Incorporating Web Based Portfolios

This year I was part of a small volunteer group of teachers who met monthly to discuss technology issues and ideas that work in the classroom. Towards the end of the year, we brainstormed ways to make this an ongoing effort next school year doing something we could then share with the remainder of the school the following year.

We decided to embark on web based portfolios for our students. All of the teachers in our group are already using technology in a variety of ways in the classroom, and we decided this would be a great way to pool all the projects and work samples together. We even received approval from our administration to make this a committee – which we are calling IDEA (Innovative Design and Emerging Applications). We plan to pilot using web based portfolios with our students in the upcoming school year (2010-2011) in order to present it to the entire faculty to incorporate during the 2011-2012 school year.

The great thing is there is choice involved for each individual teacher with regards to what types of applications to use, projects to assign, and even technology used to host the web based portfolio. We did work together on writing a parent information letter explaining the program generally.

I am extremely excited about embarking on this journey. It’s a step closer to having a paperless classroom, and I hope it will cut down tremendously on my need for paper this year. Plus, I see this as being very handy for students since it’s a lot more difficult to lose a web portfolio than it is to lose loose papers to the backpack black hole!

So now I am trying to decide how students will host their portfolios. The first thing I need to decide is if every student needs to have the exact same format – for example all blogs or all wikis. Once that is decided, the second thing I need to determine is where we will host our portfolios. I am toying with the idea of having blogs and/or wikis for student portfolios hosted through my web site. Each month, I use a tiny fraction of my bandwidth, and I am using 742.3 of 35,000 MB of storage. That should give me plenty of storage space for 105-115 student blogs or wikis. The downside to using my own space is that I would not be able to host the portfolios indefinitely. Being able to access a student’s portfolio long after he/she has left sixth grade is one of the ideals of the project, so if students did decide to keep their work (and hopefully they would want it), they would need to migrate. That seems like way too much work!

So then, how do we host our portfolios? Do we use wordpress.com or something similar for blogs? Do we find a good wiki host? I am not sure. These are some things I hope to work through in the next few weeks as I set up the basic structure of the portfolios.

Have you used web based portfolios in your classroom? How did you answer the hosting questions? If you have any comments or suggestions, I would love to hear them!

By Janelle

Space geek, science nerd extraordinaire. That's me! Want to know more, visit the About page.

5 comments

  1. A web based portfolio sounds great. Being a part of the evolution of teaching keeps me going. I am interested in how you set up the portfolio. Looking forward to it!

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