Teaching students to build an online repository of their accomplishments, digital artifacts, and reflections fosters 21st century skills and aids in helping students with post secondary readiness. Global competition is fierce for top university placement and students now need to showcase and publish achievements using advanced technical, problem solving, research, media literacy, and higher order thinking skills.
Student portfolios are a great way to showcase a particular project assignment, student achievement, and allow for authentic assessment beyond standardized test performance indicators. Free web 2.0 tools can now push student portfolios to a new level. Embedding external video content, web 2.0 presentations, blogs, wikis, and collaborative tools adds elements of creativity, interactivity, and stimulating engagement to a portfolio.
Project Share, Texas Education Agency’s collaborative course management system, includes an ePortfolio tool. Project Share is very user friendly and serves as an excellent resource for Texas secondary students, educators, and post secondary students. The Project Share ePortfolio tool includes a very simple resume wizard that high school students find easy to navigate, allows for instructors to certify student work examples, and gives students flexibility options. Google Sites is another excellent choice for students and professionals to use. Google offers many video tutorials, how to steps, and examples of classroom use. Google Apps integrates nicely with Google ePortfolio tools.
Need some resources to help you incorporate portfolios in your classroom?
Google ePortfolios How To
Evernote: Ages 3rd grade and up can use and incorporate a reflection or video resource
Livebinder: You can find examples and create portfolios in livebinder.
Examples of High School Students Blogs
Dr. Helen Barrett is an expert in this field. Dr. Helen Barrett has published new resources, implemented an ePortfolio Academy for educators, and encourages teachers to focus on managing your workspace using real learning scenarios and to showcase student work, which produces the end result.
Project Share ePortfolio
