Creating ePortfolios in the Classroom

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

The Power of Project Share

Project Share is providing and excellent platform for a community of educators and students to connect, collaborate, research, and create content. Unlike other course management systems, project share gives educators the ability to network with other public school entities across the state and is creating a systemic approach. Teachers and students in our district have the ability to access content in a mobile environment that includes productivity, web 2.0, and custom tools. Google Apps for Education serve as a great resource for collaborative work groups but fails to offer a true course management system. Moodle lacks the ability for educators to connect and share with other schools on a similar platform. In addition, it is hard for an educator to find extra hours in the day to actually build a moodle content. It is nice to have a free resource to tap into that is a ready made course management system that is similar to what other districts and schools utilize in the state. Want to utilize an existing web 2.0 tool? Project share gives educators the ability to add a custom tool menu to embed other tools and third party websites inside a course.

The power of project share is that it also connects Texas to the global network of Epsilen. Another powerful set of tools available to educators includes a fantastic lesson plan system allows for educators to tap into NYT resources, The University of Texas McDonald Observatory online content repository, and PBS digital library. Project Share resources and collaborative pieces will save our teachers time, district travel expenses, and professional development resources.

System issues with Epsilen do exist and hopefully system engineers will continue to address bandwidth issues. However, project share serves as a the best solution to provide a unified effort in addressing a real need, a systemic approach to 21st century learning.

Would you like to see project share in action? Dublin ISD would love to collaborate and welcomes you to visit our wonderful small community. All students 7-12 grade access all courses using Project Share, and all teachers participate in PLN utilizing the project share platform. To learn more, please join our Connections Grant Group in Project Share.