"Folio Thinking" Using Electronic Portfolios in Education

This week's topic of discussion revolves around the use of electronic portfolios, also known as ePortfolios or simply eFolios, in education. We'll examine what an eFolio is and its purpose in education, compare eFolios to other assessment methodologies, determine what we need to look for when evaluating an eFolio creation site for the classroom, explore a few different options for creating an eFolio, and finally answer two questions posed in ETEC 524.


What is the purpose of a portfolio?

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a portfolio is:

• A flat case for carrying documents or drawings. 

• A set of drawings, paintings, or photographs that are presented together in a folder. 

• A selection of a student's work (as papers and tests) compiled over a period of time and used for assessing performance or progress. Merriam Webster

So essentially a traditional portfolio is a physical storage device, whether that be a case, a three-ring binder, a folder, etc. that is used to store something.  A portfolio could be a physical collection of artwork, photographs, writing, tests, etc.


How do portfolios and ePortfolios differ?

In an electronic or ePortfolio the main difference is the delivery and storage system.  While a traditional portfolio may be entirely offline, an ePortfolio is stored in cyber space.  These are a few key advantages to each method.

Traditional Portfolios

• Ability to physically feel or examine an artifact. This is most useful for projects containing artwork or 3D objects.

• Ability to verify security seals on printed documents.  A raised seal used to verify a document's authenticity may not be visible on an electronic document. 

• Increased ease of use and less time to construct.  With a traditional portfolio, you only need to add the object into the binding.  With a electronic portfolio, artifacts created offline must first be photographed or scanned and then added to a page.

Electronic Portfolios

• Ability to showcase multimedia works such as videos or class presentations without needing to save the file to an external drive.  

• Easily accessible. Electronic portfolios are stored online, so that means as long as you have access to the internet, you have access to your portfolio.  If you come upon a situation where you are unexpectedly asked for information, you won't have to worry about carrying a portfolio around in the backseat of your car. 

• Ability for others to remotely comment or view/edit. With electronic portfolios, collaborators, colleagues, teachers and students can all work together or comment on a portfolio even if they are in different cities, states or countries.  

• Ability to store a wide variety of artifacts.

• Ability to password protect files. 

•  Save paper!

How is this different from other forms of assessment?

When you're looking at assessments, the first thing you have to look at is the purpose of the assessment.  Assessments in education are generally categorized as either formative or summative. According to the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University:

Formative Assessments

The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. More specifically, formative assessments: 

• help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work

• help faculty recognize where students are struggling and address problems immediately

 Summative Assessments

The goal of summative assessment is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark.

After you've determined the purpose, you decide on the delivery method.  Will it be a multiple choice test, an essay, a project, etc. All of these methods of delivery measure a student's knowledge differently.  A multiple choice or passage based quiz might measure their ability to recall information or make inferences. An essay may ask them to synthesize and make connections to what they have learned. A project could ask them to create a product based on their knowledge. All of these are valid measures of learning in their own way.

One of the key advantages to an ePortfolio is that it can be used both as an assessment and as a tool to store, analyze, and reflect on all kinds of other assessments. There is no need to assess students based on only one measure. Students can instead reflect on their entire body of work which may include many differing delivery methods. Electronic portfolios can also be used for peer reflection. Similar to a blog, if an ePortfolio is built in a manner that supports commenting or feedback, they can also be used for peer reflection.  A teacher could have a group of three to four students work together to peer review the artifacts included in the portfolio and leave comments with feedback either on or offline. Many sites allow the owner or moderator of the page to set permissions for comments.  In this way a student could send a private comment or feedback message that the moderator could choose not to publish. Additionally, many of the drag and drop interfaces allow students to include a feedback form.  They could also include a poll to have students rate the effectiveness of their artifacts. Another benefit to this is that it may show understanding in a way that a simple multiple choice test or essay cannot do.  Just like we have different learning styles, students also may perform better on one type of assessment versus another.  Collecting all of this information and having students reflect on it in a portfolio may be a better judge of learning.   

On the other hand, one disadvantage of portfolios is that even with a rubric, to a certain extent the grading is subjective. I might look at a student's body of work and grade it one way while another instructor, using the same rubric, may judge it differently.  This is one case where solid right/wrong based assessments are better.  


How does this work in the classroom?

I think the main things that teachers need to evaluate when looking at an ePortfolio system for the classroom are:

• Ease of Use 

• Prior Technical Knowledge

• Compatibility

• Classroom Management capabilities 

All of the ePortfolio options I looked at provided the ability to upload or include the same types of documents or links.  When it comes to content ability, they are equal.  That means that if I am having my students create a grammar portfolio, they can do that on any of the sites.  Likewise, they could create a science, art or math portfolio using any of these sites.  Now where things start to differ is in the ease of use. A simple drag and drop interface is always going to be easier to use for a student who has no prior knowledge of website design. Teachers also have to take into account that some students may have very little general computer knowledge.  A student might not know how to save or insert a picture.  A simplified interface like Weebly would be better for those students. Additionally, we have to consider compatibility.  If a school is a Google school, Google apps will be more compatible with other tools they are using.  Also some websites offer online classroom management tools while others don't.  I've detailed a few affordances and disadvantages for a select group of sites in the next section.

What are some available tools to create electronic portfolios?

Proprietary Tools: tools designed specifically for portfolio creation.

PortfolioGen is a free online tool to create a teaching portfolio.  It has a wide variety of customizable themes.  User Tina noted in her review that the website was "easy to use, easy to customize, and extremely professional looking." The user menu for the site offers a wide variety of preset pages including employment history, awards, interests, etc.  Having a pre-formatted page for these areas may be very useful to those who are not as skillful in web layout and design. However, upon signing up for a free site here, you'll discover that the free version has some limitations.  In order to upload a custom image and have additional pages/artifacts, you must pay a subscription fee. For the purposes of our project, you cannot add the required amount of pages without payment. Another downside of this site compared to other hosting services is that it does not appear to have any class controls that would make this useful to use in a classroom setting.  It is simply functional as a personal portfolio site. 

Pathbrite is a free online portfolio tool for use by both teachers individually AND for classroom use.  One of the things that makes this site standout is the ability to create courses. Students can submit and self reflect on online work.  The site features an intuitive, easy to use drag and drop interface that will help save time in class and it is easy for novice computer learners to pick up. The site also integrates with eCollege for graduate courses. As an additional benefit for schools using Google's education features, this site features the ability to login/signup via a Google account. This is the website that I would most likely use personally in the classroom due to it's ease of use and free classroom management/account capabilities. A brief introduction to the program is here: 

Online Website Design: online creation and editing sites 

The two main powerhouse website design choices are Weebly and Word Press.  For details on their strengths and weaknesses in the classroom, please see my previous post on blogs.  Although these two sources have the capability to add a blog, their true power is in website design.  Of the two of these, my favorite is Weebly.  Although you do need to pay a yearly amount for some of the advanced features, on Weebly it is worth it for their classroom management capabilities. Teachers can create accounts for students and monitor and password protect access to their websites.  The drag and drop user interface is the most user friendly out of all of the websites. I have in fact used this in the classroom before.  Two years ago, I taught groups of students with no prior knowledge of website design, the basics of using Weebly.  Their websites were entered in a multimedia competition and several of the groups won first place in their category. The program was very easy for them to pick up and the students enjoyed working with the interface.  A downside of Weebly is that you are limited in the number of student accounts that you can create.  Weebly would be my go to preference for an in class portfolio system, but if I have over the allowable amount of students, I'd go with Pathbrite. 

Google Sites is Google's solution to online website design.  With Google's shift towards bolstering education via resources like Google Classroom, this web design platform offers seamless integration with Google's other education based apps.  In a Google school, this cross-app compatibility may lead to this being the number one pick for classroom use.  However, it's user interface is not as simple or easy to use as Weebly. 

Wix is another free online website creation platform.  Wix's drag and drop user interface is even more user friendly than Weebly.  One downside to this site is that it does not have a classroom function like Weebly or Pathbrite.  The increased ease of use though does leave this as a great option for students or adults who have minimal knowledge of website design. I wouldn't personally use this in the classroom because of the lack of management capabilities. 


Offline Website Design: computer software programs 

Adobe Muse is one of my favorite options for adults and skilled youth. Adobe Muse is a program offered as part of Adobe's Creative Cloud suite of programs.  The program offers "freeform responsive web design with no code required."  Essentially this program is a web design program for graphic artists.  Anyone who is already familiar with the toolbars in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or In Design will find it a breeze to pick up this program.  This is truly completely custom website design without the coding. Adobe Muse offers something that the other websites listed above do not, the ability to create a completely unique web design.  A teacher or student could create a portfolio that truly stands out.  Now, in terms of classroom use, this could only be used in a classroom where students already had some sort of knowledge of graphic design.  A student who is brand new to graphic design and the concept of building a website would struggle using this program. Needing to create all of your own elements from scratch also makes this program very time consuming. Another disadvantage of this program for schools is that it is not free. For someone like me who is well versed in graphic design, this program is ideal, but I would not use it in a school context. This is the program that I will personally use for my ePortfolio for graduate studies.  However, as I mentioned, this is a program that is extremely time intensive.  For the purposes of this shorter class, I will create a temporary ePortfolio using Weebly while I work on creating my Muse site. 

Another Adobe Creative Cloud program, Dreamweaver, also allows users to build custom websites.  Unlike Muse, to create a website in Dreamweaver, you should have some working knowledge of html code. Last semester I taught a tech class which included an introduction to coding via Khan Academy.  Dreamweaver, if available, would be a program I would introduce students to in the second half or even the second year of a course. Likewise, with Adobe Muse I would introduce this in the later half of a graphic design class.  

Below is a video detailing the differences and uses for Adobe's different website creation programs. I think any of these programs COULD potentially be used to create a portfolio or elements for a portfolio, but only in a technologically advanced class.

Two Questions from ETEC 524

Of the following which would be more relevant to your graduate studies and what would you prefer and why?

• Answering questions about educational technology that ETEC professors have identified as the most important things to know and having them judge the logic, accuracy, depth, breadth, and precision of your answers. 

• Articulating what you know and have learned about educational technology from your academic, professional, and other experiences and providing evidence of that learning with a collection of artifacts you’ve created

I think that answering questions about the most important things you have studied would be more relevant to a person's long term career goals.  If these questions are deemed to cover the most important content, then I would like to know that I am well prepared to fully answer these questions. If a professor judges that my response lacks accuracy, depth, etc then I am better prepared to correct whatever misconceptions I have.  In terms of using a portfolio for a career, I would not want to put out inaccurate or incomplete information.  

Now as to what I would prefer, that is a bit trickier to answer.  While I would really like the solid feedback that could come with the first option, the second option provides the opportunity to show what you have learned.  It's more of a holistic measure of the whole process and product of your education versus simply being judged on what you remember and learned at specific points in the process.  Perhaps the ideal method would be to blend the two options.  Have students create a portfolio that highlights and answers these important points, but also allow them to include a number of discretionary pages to highlight what they have personally felt were the most impactful throughout the program.

The currently bare bones version of my ePortfolio can be found here: My Portfolio. Please note I will add my full name and additional content next week, but at that point the site will be password protected.

One last big advantage to using Weebly in the classroom or for portfolio use is that websites and individual files can be password protected.  The internet is not always the most safe for our students.  Websites like this allow us to have them publish work online while maintaining privacy from someone who lands on the site via a Google search.