the browser itself."

"The tool is not used to exchange files; the tool itself is the final work. What we get is that there is no exchange of files at any time, because when it is loaded it is the work itself, and secondly, it is not necessary to install any kind of software, as it is a browser. All computers and all mobiles have a browser, so it can be used directly."

Software For International Baccalaureate

"With this digital portfolio, the teacher can correct their work right away, make corrections, review it, and then the examiners can also correct the work from elsewhere, from anywhere in the world, because this tool is oriented to the international Baccalaureate. There may be schools all over the world; right now I believe there are 4,000 schools worldwide. All the examiners are in other parts, in other continents, because it is the English system that adapts it to everybody who wants to follow that criterion. When you do a job and the teacher corrects it and considers it good, in the past it had to be sent to the examiner. You had to send files via email or mail, but this way you don’t have to: Everything is in one access, one click."

"Several students can enter the same portfolio to perform a team work. This is done for individual jobs, but varying a little; as we are making the tool, we can adapt it to the needs of academic institutions."

How Arteportfolio Arises

"At the beginning, Arteportfolio arose through my brother, who was a teacher in India in an international baccalaureate, where the system has been introduced for some time, in which the baccalaureate of Art, with dance, video, music, and other disciplines has this need to incorporate many different multimedia files. My brother saw that as it was; it was practically impossible to put it into practice. When he saw the technology that we are developing, we connected the dots: We saw that this could be used for education and although it is initially developed for international baccalaureate, which does not require this functionality, we are expanding it, because it can be very useful for almost everything. If someone wants to use it for their education system, many more features can be added."

Arteportfolio In Schools

"For starters, what we are going to do with this tool is to implant it in some schools. For example, this first school might be the one in India where my brother was working. We will implement it there, and then from there, seeing the utility it has, we will access the other international schools. The limit? Well, there are 4000 schools. We want it to be an approved standard for all schools. We are now developing it in English and Spanish. The international baccalaureate is in English. Even if you study in Delhi or anywhere in the world, it is in English, so, we have focused on this language. Programming is already in place, so that when you want another language, you just have to upload the translations file and it will be ready."

Arteportfolio At ZincShower

"We introduced ourselves to ZincShower due to a need for visibility. ZincShower's proposal is very interesting, because we are able to have visibility and get in touch with investors that every entrepreneurial project needs. Zinc Shower was a challenge, a way to change the world with ideas, and we believed that we fit in it and it fits us too, especially in projection. We are working on our study and we need to get out; that would be ZincShower's work. The company is family-friendly: One of my brothers is in Madrid and I am in Valladolid. As everything we do is online, we have no problem to work like that."

The Added Value Of Arteportfolio

"Above all, our differentiation is that in all educational platforms you do some work and these platforms unify it. Here the platform is the work itself. It is a release in terms of content, a way to work online from scratch. In all platforms, you put a text, attach a file that was in another place, you put a video there, but everything is separated, it is not correlated. Here everything is correlated. It is a concept that is totally new and until now I have not seen it anywhere else; on any platform or any social network."

"The navigator is a blank canvas and on that blank canvas you can do whatever you want. It's like when a child has a notebook; kids are very anarchic. What we want is to capture that anarchy and that creation at the same time, and I believe that that would be our identity which distinguishes us from other platforms completely. That is why we call it Arteportfolio, because it is oriented above all to creativity."

"Also this platform could be used for mathematics, but maybe there is not so much differentiation, because this creativity is not so necessary. Although lately also in mathematics ways of giving these subjects are changing. They are so abstract sometimes that you put other ways or you do not accede to the student. When you talk about math, if you find a passionate teacher who explains it in another way, it can become very, very interesting. So with this platform you can also change the way of doing math."

Boosting Creativity

"It's art-oriented, but it's also aimed at boosting creativity. Kids are creative by nature. Then they get older and they are getting stuck, they 'pattern': You have to learn how to live in society. But children are free spirits, and you have to try to keep them that way."

"We respect personalized learning. Lately, there is a trend in learning that the way we are now using and repeating content is not very valid. What matters most is that the student tries to develop, to invent, to solve problems, and this is accentuated, because in addition, the international baccalaureate is following that dynamic, that policy; and this platform, precisely, contemplates that option."

"In Youder, we differentiate ourselves as developers in what we do from an artistic point of view. I am a programmer, but I am also a musician, violinist, writer, composer of my own music; my brother Gustavo is a designer, but he is also a painter, a draftsman... All our vision of Youder, when we create web pages and content, it is from this point of view. This makes us a little different in terms of how programmers and designers are. Starting from there, Arteportfolio is easily reached."