e-Portfolios – the benefits for student learning

Throughout the entire process of the project e-learning or technology has been involved in this. But particularly, we’ve found that e-portfolios for showcasing the richness of the learning that was happening was absolutely perfect. There were no structures, or no ways, mechanisms for us to use that enabled us to capture that digital - the images, the videoing, the audio, all of those ways that our students are capturing their information and their learning to then show parents and to show the outside world to show their stakeholders what they had actually been involved in.

So the students actually own this process. They decide what they want to showcase. Throughout the project they have been capturing evidence of their learning and talking about how they’ve been meeting success criteria. The evaluation is where they put all of the parts that they’re very proud of together and then actually share that with their parents, as a report and also their stakeholders.

Now a report is a very static document, traditionally, and you normally get a report and read it and think ‘that’s great’ - and don’t necessarily have a use for it after that. But what our students are finding is that they give this e-portfolio or this evaluation to their parents and we’ve been seeing parents giving feedback, stakeholders giving feedback which I think is just fantastic.

So it’s quite a dynamic document and a document that we think (from talking with our students) that they will be able to take with them when they leave school to showcase the kinds of dispositions that they have developed, those key competencies. So rather than just saying in a CV, ‘I’m a great team player’ they can actually showcase that using their e-portfolio.