ePortfolios can be a great tool for bringing together a student’s work on the same (or a similar) topic or to collate the work of several individuals in a group project.
As Catalyst for Learning notes,
Reflection helps students integrate and make meaning across learning experiences. And reflection is more powerful in community.
Creating an ePortfolio allows students to reflect on the work they are doing, whether it is in writing, image, or video, and an ePortfolio collects these disparate media into one stream-lined repository that can be available publicly. Because ePortfolios are viewable by a wider community (whether limited to the class, the college, or the greater public), students may take more pride in their work, and may gain from having additional feedback.
To provide an example of an ePortfolio in action, I have put together an ePortfolio site that shows a project based around the London town of Greenwich. Tech-savvy students can utilize CSS in designing their ePortfolio site, while those less comfortable with technology can rely on the basic tools available in the editor.
The project was broken up to explore different aspects of the town – Museums, Culture, Education and the Prime Meridian – in the links going across beneath the banner. In some of these sections, there is a further subdivision of sections.
The home page shows the integration of video (above) and some text, but students can choose to just include video, or just text, for example.
The image above shows the use of both image and text, as well as the further subdivision of topics along the left division (“Museums” >> “National Maritime Museum” and “The Fan Museum”). There is also a link under the image (underlined “Cutty Sark”), showing that students can redirect to different websites for additional information or to cite their sources.
Students can creatively design their banners, make videos, take photographs and write informational or reflective texts, and then collect all these items together online.
If this were a group project, one student, perhaps, would be responsible for “Museums” while another student would be responsible for “Culture.” Because the ePortfolio is cohesively designed, no contribution will look out of place, even if one student decides to create a video, while another includes a series of images.
City or neighborhood ePortfolios are particularly apt for History courses, for example, as students studying London (as in this example) can create projects on neighborhoods. As an undergraduate, I worked on a website on the Greenwich Village neighborhood in New York City, and we included different historical cultural categories as part of our approach.
Many of the projects you are doing in your classroom can be easily converted into an ePortfolio project, such as a collection of poetry in a Creative Writing course, descriptions of minerals with photos in a Geology course, or reader responses to texts in a Literature course.
ePortfolios can be a meaningful first step toward a more technology-integrated course, providing many of the benefits that come with technology in the classroom without the need for extensive course redesign or technical expertise.
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