E-portfolios

[Lori Holcomb]

E-portfolios are organized examples of student work collected and displayed in digital form. Eportfolios can serve a variety of purposes including showcasing a student's best work, showing growth over a time period or within a discipline, and as a form of authentic assessment. All portfolios are meant to invite conversation between the author and the viewer of the portfolio and allow for feedback and reflection.

Read the following article, "The Digital Convergence: Expanding the Portfolio Model" http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0441.asp?bhcp=1

and explore several of the links within the article to see examples of portfolio use by students and instructors in higher education.

Questions for discussion: What do you see as potential benefits of using eportfolios for students? What do you see as potential benefits of using portfolios from the instructor's perspective? What types of obstacles might we face when beginning to implement eportfolios? Provide an example or idea from the article or related links that seemed particularly useful or worth considering.

Additional resources:

http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/eportfolios.htm

http://electronicportfolios.org/blog/

[Lauren Philbeck]

What do you see as potential benefits of using eportfolios for students?

-I believe that Eportfolios can benefit students in many ways. Portfolios are a great way to compile a collection of work in a neat and organized way. Students would always know where to find a particular artifact or piece of work. This could be helpful when in higher level classes to be able to reference back to previous work and resources. In addition, they are great to use when on a job interview to showcase experience and exceptional pieces of work. Eportfolios allow students to be creative and imaginative with text, sound, and graphics; and in a sense can never be “lost” or “thrown away.”

What do you see as potential benefits of using portfolios from the instructor's perspective?

-For instructors, Eportfolios are a way to have students keep all their work in one place. If a piece of work is missing, the instructor can simply refer to the student’s portfolio to look for evidence of completion. In addition, they help teach students organizational skills. Portfolios are a great assessment tool or a great culminating project.

What types of obstacles might we face when beginning to implement Eportfolios?

-It may be hard to implement the use of Eportfolios due to technology obstacles. The right technology might not be available to all students or as a teacher one may not be able to allow enough class time for students without access to computers and internet to complete a portfolio. In addition, there can typically be many steps involved in creating an Eportfolio, a teacher may not have time to teach all of those steps or a student may become frustrated or behind in creating their portfolio.

Provide an example or idea from the article or related links that seemed particularly useful or worth considering.

-All 3 documents instructing one how to create an Eportfolio were extremely helpful. As I will mention below, I had to create a technology portfolio website with basically no instruction. Any of these documents would have been a life saver at the time. Creating an Eportfolio can be a long process but a step by step guide would make it so much easier.


-To graduate from Meredith College in the education program, one must create an Eportfolio with a biography page, teaching philosophy page, pictures, a rubric matching artifacts with the standards they meet, etc. The idea behind the Eportfolio was to be able to take it with us when interviewing for jobs. The process was extremely hard because I was given almost no instruction. While I completely understand the purpose behind the portfolio, other universities have easier ways for students to create portfolios. When I was a student a UNC Wilmington, our sophomore year we had to sign up for a membership to an online portfolio site. Because we signed up early in our college career, we could upload assignments as we completed them instead of having to go back and search for an assignment done at the beginning of junior year at the end of senior year as we did at Meredith. In addition, the online portfolio had templates and graphic already available instead of starting from scratch as I had to at Meredith. Overall, I like the idea of Eportfolios but my experience with them thus far as not been good.

-As far as the concept maps concerning Eportfolios, I have few comments because concept maps go over my head. I need things written out in sentences, not blurbs or short phrases. I did like how the 2nd one explained the different types and uses for Eportfolios.

[Veronica Lewis]

I agree with you in regards to teaching organizational skills, this is one skill I left out in my reply. I have students that can't even keep a notebook and this would be a great alternative for them. My experience was much better using an e-portfolio at NC A&T. We were provided a shell and just uploaded the assignments. We did have to design backgrounds but overall I was pleased with my finished product. You are right that if students don't have enough guidance they will give up.

[Kaitlin]

What do you see as potential benefits of using eportfolios for students?

I think there are a lot of benefits to eportfolios. A requirement for my undergraduate school was to have an “e-foilio.” We started creating them when I was a freshman, so by the time senior year rolled around I had a lot of information. I compiled all of my volunteer work, classroom experiences and employment information over my college years. It was extremely helpful for me when writing my resume for interviews. I took a copy of my e-folio with me to all job fairs and job interviews, however my future employers never commented on it. My undergraduate school in NY made it seem as if all employers would be expecting an e-foilo from their job candidates. I however, think that some employers were intimated by this and didn’t want to take the time to view it. Feeling this way, I was still hopeful that someone would take the time to view it because I was so proud of it. Eportfoilios are a good way to organize your accomplishments. Eportfoilos give you a sense to express yourself, you can design them any way you would like. I think a person can a learn a lot from you by viewing your eportfoilio.

What types of obstacles might we face when beginning to implement eportfolios?

I know from personal experience that it can be hard to keep up to date with your eportfoilio. I can admit that since I have been working at my current school I have not updated it in two years. I have many pictures of my classrooms from the past two years that I would like to add to it, so that if I leave my current job my portfolio will be updated. Also, I remember when I first started organizing my eportolfio I would get frustrated because some things wouldn’t save or when I went to publish something to the internet it would not look the same. Also, you have to have the right technology. For instance, if you wanted to upload pictures or videos to your eportfolio you would need access to those technologies.

What do you see as potential benefits of using portfolios from the instructor's perspective?

I think they are great for assessment, just as my instructor used. She gave a list of requirements that it should include: resume, biography, philosophy etc. and we were given extra points for anything we added. For example, during my college career I did a lot of community service, so I had a page dedicated to pictures and facts about my community service and service trips I had been to. Instructors get a sense of the students creativeness. It can also be used as a checklist for them. Making sure the students have met all the requirements for the assignment. For example, one of our requirements for our efolios was to list the NY state Intasc standards and we needed at least 2 examples of how we met/taught these standards in our undergraduate college career. We would have to go back an update the standards so all examples were not from the same year. This sometimes could be time consuming but it was a good way to teach us the importance of updating your resume/portfolio.

Provide an example or idea from the article or related links that seemed particularly useful or worth considering

I enjoyed reading about “The Folio Thinking Project.” It was a collaboration of 3 different universities. Their mission is to expose the interactions between teachers, peers, mentors and friends to encourage student reflections. I think this is great idea because sometimes it is hard to teach students how to create an eportfoilio and by interacting with others you can get more ideas and helpful hints to use on yours. Eportfolios offer so much flexibility. By interacting with others you will be able to see how the same concept can come in a variety of ways and may look completely different than yours.

I personally like eportfolios, they take a lot of hard work but it is a great opportunity for students to express themselves and present themselves in a creative way

[Karen Hughes]

I think that the potential benefits of using ePortfolios are numerous for students. A student in secondary education can build a “showcase ePortfolio” which could mean the difference in getting accepted into their preferred college or not. As stated by Gary Greenburg, “With K-12 school districts starting to implement electronic portfolios to support more authentic, long-term assessment of student achievement, college and university admissions officers should not be surprised to see submissions of student ePortfolios showcasing accomplishments that do not appear on transcripts and that are not reflected in standardized tests or advanced placement exams.” (p. 6) Many students are not “good test takers” and a well developed ePortfolio might just be the evidence a student need to demonstrate their academic ability.

Other benefits as pointed out by Dr. Helen C. Barrett, “Artifacts are selected by the learner to tell the story of their learning. Portfolio and artifacts are reviewed with the learner and used to provide feedback to improve learning.” The process of developing an ePortfolio increases a student’s engagement and ownership in their learning process.

Potential benefits of using portfolios from the instructor's perspective are also numerous and substantial. As stated by Gary Greenberg, “Using ePortfolios to expose the learning process through comments, discussions, feedback, and reflection holds perhaps the greatest promise for advancing student learning and achievement and supporting new models for learning.” (p. 5)

Teachers are also able to annotate documents using the markup tools to provide quick feedback to students.

Obstacles which we might face when beginning to implement ePortfolios is the requirement of the proper tools and training to enable students to create a well organized ePortfolio. I feel that providing templates for students to use would help ensure that the ePortfolios contain necessary information. The ePortfolio development tool would also need to allow students some flexibility in individualizing their ePortfolio to make it a better reflection of the student. Students’ progress would also need to be monitored during the development of their ePortfolio to assure the desired completion.

I found the Johns Hopkins University CTE Electronic Portfolio, "Folio Thinking" a new tool in retaining engineering students, especially interesting and definite food-for-thought. “Almost half of Stanford students who take the freshman engineering seminar decide not to pursue that field of study, a fact that has led Professor Larry Leifer and his research team to ponder ways to stop the exodus. The goal of the project is to develop and evaluate a new instructional strategy for Engineering Education designed to increase student self-confidence, and in the long term, to increase the number of freshman engineering students who graduate and work in their field.” I found it very interesting that by having the freshman engineering students build an ePortfolio they increased their self-confidence in their ability to become engineers, thus reducing the number of students changing majors.

Karen Hughes

[Jennifer Cable]

Karen,
I agree that not all students are good test takers. I think this is probably one of the reasons that the state has changed the 4th, 7th, and 10th grade writing assessment. Why should a student be graded on one writing on one day? I think that providing on-ongoing assessment of student's work is much more practical and fair.

I also think that with the annotate tools available in current word processing software it makes it easy to show students their mistakes and what they need to correct. I think the downside to e-portfolios for some teachers will be their lack of technology skills. As we have seen from this class, 21st century skills are running head on into technology and I am afraid that many teachers are going to be left behind because they either refuse to learn or refuse to use the technology. I believe that e-portfolios are here to stay will become more predominant in middle and high school education.

[Joyce Boone]

Karen, thanks for your comments. I also wish that I'd been encouraged to start a portfolio years ago. It would have been a marvelous tool to not only market my skills career-wise, but also to stimulate my next projects, passions, and steps.

Joyce

[Jennifer Cable]

1. What do you see as potential benefits of using e-portfolios for students?

I think one potential benefit of e-portfolios for students is that it will allow the students to work on something, save it, and revisit it later. Because it is in digital form, it is easy to manipulate and make changes. The chances that it could be lost, like a sheet of paper, are much smaller. It gives students the ability to revisit and reflect on past work, which gives them the opportunity to see progress they have made. Other students can see a student’s work and provide feedback. It is also teaching them technology skills that will be helpful in the future. Using this form of digital media encourages students to develop critical thinking skills.

2. What do you see as potential benefits of using portfolios from the instructor's perspective?

From an instructor’s perspective, there are many benefits to using e-portfolios. One is that it is easy to retrieve student’s work at anytime if saved on a network drive or the Internet. The instructor can give feedback as the students are working on the assignment and not wait until the students has turned in the paper. An instructor can make suggestions, which the students can quickly change because of the digital format. Teachers can review past work and compare it to current work to see if the student is progressing and what areas need improvement. One year’s work can be passed on to the next teacher giving that teacher an idea where the students are and how to proceed with their instruction.

3.What types of obstacles might we face when beginning to implement eportfolios?

This part of the assignment is very easy because we are currently trying to being the e-portfolio requirement for our 7th grade students. The first obstacle we have run into is having the network capability and computers to allow each student access to a computer. The wireless infrastructure in our school is poor. We currently have several laptop carts but the wireless will not support them all. We do have two computer labs but they are being used all day for Keyboarding and Business Computer Technology classes. Another obstacle we have run into is where to create these portfolios. We do have ample network storage space for the students to save their work but trying to get the students to save their work where they are suppose to is another big challenge. The student’s skill levels are very different and this can create an obstacle. Some students are good keyers while others are still learning the keyboard. Some students feel at ease using word processing while others have never used any form of word processing. In our school, we have initially worked out some of our problems. The language arts teacher is going to have the students write their stories, then come to my class, and type them. This is not the ideal situation because the students need to start learning to compose on the computer. As we proceed, our school is trying to purchase new switches and network drops for the language arts room so that the students will have computer access in this classroom. These are a few of the obstacle we have faced trying to implement e-portfolios.

4. Provide an example or idea from the article or related links that seemed particularly useful or worth considering.

http://eportfolio.laguardia.edu/

For me, I have always thought of an e-portfolio as just a folder with documents or drawings in it. After studying about e-portfolios this week, I have found they are much more. They can be very creative and informative. The web address I have provided I found from our readings. It is a link to the LaGuardia Community College web site where you can look at student’s e-portfolio. They are very colorful, creative, and informative. I think to show student examples of e-portfolios will help them. I think they will be excited about creating something where they have so much control and where they can display their work. I would like to encourage you to look at the student e-portfolio gallery of the LaGuardia Community College students and gather ideas for use in your classroom. From our readings, several free sites are listed which would allow students to begin creating their own e-portfolio. The link I have provided can give students some great ideas and a starting point.

[Karen Hughes]

Jennifer I agree that it is very beneficial for students to be able to save their work in digital format and be able to modify it easily. You also made a great point about teachers being able to give feedback to students as they work on an assignment instead of waiting until the assignment is complete. I think it a great idea to catch problems or misunderstandings as early as possible.
Karen

[Rhonda W]

Your discussion points out another value of e-portfolios, especially with middle grades students. These students have to take a computer skills test (at least today's students, who knows what the future will bring). Working on an e-portfolio provides a place where they can practice and further develop some of their computer skills prior to taking the assessment. We say the computer skills curriculum is K-12, but students' exposure is inconsistent from school to school and program to program. This sort of program would provide a place for students who have been shortchanged to do some catching up. It also gives them a hands-on applied way to see their computer skills in practice. Some may not have internalized part of their earlier work because they didn't understand its purpose.

[Jennifer Cable]

Rhonda,
I totally agree with your posting. In our system, students typically don't get adequate computer training until they enter middle school. We are constantly trying to play "catch up". Anything that will help the students will be an asset. E-portfolio might be a way to improve their skills.

[Veronica Lewis]

I visited your provided link to LaGuardia Community College. There are some great examples to show students to get them motivated to begin their own e-portfolio. That is the greatest fear for a lot of students; not knowing where to begin or know what a product looks like. Thanks!

[Joyce Boone]

There are multiple benefits to the student in the use of eportfolios. For students, eportfolios can be used to trigger or solicit communication and interaction with teachers, mentors, peers, and others. Maintaining an eportfolio will encourage creative ideas among students as well as encourage critical reflection about processes and outcomes. One of the benefits results that will evolve from communicating with others is that the student will be challenged to improve his or her work and approach projects and problems in new and fresh ways.

A lifelong learning eportfolio can be quite useful and valuable to a student over the years, allowing an enlightening view of the evolution of that student’s learning, career, and personal growth. Using the eportfolio as a yardstick or sorts, it can be used to stimulate continued growth if there is a lag in productivity. Maintaining an eportfolio provides an opportunity for the student to keep relationships and networks open.

From the instructor’s perspective, the use of eportfolios shifts some of the responsibility from the instructor to the student, which in the long run empowers students and increases their accountability. This is consistent with the environment that they will encounter in the 21st century workplace. The viewing and management of students’ eportfolios is simplified and made more convenient because they can be viewed online. Instructors may be able to use different and new strategies for challenging students to show their accomplishments.

Challenges for incorporating eportfolios will present themselves for both students and instructors/administrators. For students, starting an eportfolio may be relatively simple. Maintaining an eportfolio through a number of years is something else entirely. It requires a commitment and hard work. Challenges to the education system include the fact that coordination of course structure and credits should be established between K-12 educators and the higher education system, as an increasing number of students will present to the higher ed system with eportfolios.

An example of how eportfolios can be effective is in documenting a learner’s mastering of a foreign language. The eportfolio can track the student’s progress in reading, writing, and interpreting a foreign language and include audio files of the student’s achievement and progress. Athough it appears to be a challenge to maintain, the eportolio is an exciting tool and the benefits far outweigh the work that would be necessary to create one or more.

Joyce