5 benefits of helping your students create e-portfolios
Thomas Courtley
Education Specialist
What is a student e-portfolio?
An electronic portfolio (e-portfolio) is a purposeful collection of student work, demonstrations, lessons, imagery, and multimedia that showcases students’ learning progression, achievements, and highlights what students can do.
Almost every day you share specific lessons with your students: as homework, or as revision material, or in preparation for tests. Help you students achieve structure by taking their learning and their future into their own hands.
Why are e-portfolios beneficial for students?
With an e-portfolio you have your students reflect on what they learnt, how they learnt it, and how much they learnt. An excellent description is offered by Paulson, Paulson and Meyer: “a portfolio is a laboratory where students construct meaning from their accumulated experience”.
E-portfolios can help students facilitate, document, and archive their own learning. They can become a learning tool to clarify students’ educational goals, integrate and consolidate their learning through reflection, and showcase their achievements.
You could implement a subject-specific portfolio, or a portfolio used across multiple years or subjects. Based on your students’ needs, you can decide what kind of portfolio to create, and what to showcase within it. An e-portfolio is easy to implement and customisable.
It represents the perfect conversation starter during student-led conferences, allowing students to showcase and explain their study or career choices to their parents or caregivers. This helps guide the discussion with concrete examples of their decisions and plans.
Why are e-portfolios beneficial for teachers and schools?
E-portfolios can function as a tool for schools to evaluate programme effectiveness. They can be a useful way to organise and assess what students gained out of the programme.
If you are currently working with paper portfolios, moving into the digital realm is a natural progression. Technology makes the maintenance of portfolios easier. If you have not started with portfolios yet, it might be easier for you and your students to work directly with a digital portfolio.
How can you help your students create their e-portfolio?
It is nice to have both words and visuals in a portfolio. In LessonUp you can do so by adding photo questions. Your students could upload screenshots of their assignments, works, and exercises within any number of interactive slides. Furthermore, you could add some polls, to showcase your students’ opinion on relevant topics.
Once created, share the portfolio with your students through your class, and via your lesson modules. By doing so, you make sure that you and your students always have access to it, and can easily customise it and add slides to it if needed.
