Ways To Help Students Develop Digital Portfolios

This post was originally published on Education Week for Larry Ferlazzo’s EdWeek Teacher blog:

Digital portfolios can be a very useful tool to enhance students’ social and cultural learning in an English Language classroom. Teachers can use digital portfolios as a platform for students to show their work. More importantly, students can use them as a platform to share the learning process with their teacher.

I used digital portfolios as an extension to students’ learning outside of the classroom, as a platform for peer feedback, and to build and foster social, cultural and interpersonal interactions in our classroom.

My students created their portfolios on Blogger.com which has a very simple and easy to manage interface. However, teachers can use many other platforms: Edublogger, Google Sites, and WordPress are just a few examples. My students personalized their sites through themes, images, layout, and content.

Their digital portfolios contained some of the following categories:

• Responses to readings, discussions, news events.
• Sharing images, visuals, links/resources.
• Reflections: thoughts on ideas, themes, goals.
• Digital storytelling.

Read the rest of the post here.