Using e-Portfolios in the Classroom

Using e-Portfolios in the Classroom

Photo Courtesy of The Unquiet Library via Flickr

The discussion about student portfolios and the benefits of storing student work has been a topic of conversation among teachers for a long while.  Most would agree that the opportunity for students to warehouse their work, whether it be art, writing, or whatever, is valuable.  First, it allows students to do some reflection on their own progress and process as the portfolio continues to grow.  In addition, keeping a portfolio allows for a variety of formative assessments to be perused and studied ahead of a more formal, summative assessment.  Meta-cognitive journal writing about a student's own growth as an artist affords a more critical eye and puts some distance between the original piece and the reflection.

One of the major problems, however, has been managing space.  Keeping a file folder (or several) and then orchestrating the passing of those folders from teacher to  teacher and from year to year has proved cumbersome at best, nightmarish at worst.  Enter the E-Portfolio.

Mary Beth Mertz writes in her blog for Edutopia that storing student work in the cloud allows wider access to the work, beyond the student and teacher.  The move to paperless also makes it easier to organize and store student work digitally rather than in hard copy form.  Mertz points out that, with all of the options for E-Portfolios available, it can be difficult to select the best one.  So she provides a quick overview of many of the more common applications available online today.

Before sharing the list of options, Mertz suggests that educators first consider a handful of driving questions, such as, "Will students be able to share and critique one another's work?" or "Can the teacher provide feedback to the student privately?"  These and other questions will help to narrow the options to find a portfolio application that meets the educator's needs the best.

Among the suggested portfolios are:  Wikispaces, Google Sites, Dropbox, Evernote, and Project Foundry.  Mertz offers a brief explanation of the format and benefits of each application.  Admittedly, the myriad choices available can be overwhelming to some, and finding a compatible format for multi-year portfolios is something each school or grade level or subject must agree upon.  

But the benefits are undeniable.  For the proponents of portfolios, the ease of use, accessibility, and tidy storage solutions offered by E-Portfolios make it simple to store student work in order to reflect or showcase later on.