E Portfolios

Every time I hear the word portfolio I think of the filing cabinets in our language arts office. For the past ten years portfolios have been required for all of our students, 9th through 12th grade. The concept is to collect and store all of the written work students complete through their four years at our school. Unfortunately, these portfolios become meaningless unless teachers take the time to review student work or even reference the portfolios as a tool for instruction. Sometimes we are so concerened about completing our own curriculum and instruction that we often push the concept of these portfolios to the side. Although we do file away student work, it is very rare that we actually use these portfolios for anything meaningful other than storage. At the conclusion of a student's 12th grade year, the portfolios are returned to students. I believe the concept of Electronic Portfolios is engaging for student learning and self reflection. I was unaware of the fact that an electronic portfolio contains various forms of media other than microsoft word documents. The concept that students can be linking sites/articles of personal interest to a given assignment or topic does make meaning more personalized for the students. I have two honors classes that I teach and during classroom discussions, these students always incorporate or reference books or articles that have themselves encountered out of their own interest. They like to share these examples and tie the topics or events into our class discussions. An electronic portfolio would allow these students to connect their current knowledge by providing links to teacher generated assignments. Electronic portfolios seem like they are time concuming to organize and generate as part of a curriculum which in turn seems why so many schools have not made the change from paper portfolios to electronic portfolios. Connecting to the previous reading on constructivism, however, it is almost necessary that schools need to consider the change in order to meet today's expectations and use of technology.