Portfolios and EPortfolios Applications

This article gave me an enormous amount of insight into Portfolios and the premise behind the creation of them which I had very little prior knowledge. The learning potential from either an electronic Portfolio or paper Portfolio is still being debated however the evidence is clear overall that these both serve to help individuals, teachers, and students grow intellectually from the information which is gathered and used to reflect upon later. The argument in support of students keeping electronic portfolios "to support student learning, engagement, and collaboration" has been explored in a study by the REFLECT Initiative. The acronym REFLECT or "Researching Electronic portfolios: Learning, Engaging, and Collaboration through Technology" is an initiative that started primarily to study the issues related to learning and reflection by secondary students involved in the use of electronic portfolios and has been a two year undertaking. It was interesting to read that the teacher's role was critical to the success of the programs, and how a single teacher proved to be less efficient in developing the full potential versus two teachers, or a group of teachers who had a technology support system in place. Those teachers with the technology support were better able to utilize these eportfolios because the opportunity was there to communicate with one another about their experiences. And so it is no surprise that larger communities of teachers and school-wide systems have even better results. There are many variations of and uses for portfolios although those that are used to Assess Learning and those that support learning are primary to teachers. The applications are wide provide valuable data for both teachers and students. I can now see the unlimited resource a portfolio can be for educational uses and therefore anticipate the opportunity to learn more about them in the future, whether through my own experience or through others.