Portfolios are a great way to document a student’s progress and improve learning and teaching by providing both the student and the teacher with valuable evidence that helps to monitor students’ experience in the learning process. Using ePortfolios students are given the chance not only to reflect and grow academically but also to use them as goal-setting plans and for future career advancement.
In my opinion, ePortfolios are tied up with students’ learning and progress but at the same time, they are a reflection of the teacher’s instructions and the institution’s educational curriculum goals. Klein, who draws attention to the importance of integrating social media in academic ePortfolios states that by using ePortfolios students build on their skills and qualities like “analytical ability, intellectual leadership, and creativity” (Klein 69). Rightly so, I think that engaging students in creating and using ePortfolios enhances learning for them because it enables students to reflect on their strengths, become aware of their weaknesses, and strive to improve. E-Portfliois are a great valuable learning tool for students, but it is also just as beneficial for us teachers too. This tool helps teachers to assess students’ progress in a much easier, faster, and more meaningful way. Moreover, through ePortfolio teachers can enhance their thinking and teaching practices by reflecting on the pros and downsides of the curriculum, looking for new techniques, and implementing new strategies in the process of learning in order to advance students’ improvement.
Many teachers do not assign e-portfolios to students because they view them as an overwhelming task. I, myself was also concerned before reading the well-detailed articles of Klein and Yancey that demonstrate the multiple benefits that ePortfolios have for students’ learning, motivation, confidence, and career development, and the multiple skill benefits that they gained by using them. For instance, Klein claims that since most students use social media as a tool for communication and interaction, “the egalitarian nature of content associated with social media meshes seamlessly with pedagogical models for empowering student voices” (Klein 59). This connection enables students to grow self-knowledge when using ePortfolios for different purposes and prepares them to work effectively in multiple settings. Yancey, the author of “Portfolios, Circulation, Ecology, and the Development of Literacy” considers electronic portfolios as an ecology system itself which assembles and articulates all writing drafts and reflective commentary. Moreover, in this ecology, Yancey views learning as an ongoing process where the “student principal agent of his or her own learning” (Yancey 9). Certainly, ePortfolios enable students to delve with self-exploration and expression which fosters a desire for learning and accomplishing academic goals. However, practicing the use, creation, and implementation of eportfolios in the learning process shows how students take control of their academic growth, professional planning, and success.
Teachers who work with students who are building their ePortfolios enhance their thinking, and creativity, strive for improvement, and reflect on their learning/teaching the same way as the students. Yancey refers to learning as a “reiterative process” and therefore he notes that asking students to create ePortofolio should not be an on-time thing in the classroom. Instead, portfolio-making should always be in process in a way that is never done (12). Seeing students’ progress and noticing their weaknesses teachers set new goals for new teaching strategies in order to advance students’ learning and enhance both pairs’ experiences with ePortfolios. The new goals and creation of new assignments provide us teachers not only with new strategies to improve students’ learning but also with opportunities to assess their work in a way that is manageable. What is the most important thing is the fact that the implementation and use of ePortfolios creates a teacher/student relationship where guiding and learning work very well together.
Hi, Haka!
Thank you so much for your insight on Eportfolios. I enjoy how you mention its benefits for teachers and the teacher/student relationship. When I’ve thought about Eportfolios on my own, I mostly focused on student impact. Being able to measure students’ progress and review how they perceive their own development if reflections are included sounds very valuable. The latter is something I like to do, especially as an incoming teacher, in order to see any trends. Something I want to do, but I’m uncertain what the common consensus would be, is asking them what content struggles they encountered in the assignment. Given that Eportfolios are a great way to prepare for projects some might encounter in their careers after college, it wouldn’t necessarily be deemed appropriate to discuss things like that in the career domain. But as a teacher, I’d be interested to see where their confusion or concerns are coming from and offer suggestions and feedback–as well as reflect on my own teaching practice and prompts. Thank you for the opportunity to reflect more on Eportfolios in this great post!
If you are a teacher, keeping a teaching portfolio is something I highly recommend as a way to understand what is involved in keeping a portfolio. Students need to take pride in their portfolio, and I think they need to have some control over how they present themselves through it. This can sometimes be difficult it the portfolio program is highly structured through the school or administration, and some portfolio programs are either hard to customize or take practice to learn (like Digication). The way I’ve approached this with my students (who are college level) is by providing templates that take away some of the labor of design to start out the portfolio. They can change this completely if they wish, as long as they present the required work at the end of the semester. For young children, especially for teachers who are using portfolio only within the class and do not need to answer to administrative requirements, I think it’s important to teach students how to customize their own portfolio by using the settings, uploading fun images, and especially writing in their own voice to reflect on what they are learning (that would be the most valuable part). This is one of my favorite designs (the writing is pretty good) for one of my former students’ writing portfolio https://stonybrook.digication.com/tina-tang/warning
The original template looked very different from this, although the menu was provided to the students and the general structure of welcome, about me, and writing work with pages for 3 essays.
Hi Haka,
I really appreciate how you identify ePortfolios as beneficial to both students and instructors, since the ecology that Yancey addresses implies that there is more to the conversation (between students, peers and teachers) than student self-awareness. Just as the student demonstrates their development, so too should the instructor see this process as an interpretation of their teaching. Regardless of what was taught, the teacher’s techniques must be reevaluated after they are filtered through a student’s attempt to organize and assess their own progress.
In this way, teachers can use ePortfolios to identify breakdown in how they communicate techniques to students. In my experience teaching ePortfolios, my biggest challenge was admitting to myself that some of my techniques weren’t effectively linking class knowledge with the students’ real lives. As ePortfolios work to frame student skills in a narrative fashion (ie: “I began here, overcame these challenges and still must improve in these different areas”), students would often struggle to demonstrate personal development, even when, in my eyes, they had clearly improved. By integrating the ePortfolios earlier (and throughout) the semester, and constantly providing opportunities for students to reflect on progress (and how they’ll use it in the outside world), I saw substantial improvements in how they articulated the steps in their academic journeys.
Great post!
-Christopher Munde