Russell Stannard takes us from blogging to e-portfolios.
E-portfolios is a word you hear quite often these days. It comes up in much of the literature produced by the European Union, and I see that several of the British Council courses for teachers are assessed via an e-portfolio.
Assessment blogs
My interest in e-portfolios really developed out of the work I was doing with blogging while at the University of Warwick. We were using blogs as a way of assessing our students on the MA in ELT course. The students were producing a lot of digital content – mind-maps, videos, cartoons, chats, audio recordings, etc – and we got them to embed all the content into a blog and then write about what they did and how they might apply it in their own teaching context. Blogs have come a long way since the text-based blogging tools that people used before the introduction of Web 2.0. They now have much greater potential as they allow for all sorts of content to be embedded into them.
I realised that, in essence, these students’ blogs were a form of e-portfolio. They were a digital record of all their work, covering a broad range of skills that were developed during the course, and they offered information about the student’s progress to a wide range of stakeholders. The student could show the blog to a future employer as proof of their ICT skills; the audio recordings could be proof of their speaking skills; the chat and collaborative content could be used as examples of how they work in groups; the written commentary in the blog could be evidence of their written work. It was all online, in one place and easy to share and even re-purpose.
LiveBinders
However, there are more specific tools on the internet that could be used for the purpose of creating an e-portfolio. One of these tools can be found at LiveBinders.com. In its basic form, the tool is free and allows the students to keep a whole range of digital content inside an electronic binder, which is organised by tabs and sub-tabs (rather like menus and sub-menus). The students could have examples of videos they have produced, articles they have written, audio they have recorded, texts they have read, etc – all in one place. What I especially like is the whole range of layouts that the students can choose from, allowing for really interesting ways of organising their work.
One example is the ‘divided screen’ layout. The students can upload a text they have written on the left-hand side of the screen and their commentary on the text on the right-hand side. They could do the same with a video, uploading a video on one side of the screen and then, perhaps, adding an audio commentary on the other side. They can combine the resources in all sorts of ways. As a result, over the duration of a course, a student can build up a digital record of various ‘artefacts’ they have produced and display them in the portfolio. It can be used for assessment and as evidence of the skills they have acquired.
Portfolios produced by LiveBinders can be shared, so a student can allow the teacher and other students to leave comments, ask questions, etc. So again, thinking of the layout, the student can organise their portfolio in such a way as to display clearly the comments and suggestions from other students or the teacher. E-portfolios, by their very nature, are formative assessment tools as their production is a process, and the students can re-write, edit, change or adapt them as they develop. Here, I am concentrating on a situation where each student produces their own e-portfolio but, of course, an e-portfolio could also be a group-based project.
‘Live binders’
One of the best features is the LiveBinders button. You can add it to your browser (you simply drag it from the LiveBinders website when you sign up) and then when you want to add any content from the web into the one of your e-portfolios, you simply click on the button and add it into any of the binders you have created. It really is a one-click process.
Of course, e-portfolios don’t have to be just for students. I could produce an e-portfolio of all the work I have done in ICT. It could include links to my presentations on YouTube, links to my blog, to my training videos, pictures from talks, uploads of articles I have written and even the podcasts I have made. It can be updated whenever and wherever, and could be a useful way of bringing all my work in ICT together in one place. It would be very useful for potential employers, especially as I have recently gone freelance! An excellent example of an e-portfolio of that type is the one produced by Shelly Terrell (www.livebinders.com/play/ play/202342?present=true) which includes a mass of pages and tabs relating to all her work in the domain of ICT and education.
LiveBinders is not that hard to use. It doesn’t have an especially modern look and feel, and it could do with a bit of an update. However, it really is a quick and easy way to bring together a huge range of digital content in one place. I have provided some free help videos (see below) to take you through everything you need to know.
Help videos for using LiveBinders:
http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/binder/index.html
Russell Stannard is the founder of www.teachertrainingvideos.com, which won a British Council ELTons award for technology. He is a freelance teacher and writer and also a NILE Associate Trainer.
