Electronic Portfolios

The article, ElectronicPortfolios as Digital Stories of Deep Learning, really made me see assessments and portfolios in a new light. The tenent that I identified with the most was: Assessment for learning should be sensitive and constructive because any assessment has an emotional impact. I think that as teachers we sometimes forget how much every single thing that we do as an emotional impact on the students, especially assessments of any kinds. Being told you did well will make a student have a good reaction, where as doing bad will have the opposite effect. Many times when a student sees they didn’t do well on an assessment they see it as a reason to give up because they don’t feel like they can do anything. If we as teachers used assessments FOR learning more often then to measure what they should have learned we not only help ourselves and our students, but we also help the overall feel of the classroom. Instead of feeling like they are failing the teacher can use assessment to see gaps and build up their students from there instead of bring them down because they are not where they should be.

Some of the classes I teach are math classes, and many students in these types of classes come in day after day, takes notes, do problems, do homework and take a test. From my observations, students never really take ownership of the information they are given and what/how they are learning it. Because of this retention of the information is low, and this creates all sorts of problems down the road. I think with electronic portfolios, or even just hard copy portfolios students could really take ownership of this information, what is it, how they are recording it, and have a great product to look back on to remember it or study it from. I see a lot of potential for using portfolios in math class. I feel like it could break up the monotony of traditional notes and give the students something that they want to keep up with and use on a daily basis. By creating these students will take the information, put it into their own style and wording, and that way they take it in, have a better chance of remembering it, and have all information they have learned in one place to go back to later. I think the idea of this in very intriguing and I am working on ways to develop it in my classroom to create a better learning environment. 

To get a better idea of what impact this could have on education I am creating my own electronic portfolio located here: Adrienne Emerson's E-Portfolio
I also researched other E-Portfolio projects to see how other people are making this work in their classes/workplaces/studies. I found a lot of interesting examples but this one was my favorite.