The ultimate feature in ePortfolios: Reflection

What makes ePortfolios a meaningful tool for learning is reflection. If students don’t reflect on their work, the portfolio is nothing but a collection of tasks. Abrami (2008) sees three moments in which students must reflect: before, during and after developing their portfolio. Reflecting before they design their portfolio allows students to set achievable yet challenging goals. This will lead students to be more goal-oriented and see the need of designing a strategic plan in order to reach their objectives. during their ePortfolio development implies self-control from learners. This is, they have stay focused and motivated so that they can do the most of their resources and effort. They may need to make changes along the way depending on their own observations of the task. Once they’ve finished their ePortfolio, students need to reflect again and assess their results. This allows students to develop a sense of achievement and, at the same time, they have the chance to see what they could’ve done better or need to improve.

Some of the benefits I see in this reflective approach are:

·        Learning experience is more stimulating

·        Students focus on the learning process much more than just in the product

·        Students get aware of their learning style

·        Students learn to manage feedback

·        Making mistakes is seen as learning steps

This reflection cycle will make the design of ePortfolios a very enjoyable task!  

Philip C. Abrami, C. Anne Wade, Vanitha Pillay, Ofra Aslan, Eva M. Bures, Caitlin Bentley: "Encouraging self-regulated learning through electronic portfolios." Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology V34(3) Fall 2008

Different tools for different kinds of ePortfolios

There are different types of tools we can use for creating e-portfolios. Of course they all have pros and cons but pros are many more than cons. To start with, they all have free versions so that students don’t need to spend any money on using them. Also they all have many easy-to-use features that allow students to be creative and imaginative. Since young people are usually into technology, they don’t have any trouble working with these apps.

Let’s take Google Apps as an example. It has great capacity and lots of templates. They also allow students to work collaboratively or independently. It has been said that Weebly is a very fun tool to use because you can include photo galleries and slide shows in your portfolio.  On the other hand, Wordpress is a fantastic blogging tool that helps you make your ePortfolio more appealing. It’s not that easy to use at the beginning, though. At last but not least, there’s Yola. It allows students include images in their ePortfolio and there are lots of free templates they can use.

Personally, I need to get familiar with all these tools because I haven’t used them that much. I think I’ll have to ask my daughter to teach me how to make the most of them :)

A very valuable learning tool: e-portfolios!

I’d like to share with you some basic concepts about e-portfolios. First of all, an e-portfolio is “a purposeful collection of student’s work that exhibits the student’s effort, progress and achievements in one or more areas.” I find this definition very insightful because I thought a portfolio was just a collection of student’s work to see his/her progress along time. So, what called my attention was the word “purposeful” because that means that we teachers need to set a clear objective of why we’ll have our students work on a portfolio so that everything we do lead students to reach that aim. Depending on the objective one has in mind is the kind of portfolio that will be developed and the tools that will be used to do it. E-portfolios are those which are entirely computer readable and it is very recommendable to use them because they offer a lot of benefits, such as portability, easy to create back-up files, completely learner centered, etc.  

There are certain steps to follow in order to create an e-portfolio:

1.      Defining the portfolio context and goals.

2.      The working portfolio

3.      The reflective portfolio (what?, so what?, and now what?)

4.      The connected portfolio

5.      The presentation portfolio

There are different kinds of portfolios: learning, assessment and employment portfolios. Basically, learning portfolios focus on the learning process; assessment portfolios focus on the learning product and employment portfolios are aimed to get a job. The kind of portfolio depends on the purpose, process and product one has in mind.

Porfolios are ongoing learning tools. As it’s been said before, they are a collection of student’s work which can be called artifacts. But what makes portfolios a very valuable tools is the fact that students reflect on their work. When they do that, these artifacts become evidence of students’ achievement. 

Barret, Helen, (2001). Education Portfolios: A chapter in education technology; An encyclopedia to be published by ABC-CLIO.