Introduction
This Fine Focus session was presented by one of our regular participants Sandra Stewart (@marndon) from New South Wales. Sandra introduced us to e-portfolios with fantastic illustrations from her own experience. The session was recorded as always and is well worth watching!
The Session
Sandra was a great facilitator keeping us busy & therefore engaged throughout! Initially she found out about our awareness/understanding of e-portfolios and then moved on to show a variety of examples using different platforms through Application Share (this is somewhat problematic to use in BbC as opposed to Elluminate).
Sandra encouraged us to think about the purposes of e-portfolios and gave us an activity to help us think about the potential for us personally! So agree with Sandra that to use anything with students we need to have a degree of familiarity with the “tool/app” ourselves!
I particularly enjoyed that the examples were not all using Mahara. Not that I have anything against it but it seems often to be the only option mentioned in Aus VocEd!
Conclusion
This was a GREAT session – so love it when our regular participants run a session as this is a very large part of what we are about! Sandra has encouraged and motivated me to make more effort with e-portfolios. My institute has just got Edublogs Campus & we plan to enable students to use blogs as an e-portfolio. Part of the reasoning behing this is that I already know Edublogs blogging platform well – this will enable me to help my colleagues more than if we moved immediately to a specified e-portfolio platform.
Next Webinar
Our next session is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday September 29that 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday September 30th at 7am West Aus, mid morning Eastern States Aus depending on your timezone (check yours here) – in the usual Elluminate room. This is one of our fortnightly unconference sessions where we invite you to bring along your “hot topics” and “burning issues” for our poll on the topic
Yes, I’m glad that you enjoyed the session, but some ePortfolios are very limited, ie they might do one or two things very well, eg assessments and showcasing, but are not flexible enough to do other things. I really think that sessions like these should also consider the wider functionalities that people in different age-groups or lifestyles might need. eg what about peer-review or collaboration, what about different ‘personas’ or view for different audiences?
Apart from my regular blog, I have just started collating a number of ePortfolio examples so that students (and teachers) can discuss the variety of presentation styles (or errors!).
see: http://www.scoop.it/t/eportfolios-examples
Beat Wishes,
Ray T
Hi Ray
Thank you for sharing your link.
I’m not sure whether you have accessed the recording in which a variety of functions for and types of e-portfolios where mentioned. The blog post never provides a detailed view of the webinar – it is indended to enable people to decide whether they might like to view the recording.
I think we would all agree with you that there are many uses and different types of portfolio. However in the one hour available to us it is never possible to cover any topic in great depth and Sandra did a terrific job in giving us a “taste” of some of the possibilities.
Jo