Faculty (n=12) supervising interns and all interns (n=279) for the school years 2007-08, 2008-09, and 2009-10 used TaskStream for their webfolio. A supervising faculty member was selected to coordinate the development and implementation process for the program. The year-long internship was completed during the final year in the Masters of School Administration (MSA) program.

Faculty and students received instructions on utilizing webfolios through a variety of formats including: handouts, demonstration, overview sessions in computer lab, and individual appointments. During the year-long internship students met once a month for internship seminars and webfolio instruction. Upon completion of the internship, students and faculty were asked to complete a survey on the use of the webfolio. In addition, the webfolio application also generated several reports used to compare student use of the webfolio and learning during the internship. Faculty perceptions of the usability of the webfolio were also assessed.

Selection of webfolio tool. There are two venues to webfolio development: off-the-shelf tools such as Microsoft Office and Web-based systems such as TaskStream (Strudler & Wetzel, 2005). After researching available venues the faculty selected TaskStream as the webfolio application. One reason for the selection of TaskStream was the technical support offered by the Web-based system. The support was immediate and uninterrupted. Another reason for selecting this application was the cost factor. At the time the faculty decided to take initiative and use webfolios, there was (and still is) no funding for the implementation of this innovation. TaskStream did not incur any additional costs to the department or the faculty. The cost associated to this Web-based system was to the students upon subscription. In order to not overburden students, the faculty decided not to require textbooks and in place of the textbook students subscribed to TaskStream. A final consideration that led to the selection of TaskStream was the fact the Web-based system provided storage and tools to manage and generate reports specifically aligned with accreditations standards. This also meant that there would not be a need for a technology commitment from the university to maintain files.

Implementation process. The faculty coordinating the implementation of TaskStream translated the existing internship portfolio outline into a Web-based format. Faculty and students received instructions on utilizing webfolios in many ways that included handouts, demonstration, overview sessions in computer lab, and individual appointments. During the year-long internship students met once a month for internship seminars and webfolio instruction. In addition, faculty would provide individual help during their school observation visits. Change is complex and takes time (Hall & Hord, 2001) and this case was no different. Faculty members were willing to try the new Web-based application yet many times commented on the challenge to learn a new venue. Students also made similar comments along the way in addition to expressing difficulty in accessing the internet in many rural areas of the eastern part of the state. The key to the success of the implementation was appointing one faculty to facilitate the process. It was comfortable and important for all of those involved to turn to a person that would be available to help and in this case it was the university faculty. As the year progressed, the familiarity with the application helped with the process of uploading evidences and artifacts. By the end of the school year all students completed their webfolios and all faculty evaluated the webfolios via the Web-based system.

The majority of students in the cohorts reported spending an average of 100 hours or less on the development and completion of their webfolios during the internship (61%, 53% and 51% respectively). From a TaskStream report, students typically shared their work 24 times during a 9 month period with the faculty supervisors assigned to support and evaluate their internship experience. This number decreased to 18 times during 2009 and 12 during 2010.

Several different survey questions were incorporated in the evaluation process to gather feedback regarding students’ perceptions of the incorporation of the webfolios. Following a five point Likert scale, an average agreement score was computed from the coding of the response categories of primary purpose, very important but not primary, important purpose, less important, not the purpose with values ranging from 1-5 respectively. With lower responses indicating a more primary purpose for the webfolios, the intern cohorts reported the greatest support for the webfolio as serving as a means to develop a reflective school administrator (Table 1).

Students were asked to provide feedback to the question “Now that you are finished, how do you feel about your webfolio?” These narrative responses were analyzed and placed into response categories as presented in Table 2. Students’ narrative responses could be categorized as very positive toward the webfolio usage across all three cohorts.

Regarding the application of the webfolio in actual practice, students were asked to respond to the item “In the future, how do you think you will use or adapt the webfolio?” Narrative responses were analyzed and placed into response categories as presented Table 3. Across all three cohorts, the majority of the students’ responses were categorized as indicating that the webfolio would be used primarily as a reference/resource in seeking a leadership position in the schools.

With the transition to a webfolio over the last three years, there was a need to identify areas of support for the application to support its implementation and success for the students. Table 4 provides the interns’ responses to a survey question that highlights the most frequently indicated response for each item. Over the three year period, all cohorts indicated that the full time availability of laptop computers, handouts provided by the University Supervisor and one-on-one meetings with the university supervisor were the most useful resource in the creation of their portfolios. The usage of the online tutorials offered by TaskStream was the least useful.

Students were also asked to provide feedback concerning improvements and problems with the webfolio development process for the next group of interns. Their narrative responses were analyzed and placed into response categories as presented in Tables 5 and 6. While the initial cohort implementing the webfolios indicated an opinion that the process will improve with future implementations and the need for streamlining information, subsequent cohorts consistently reported greater need for more presentations and professional development for interns. These data are reported in Table 5.

Table 6 provides information about specific problems that interns encountered with the webfolio process. While the overwhelming majority of students in the first cohort that implemented webfolios indicated that technology issues were the greatest source of problems, subsequent cohorts report very few issues impeding their usage of the tools.

Initially, the idea of implementing webfolios was widely accepted by the faculty. Once the idea became a reality, faculty hesitated. After discussions on postponing the implementation one additional year, faculty decided to continue as planned with the condition that one faculty among them coordinate implementation and instructions for use with students and faculty. Having one faculty coordinating the process was an effective tool for full implementation. One reason was that students and faculty felt they had a point person to contact with problems. Another reason was that one faculty coordinator could keep ongoing notes of implementation issues and incorporate needed changes for the second year of implementation. A lesson learned was that even though there was no monetary investment in implementing webfolio there was a large and unexpected time commitment from the faculty coordinator who also was also supervising interns. Therefore, having one point of contact for the application is helpful but release time might be needed.

All faculty need to be familiar with the application and its usage and support. In this pilot study, faculty was learning to use webfolios alongside students but the learning perspectives were different. Students learned to create webfolios while faculty learned to review and provide feedback. Therefore when students looked for their supervisors for technical support the standard approach was to connect students with the coordinator. A lesson learned was to allow time for practice and to provide very clear expectations and processes for the use of the online tool.

Many students completing the principal preparation program at this institution live in rural regions of North Carolina where access to the internet is difficult. Therefore, faculty and students addressed obstacles in order to access adequate levels of technology and support. One particular obstacle was encountered at the monthly seminars held at a local high school. Meetings were typically held in the media center where access to the internet was limited due to the small number of computers and in addition the need for a password to access the internet. Thanks to the collaboration with the school administrators the faculty was able to obtain a temporary password to log on to the internet however there were small numbers of terminals to access. A lesson learned from this experience is the need to meet in a location where Wi-Fi is accessible and where each student has access to a computer. At this point, the faculty is strongly recommending students to bring their laptops with them. In addition, the meeting locations must have computer labs with internet access.