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Portfolios are collections of students' work over time. A portfolio often documents a student's best work and may include other types of process information, such as drafts of the student's work, the student's self-assessment of the work, and the parents' assessment. Portfolios may be used for evaluation of a student's abilities and improvement. In recent years, portfolios of students' performance and products have gained impressive degrees of support from educators, who view them as a way to collect authentic evidence of children's learning. For many early childhood educators, portfolios are an attractive alternative to more traditional assessment approaches. Often, however, teachers raise important questions about what portfolios contain, what benefits they will bring to the classroom and the children, and how they can be managed. What do portfolios contain? Grosvenor (1993, pp. 14-15) lists three basic models.

Portfolios are systematic, purposeful, and meaningful collections of students' works in one or more subject areas.

Students of any age or grade level can learn not only to select pieces to be placed into their portfolios but can also learn to establish criteria for their selections.

Portfolios should be ongoing so that they show the students' efforts, progress, and achievements over a period of time.

What benefits can they bring? Teachers who have experience with portfolio assessment report that it complements such developmentally appropriate curriculum and instruction as whole language, hands-on approaches, and process mathematics. It also allows them to assess children's individual learning styles, enhances their ability to communicate with parents about children's learning, and helps to fulfill professional requirements of school and community accountability (Polakowski, 1993). Implemented well, portfolios can ensure that the focus and content of assessment are aligned with important learning goals. How can they be managed? The planning, collecting, storing, and interpreting of authentic information on children's progress over time is time consuming. Many teachers are initially hesitant or resistant to use portfolio assessment because they fear that adding it to their existing responsibilities may prove overwhelming. Teachers who have made the transition from traditional assessment to portfolio assessment advise that it requires a refocusing, not a redoubling of teacher effort. Since the kinds of materials collected are typical classroom tasks, assessment and instruction are joined together with curriculum. Time spent in this kind of assessment, then, is not time taken away from teaching and learning activities (Polakowski, 1993. Tierney, Carter, Desai, 1991). Polakowski (1993, pp. 52-53) describes three management techniques she uses concurrently for instruction and individualized assessment.

From the National Education Association's Teacher-to-Teacher Series, edited by Dalheim (1993). In this book, experienced teachers recount their own experiences in studying, field testing, and fully implementing portfolio assessment. Sample portfolio contents and forms are included.

By Tierney, Carter, and Desai (1991) is designed to help teachers think about how they might employ portfolio assessment in literacy areas. It contains illustrations of related materials and examples of student portfolios.

By DeFina (1992) is a practical oriented book offering suggestions for thinking through the concept of portfolios, getting started, involving parents and students, and more.

For additional information, refer to The Portfolio and Its Use. Developmentally Appropriate Assessment of Young Children (Grace, 1992). References

An online portfolio provides a way to reveal your credentials to the world. It allows you to package the best evidence of your candidacy for employment such as your resume, artwork, reports, lesson plans, transcripts, certifications, articles, letters, and more in a form easily accessible via the Internet. The Purpose of a Portfolio A well-prepared portfolio provides evidence to an employer of your accomplishments, skills, abilities and it documents the scope and quality of your experience and training. It is an organized collection of documentation that presents both your personal and professional achievements in a concrete way. Portfolios can range in from something as simple as an online version of your resume to a web site full of materials. A portfolio can include word processing files of your resume and writing samples, digital images of your graphic and artwork, and video and audio files. Portfolio Design Designing your web site well can significantly alter your user's reaction to your work. Your goal in creating a portfolio is to present your credentials and personal information in a manner that is functional, user friendly, and aesthetically pleasing. If you have some HTML or other web programming skills, you may want to consider creating a web portfolio that utilizes a more interactive and presentational effect. If not, you may want to utilize a portfolio service where you can simply upload your documents to a portfolio web site. There are sites which offer free web hosting and other sites like Portfolios. com which offer a free option specifically for portfolios. You can show five samples of your work in a two page layout. Other, more extensive, portfolio options are available for a fee. Build Your Portfolio Remember that your portfolio is a work in a process. You don't need to upload everything at once. Take it one step at a time and take the time to create a professional, polished portfolio. Shoddy work won't reflect well on your candidacy for employment. Keep your portfolio current. Check to make sure everything is in working order on a regular basis. That means no broken images or broken links to other sites or outdated information. If you have a link to your email address test it to make sure it works. Add a link to your portfolio to your resume and mention it in your cover letters so employers can access the information quickly and easily. Need some inspiration? Check out these sample portfolios.

Finally, remember that your portfolio, if you have done an excellent job, could be what makes you stand out in a crowd of candidates!

In finance, a portfolio is an appropriate mix of or collection of investments held by an institution or a private individual. Holding a portfolio is part of an investment and risk-limiting strategy called diversification. By owning several assets, certain types of risk (in particular specific risk) can be reduced. The assets in the portfolio could include stocks, bonds, options, warrants, gold certificates, real estate, futures contracts, production facilities, or any other item that is expected to retain its value. In building up an investment portfolio a financial institution will typically conduct its own investment analysis, whilst a private individual may make use of the services of a financial advisor or a financial institution which offers portfolio management services.

Portfolio management involves deciding what assets to include in the portfolio, given the goals of the portfolio owner and changing economic conditions. Selection involves deciding what assets to purchase, how many to purchase, when to purchase them, and what assets to divest. These decisions always involve some sort of performance measurement, most typically expected return on the portfolio, and the risk associated with this return (i. e. the standard deviation of the return). Typically the expected return from portfolios of different asset bundles are compared. The unique goals and circumstances of the investor must also be considered. Some investors are more risk averse than others. Mutual fund have developed particular techniques to optimize their portfolio holdings. See fund management for details.

Some of the financial models used in the process of Valuation, stock selection, and management of portfolios include.

There are many different methods for calculating portfolio returns. A traditional method has been using quarterly or monthly money-weighted returns. A money-weighted return calculated over a period such as a month or a quarter assumes that the rate of return over that period is constant. As portfolio returns actually fluctuate daily, money-weighted returns may only provide an approximation to a portfolio’s actual return. These errors happen because of cashflows during the measurement period. The size of the errors depends on three variables. the size of the cashflows, the timing of the cashflows within the measurement period, and the volatility of the portfolio

A more accurate method for calculating portfolio returns is to use the true time-weighted method. This entails revaluing the portfolio on every date where a cashflow takes place (perhaps even every day), and then compounding together the daily returns.

Performance Attribution explains the active performance (i. e. the benchmark-relative performance) of a portfolio. For example, a particular portfolio might be benchmarked against the SP 500 index. If the benchmark return over some period was 5%, and the portfolio return was 8%, this would leave an active return of 3% to be explained. This 3% active return represents the component of the portfolio's return that was generated by the investment manager (rather than by the benchmark). There are different models for performance attribution, corresponding to different investment processes. For example, one simple model explains the active return in "bottom-up" terms, as the result of stock selection only. On the other hand, sector attribution explains the active return in terms of both sector bets (for example, an overweight position in Materials, and an underweight position in Financials), and also stock selection within each sector (for example, choosing to hold more of the portfolio in one bank than another). An altogether different paradigm for performance attribution is based on using factor models, such as the Fama-French three-factor model.

By Randall S. Hansen, Ph. D. An old job-hunting tool is making a big comeback. For years, graphic artists, journalists, teachers, and other creative types have used career portfolios while job-hunting, but it is only recently that the idea has caught on for all types of job-seekers. What is a job skills, job-search, or career portfolio? It is a job-hunting tool that you develop that gives employers a complete picture of who you are -– your experience, your education, your accomplishments, your skill sets -– and what you have the potential to become -– much more than just a cover letter and resume can provide. You can use your career portfolio in job interviews to showcase a point, to illustrate the depth of your skills and experience, or to use as a tool to get a second interview. This article will show you how to develop your job-search portfolio, key elements to consider in developing your job-search portfolio, and the best resources to explore job-search portfolios in more depth. Your biggest time commitment will be the initial development of your portfolio, but once you've developed it, keeping it current and up-to-date should be fairly easy. Your two biggest decisions in developing your portfolio are determining the format of the portfolio and the organization of the portfolio. Most experts agree that the portfolio should be kept in a professional three-ring binder (zipper closure optional). You should include a table of contents and use some kind of system -– such as tabs or dividers -– to separate the various parts of the portfolio. Besides the traditional portfolio, if you have access to space on a Web site, you should also consider developing an online Web-based portfolio. Once the development is complete, you then have to gather, write, copy, and assemble the material that goes in the portfolio. This process will not only result in a professional portfolio, but should help you be better prepared for your job search. So, what types of things go in a portfolio? Here are the basic categories. Don't feel you need to use these exact ones for your portfolio. The key to remember as you contemplate these items is that you want to give reasons for the employer to hire you -- you want to showcase your education and work experience by showing examples and evidence of your work, skills, and accomplishments.

And remember . . . once you've created your job search portfolio, be sure to take it with you to all interviews and use it as a tool to getting job offers. If you still have some questions, here are additional resources that can help you build your portfolio. Books.

Kimeldorf Portfolio Library. Selected articles, excerpts, and other works by portfolio guru Martin Kimeldorf.

Questions about some of the terminology used in this article? Get more information (definitions and links) on key college, career, and job-search terms by going to our Job-Seeker's Glossary of Job-Hunting Terms. Dr. Randall S. Hansen is founder of Quintessential Careers, one of the oldest and most comprehensive career development sites on the Web, as well CEO of EmpoweringSites. com. He is also founder of MyCollegeSuccessStory. com and EnhanceMyVocabulary. com. He is publisher of Quintessential Careers Press, including the Quintessential Careers electronic newsletter, QuintZine. Dr. Hansen is also a published author, with several books, chapters in books, and hundreds of articles. He's often quoted in the media and conducts empowering workshops around the country. Finally, Dr. Hansen is also an educator, having taught at the college level for more than 15 years. Visit his personal Website or reach him by email at randall(at)quintcareers. com. Don't forget to check out all our Career Portfolio Tools and Resources for Job-Seekers. Finally, check out this deal! Domain Name Sanity -- where else can job-seekers get a Website (with the domain name of your choice), enough space to publish your Web-based resume and career portfolio (20 megabytes), up to 50 email addresses, and lots of publishing and promotion resources -- for under $20 a year!! This deal is amazing -- almost too good to be true. If you don't have a Website, but want to put your resume and portfolio on the Web, take advantage of these services! Fee-based.

The following pages are to assist you with your understanding about what portfolios contain at other institutions. They are intended to provide guidance, suggestions, and models to assist you with constructing your portfolios.

WHAT IS IT? Portfolios are collections of student work representing a selection of performance. Portfolios in classrooms today are derived from the visual and performing arts tradition in which they serve to showcase artists' accomplishments and personally favored works. A portfolio may be a folder containing a student's best pieces and the student's evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the pieces. It may also contain one or more works-in-progress that illustrate the creation of a product, such as an essay, evolving through various stages of conception, drafting, and revision. More teachers have recently begun using portfolios in all curricular areas. Portfolios are useful as a support to the new instructional approaches that emphasize the student's role in constructing understanding and the teacher's role in promoting understanding. For example, in writing instruction, portfolios can function to illustrate the range of assignments, goals, and audiences for which a student produced written material. In addition, portfolios can be a record of the activities undertaken over time in the development of written products. They can also be used to support cooperative teaming by offering an opportunity for students to share and comment on each other's work. For example, a videotape of students speaking French in the classroom can be used to evoke a critical evaluation of each other's conversational skills at various points during the school year. Recent changes in education policy, which emphasize greater teacher involvement in designing curriculum and assessing students, have also been an impetus to increased portfolio use. Portfolios are valued as an assessment tool because, as representations of classroom-based performance, they can be fully integrated into the curriculum. And unlike separate tests, they supplement rather than take time away from instruction. Moreover, many teachers, educators, and researchers believe that portfolio assessments are more effective than "old-style" tests for measuring academic skills and informing instructional decisions. WHY TRY IT? Students have been stuffing assignments in notebooks and folders for years, so what's so new and exciting about portfolios? Portfolios capitalize on students' natural tendency to save work and become an effective way to get them to take a second look and think about how they could improve future work. As any teacher or student can confirm, this method is a clear departure from the old write, hand in, and forget mentality, where first drafts were considered final products. HOW DOES IT WORK? Although there is no single correct way to develop portfolio programs, in all of them students are expected to collect, select, and reflect. Early in the school year, students are pressed to consider. What would I like to reread or share with my parents or a friend? What makes a particular piece of writing, an approach to a mathematics problem, or a write-up of a science project a good product? In building a portfolio of selected pieces and explaining the basis for their choices, students generate criteria for good work, with teacher and peer input. Students need specifics with clear guidelines and examples to get started on their work, so these discussions need to be well guided and structured. The earlier the discussions begin, the better. While portfolios were developed on the model of the visual and performing arts tradition of showcasing accomplishments, portfolios in classrooms today are a highly flexible instructional and assessment tool, adaptable to diverse curricula, student age/grade levels, and administrative contexts. For example. The content in portfolios is built from class assignments and as such corresponds to the local classroom curriculum. Often, portfolio programs are initiated by teachers, who know their classroom curriculum best. They may develop portfolios focused on a single curricular area--such as writing, mathematics, literature, or science--or they may develop portfolio programs that span two or more subjects, such as writing and reading, writing across the curriculum, or mathematics and science. Still others span several course areas for particular groups of students, such as those in vocational-technical, English as a second language, or special arts programs. The age/grade level of students may determine how portfolios are developed and used. For example, in developing criteria for judging good writing, older students are more likely to be able to help determine the criteria by which work is selected, perhaps through brainstorming sessions with the teacher and other students. Younger students may need more directed help to decide on what work to include. Older students are generally better at keeping logs to report their progress on readings and other recurrent projects. Also, older students often expand their portfolios beyond written material to include photographs or videos of peer review sessions, science experiments, performances, or exhibits. Administrative contexts also influence the structure and use of portfolios. While the primary purpose of portfolios for most teachers is to engage students, support good curricula and instruction, and improve student teaming, some portfolio programs are designed to serve other purposes as well. For example, portfolios can be used to involve parents in their children's education programs and to report individual student progress. Teachers and administrators need to educate parents about how portfolios work and what advantages they offer over traditional tests. Parents are generally more receptive if the traditional tests to which they are accustomed are not being eliminated. Once portfolios are explained and observed in practice, parents are often enthusiastic supporters. Portfolios may also be used to compare achievement across classrooms or schools. When they are used for this purpose, fairness requires that standards be developed to specify the types of work that can be included and the criteria used to evaluate the work. Guidelines may also address issues of teacher or peer involvement in revising draft work or in deciding on what to identify as a best piece. In all administrative contexts, teachers need administrative support to initiate a portfolio program. They need support material such as folders, file drawers, and access to a photocopy machine, and time to plan, share ideas, and develop strategies. All portfolios--across these diverse curricular settings, student populations, and administrative contexts--involve students in their own education so that they take charge of their personal collection of work, reflect on what makes some work better, and use this information to make improvements in future work. WHAT DOES THE RESEARCH SAY? Research shows that students at all levels see assessment as something that is done to them on their classwork by someone else. Beyond "percent correct," assigned letter grades, and grammatical or arithmetic errors, many students have little knowledge of what is involved in evaluating their classwork. Portfolios can provide structure for involving students in developing and understanding criteria for good efforts, in coming to see the criteria as their own, and in applying the criteria to their own and other students' work. Research also shows that students benefit from an awareness of the processes and strategies involved in writing, solving a problem, researching a topic, analyzing information, or describing their own observations. Without instruction focused on the processes and strategies that underlie effective performance of these types of work, most students will not learn them or will learn them only minimally. And without curriculum-specific experience in using these processes and strategies, even fewer students will carry them forward into new and appropriate contexts. Portfolios can serve as a vehicle for enhancing student awareness of these strategies for thinking about and producing work--both inside and beyond the classroom. WHAT ARE THE DRAWBACKS? Good portfolio projects do not happen without considerable effort on the part of teachers, administrators, and policymakers. Research shows that portfolios place additional demands on teachers and students as well as on school resources. Teachers need not only a thorough understanding of their subject area and instructional skills, but also additional time for planning, conferring with other teachers, developing strategies and materials, meeting with individual students and small groups, and reviewing and commenting on student work. In addition, teachers may need extra space in their classrooms to store students' portfolios or expensive equipment such as video cameras. However, portfolios have been characterized by some teachers as a worthwhile burden with tangible results in instruction and student motivation. (For more information on the role of administrators and policymakers in the success of portfolio programs, refer to the next issue of

Provides 20 to 30 pages of articles, project briefs, and other materials by teachers, project directors, and researchers about local and state portfolio projects. It also serves as an information exchange for people interested in portfolios.

PROPEL is a continuation of ARTS PROPEL, a cooperative research project involving the Pittsburgh Public Schools, Harvard Project Zero, and Educational Testing Service (ETS). Throughout both stages of the project, portfolios have been used along with classroom observations and external assessments to assess teaming in three content areas--imaginative writing, music, and the visual arts. Information on the PROPEL/ARTS PROPEL approach is now available from ETS in four handbooks--a general overview handbook and one for each of the three content areas. The handbooks describe program and teacher strategies and illustrate student production, perception, and reflection in projects that extend over time.

Maryl Gearhart of CRESST is investigating two collaborative research projects involving portfolios in elementary schools. One project involves analyzing issues and problems encountered when teachers use a scoring rubric, originally developed for writing assessments, to score writing collections in student portfolios. Gearhart and her coresearchers called for strategies that "balance the tension between evaluators' needs to constrain and structure portfolios for assessment and teachers' needs to devise portfolio uses that ensure their discretion in curriculum." In the second project, Gearhart is documenting the impact of mathematics portfolios on instructional methods and students' learning and motivation.

Richard P. Mills is commissioner of education in Vermont, where fourth and eighth grade students are being assessed in writing and mathematics using three methods. a portfolio, a best piece from the portfolio, and a set of equivalent performance tasks. Even as the results from the first year of implementation are being analyzed, the program is being expanded.

Lauren Resnick and Marc Tucker are codirectors of the New Standards Project, which has embarked on a process to develop a new assessment system to support world class standards of performance for all students. The system employs advanced forms of performance assessment, such as portfolios, exhibitions, projects, and timed performance examinations. Among its partners are the following states. Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington.

Winfield Cooper PORTFOLIO NEWS Portfolio Assessment Clearinghouse San Dieguito Union High School District 710 Encinitas Boulevard Encinitas, CA 92024 PROPEL/ARTS PROPEL Pittsburgh Public Schools 341 South Bellefield Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 ARTS PROPEL Educational Testing Service 18-R Princeton, NJ 08541 Ron Dietel National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST)/UCLA 145 Moore Hall 405 Hilgard Avenue Los Angeles, CA us. (310) us. Richard P. Mills Commissioner of Education Vermont Department of Education Montpelier, VT 05602 (802) us. New Standards Project Learning, Research and Development Center University of Pittsburgh 3939 O'Hara Street, Room 408 Pittsburgh, PA 15260 (412) us. Larry Rudner ERIC Clearinghouse/AIR 3333 K Street NW, Suite 300 Washington, DC 20007 (202) us. Joe McDonald Coalition of Essential Schools Brown University Box 1969 Providence, RI 02912 (401) us. Ed Roeber Council of Chief State School Officers 1 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Suite 700 Washington, DC us. (202) us. Don Chambers National Center for Research in Mathematical Sciences Education University of Wisconsin at Madison 1025 West Johnson Street Madison, WI 53706 (608) us.

A professional employment portfolio could be just the thing that sets you apart from other job candidates. A well-prepared portfolio

In addition to your traditional portfolio, you may want to create an electronic portfolio. You can make the electronic portfolio available to employers as a supplement to your rsum. It can be on the World Wide Web or on a CD-ROM, floppy disk, or zip disk. You can set it up as a PowerPoint presentation or include a PowerPoint slideshow as part of your electronic portfolio. Electronic portfolios are easy for employers to access and use, especially if they're on the web. By including a mailto link in your portfolio, employers can contact you easily simply by clicking on the link and typing in a message for you. Another benefit of having an electronic portfolio is that it shows employers that you are familiar with various types of computer technology and programs. Before creating your electronic portfolio, create your traditional version. Include electronic versions of items from your traditional portfolio. For example, include the word processing files for your writing samples and your rsum, scans of appropriate photos and certificates, and Adobe Acrobat (pdf) files of graphics such as brochures that you have designed. In University Computing Services graphics labs you can scan photos, digitize images, and prepare other items for inclusion. In addition to the kinds of materials in your traditional portfolio, you might include an expanded version of your rsum, audio and video clips, an e-mail link, a link to Ball State's web site as well as one to your major department's pages, a link to the curriculum for your major, and other appropriate links. Avoid personal information and inappropriate links--anywhere on your web site. Remember that anyone with much web experience can explore more of your web pages quite easily beyond your portfolio if it's online. You might want to put your online portfolio on a different server to prevent this kind of browsing by employers.

An essay appearing online and in print. This tells why portfolios match today's labor market conditions and lists many examples of what could be put in a portfolio.

Excerpted from the book, Portfolio Power, this essay describes the ways the author utilized portfolios in various job searches from the 1970s through the 1990s. The article illustrates how the author competed successfully for professional opportunities by effectively communicating his potential to employers, committees, and clients through the use of portfolios.

Describes how the author researched the topic of portfolios on the net and how he used those contacts to develop endorsements.

This article describes how people are going back to school online in order to save time and money. This piece also notes how many schools are asking students to document their online (and in-class) learning using portfolios.

Illustrates how various colleges use portfolios as part of their on-going learning and career-planning services.

An Evaluation and Career Development Alternative.   A planning guide for setting up an alternative staff evaluation program using portfolios.

This short article describes what it takes to make a portfolio. It also includes pointers about time, money, length of portfolios. Finally, tips about making digital portfolios are included.

This is a how-to article for vocational educators interested in using portfolios in their school-to-work programming. Illustrates two sample lessons from my books.

An essay using myth and humor used by the author to defuse fears about technology during his portfolio workshops.

This work speculates about the future labor market where "infobots" become your job search agents and people have portfolios online.

Using virtual portfolios for online job searches. Numerous examples are included from the author's 20 year experience in making and using portfolios. Samples from all over the world illustrate how job seekers, schools, career counselors and experts are using portfolios to give them the advantage in a tight labor market. Principles of good design illustrate how to make an effective and eye-appealing presentation. People also interested in electronic and multi-media portfolios will find useful tips and suggestions.

This book guides students in the production of a portfolio to help meet the requirements for a class assignment, culminating project, or graduation. The author of this student-centered book combines his previous expertise in helping students identify their interests and talents in careers, leisure, learning, and community service. The workbook contains dozens of examples illustrating what can go in a portfolio. letters of recommendation, computer disks, database print outs, graded assignments from various classes awards, report cards, membership certificates, attendance records, excerpts from video tapes, plan sheets for community service, photos, news clips, journal entries, music recordings, career test print outs (to name a few). The books also suggest the various ways one might use a portfolio. in job seeking, for college applications and classes, appendage to a grant, small business, record of independent study or projects, completion of class or school requirements, applying for loan applications, tech-prep linkages, a tool to chronicle personal growth, etc.

Various inventories help identify "proud moments" which guide the student in selecting portfolio samples. Vocabulary lists assist students in identifying words that describe the skills and character traits associated with these proud moments. The Weekly Portfolio Log cultivates the habit or discipline of archiving samples for the portfolio. Various outlining models can be used for organizing the portfolio samples (thematic, chronological, skills-based). The final chapter guides the student in creating front matter (table of contents and acknowledgments), back matter (self-evaluation of the portfolio), and planning an oral presentation. While the workbook is written for the secondary age population, it could be easily adapted upwards and downwards in age. The work is approximately 100 pages and is supported by a complete teacher's guide.

A professional employment portfolio could be just the thing that sets you apart from other job candidates. A well-prepared portfolio

In addition to your traditional portfolio, you may want to create an electronic portfolio. You can make the electronic portfolio available to employers as a supplement to your rsum. It can be on the World Wide Web or on a CD-ROM, floppy disk, or zip disk. You can set it up as a PowerPoint presentation or include a PowerPoint slideshow as part of your electronic portfolio. Electronic portfolios are easy for employers to access and use, especially if they're on the web. By including a mailto link in your portfolio, employers can contact you easily simply by clicking on the link and typing in a message for you. Another benefit of having an electronic portfolio is that it shows employers that you are familiar with various types of computer technology and programs. Before creating your electronic portfolio, create your traditional version. Include electronic versions of items from your traditional portfolio. For example, include the word processing files for your writing samples and your rsum, scans of appropriate photos and certificates, and Adobe Acrobat (pdf) files of graphics such as brochures that you have designed. In University Computing Services graphics labs you can scan photos, digitize images, and prepare other items for inclusion. In addition to the kinds of materials in your traditional portfolio, you might include an expanded version of your rsum, audio and video clips, an e-mail link, a link to Ball State's web site as well as one to your major department's pages, a link to the curriculum for your major, and other appropriate links. Avoid personal information and inappropriate links--anywhere on your web site. Remember that anyone with much web experience can explore more of your web pages quite easily beyond your portfolio if it's online. You might want to put your online portfolio on a different server to prevent this kind of browsing by employers.

An electronic portfolio, also known as an e-portfolio or digital portfolio, is a collection of electronic evidence assembled and managed by a user, usually on the Web (also called Webfolio). Such electronic evidence may include inputted text, electronic files, images, multimedia, blog entries, and hyperlinks. E-portfolios are both demonstrations of the user's abilities and platforms for self-expression, and, if they are online, they can be maintained dynamically over time. Some e-portfolio applications permit varying degrees of audience access, so the same portfolio might be used for multiple purposes. An e-portfolio can be seen as a type of learning record that provides actual evidence of achievement. Learning records are closely related to the Learning Plan, an emerging tool that is being used to manage learning by individuals, teams, communities of interest, and organizations. To the extent that a Personal Learning Environment captures and displays a learning record, it also might be understood to be an electronic portfolio. Students have been taught to create digital identities using presentation software or tools to create web pages. Such technologies, however, are not easily utilized by children or elderly people who lack web authoring skills or a hosted site. More recently the use of virtual learning environments (VLEs) in schools and universities has led to an increased activity in the creation of e-portfolios for a variety of reasons. Most of these e-portfolios, however, are retained within the VLE and are not easily accessed outside the VLE. This results in problems of exporting data and related interoperability issues. An alternative approach is to use a system externally hosted to any institution. This permits transition through the various stages of education and employments and even into retirement. E-portfolios, like traditional portfolios, can facilitate students' reflection on their own learning, leading to more awareness of learning strategies and needs.

Results of a comparative research between paper based portfolios and electronic portfolios in the same setting, suggest use of an electronic portfolio leads to better learning outcomes.

There are three main types of e-portfolios, although they may be referred to using different terms. developmental (e. g., working), reflective (e. g., learning), and representational (e. g., showcase). A developmental e-portfolio is a record of things that the owner has done over a period of time, and may be directly tied to learner outcomes or rubrics. A reflective e-portfolio includes personal reflection on the content and what it means for the owner's development. A representational e-portfolio shows the owner's achievements in relation to particular work or developmental goals and is, therefore, selective. When it is used for job application it is sometimes called Career portfolio. The three main types may be mixed to achieve different learning, personal, or work-related outcomes with the e-portfolio owner usually being the person who determines access levels.

Some E-portfolios can be used for presentations, a number of different assignments and most popularly, class studies. Others may be used within an education setting for assessment and accreditation, such as an institutuional electronic portfolio. An Institutional ePortfolio is a multimedia Web site designed to help document and organize a college or university's story, goals, and standards. It can foster a depth and breadth of connections among other institutions as well as within the institution itself, its programs, and its constituents and can provide an efficient means to reinforce shared visions and commitments to its mission.

Elgg, an open source social networking platform primarily designed to be a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and an Eportfolio tool.

Haag, S., Cummings, M., McCubbrey, D., Pinsonneault, A., Donovan, R. (2006). Management Information Systems for the Information Age. Building an E-portfolio(XLM-J). Toronto. Mcgraw-Hill. ISBN us.

Hebert, Elizabeth A., (2001) The Power of Portfolios - What children can teach us about Learning and Assessment. San Francisco. Jossey-Bass. ISBN us.

Mendoza-Calderón, Marco A.. Ramirez-Buentello, Joaquin. (2006). Handbook of Research on ePortfolios. Facilitating Reflection Through ePortfolio at Tecnológico de Monterrey. Hershey, USA. Ali Jafari (Ed). pp. us. ISBN us.

^ M. van Wesel A. Prop (2008) The influence of Portfolio media on student perceptions and learning outcomes. Paper to be presented at the Student Mobility and ICT. Can E-LEARNING overcome barriers of Life-Long learning Conference, Maastricht (

Institute for Learning IfL The professional body for teachers in further education in England, promoting the use of ePortfolios through its PebblePad powered REfLECT CPD tool.

EPortfolio 2009, 22-24th June 2009, London This year's event main theme is "Innovation, Creativity and Accountability."

An Introduction to Science Portfolios- Using portfolios as an assessment tool will allow your students to successfully demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of scientific concepts using their own talents and abilities.

Education for the Future - Supports systemic change in schools and districts for increased student learning, assisting schools with systemic reform largely through School Portfolios and Data Analysis.

Multimedia Approach to Profiles and Portfolios. INteractive Guidance (MAPPING) - A project to create a package of computer-based, multimedia, interactive resources that will assist staff developers and lecturers in Higher Education who wish to develop an academic (teaching) portfolio. Funded by the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council.

Preparing a Teaching Portfolio - Guidebook prepared by the Center for Teaching Effectiveness of the University of Texas at Austin.

The Teaching Portfolio - Article by Hannelore B. Rodriguez-Farrar, introduces and explain the Teaching Portfolio concept as a way to demonstrate one's teaching credentials to colleagues, department chairs and potential employers.

Teaching Portfolio at Washington State University - Guidelines for preparing a teaching portfolio at Washington State University.

Teaching Portfolio Guidelines - Guide intended to help begin to construct and think about a teaching portfolio.

Teaching Portfolios - Tools for developing and assessing a faculty teaching portfolio. Really extensive. From the University of texas at El Paso.

This article feature ideas on how to create a successful artist portfolio and how to present your portfolio to galleries or to anyone. The information is useful to anyone in working in fine art or commercial art. It will help all photographers, painters and other artists that might one day have to create artist portfolio or present their artworks to a gallery. To become successful in today's art market, an artist must have a vision, they must master the technical skills required in your art medium, and the artist needs to understand of the business of art. When presenting a portfolio, not only the artists work is being judged, the artist is also being judged. Is this artist or photographer serious? Will he or she succeed in the art world? Are they worthy of being represented? Your artist portfolio should impress viewers with your vision and with how well you have mastered the technical aspects of photography. To go along with your portfolio, you should provide good artist support materials. This site was designed to help you to understand the importance of good artist support materials and help you to understand the business side of art.

Remember, no matter what you've heard or read, your work doesn't stand alone. Whenever a gallery owner, museum curator, or art consultant reviews your portfolio, the memory of your photographs will be only part of what you leave behind. Just as packaging plays an increasingly important role in product marketing, you are as integral to your presentation as your images. A successful portfolio presentation is absolutely necessary if you expect to become represented gallery or make a lot of sales.

Your photographs must be presented in a professional manner. Choose only finished prints for your portfolio. Never show work prints or unspotted prints. Always show your best work. Plan your portfolio carefully. A good portfolio should have continuity and provide viewers with a clear idea as to what your vision is. It should be organized by subjects or different photographic styles. Horizontal and vertical images, as well as different size prints should be organized and grouped separately. Black and white images and color images should also be grouped separately for easier viewing. Your work should be presented in an appropriate portfolio case or shipping case. If you are presenting your work to a gallery, it is best to use a case specifically designed for fine art photography. Cases are usually available from good local photography or art supply stores. You can also purchase them through mail order companies. Your photographs should be completely finished prints that are ready for sale. They should be overmatted, signed, dated, titled, numbered, and stamped with your print identification stamp. Before making your portfolio presentation, remove any tissue or plastic bags that protect the prints. Make sure that your overmats are clean and free of any finger prints. Your window overmats should be well cut, with clean straight lines, and look as good as possible. If you are having problems cutting them, try a professional frame shop. Shop around for the best prices, and if money is a problem, consider trading art for matting.

Your portfolio must be well-edited, and you may not be the best judge of your own work. Since it is often difficult to be objective about your own photographs, you might have someone you respect view and critique your portfolio prior to showing it to a gallery. This will ensure that the work you show is your strongest work. Limit the number of photographs you are showing to no more than twenty prints. You might even consider as few as ten prints. The main objective of your first visit is just to introduce your work to the gallery. Make the experience of looking at your work as pleasant and positive as possible so that you can come back another day. It could take several portfolio presentations before the gallery gets to know you and decides to represent you. Present only one thematically unified or otherwise cohesive body of work. If you have more than one body of work to show, show your strongest work first and trust that your success will allow you to present your work again.

Start off on a positive note, make a complimentary comment about the gallery or the artworks on display. Thank the reviewer for taking the time to look at your work. Briefly introduce yourself and your photographic history. Keep it short, because your work is more important at this stage. Assume that the person looking at your work is a professional. Don't insist on white gloves or make a fuss about the handling of your work. If you are overly concerned, handle the work for the reviewer. Always keep in mind that you want to make it as easy as possible for the reviewer, so that you will be welcomed back again. Don't interfere with normal business that might be going on during the portfolio review. Never interrupt a sales effort or impede a possible sale. Before you begin your presentation, let the reviewer know that you understand the importance of normal business, and that you will not mind an interruption if something comes up. Listen carefully and don't hesitate to take notes if necessary. Try to identify the reviewers favorite photographs. You might want to show them again on another visit. Keep your questions to a minimum. Try to eliminate negative responses from the reviewer, and always avoid questions that can be answered with a no. Don't ask for representation, and don't ask for an exhibition, because you can assume that the person looking at your work knows what you want. The reviewer will discuss representation or exhibitions if they are available to you. Your main purpose in showing your portfolio is to have the gallery become familiar with your work. If you have arranged for a thirty-minute appointment, time your presentation so that you will be ready to walk out the door in thirty minutes or less. Stretching your appointment, unless the reviewer requests it, will do you more harm than good. If you have slides of additional work, have them ready and be prepared to show them if (and only if) the person reviewing asks to see more of your work. Slides are frequently used by galleries and art consultants to show clients images. Slides should always be of prints, not duplicates of slides. Mastering the art of making good quality slides will be a benefit to your career. If you are having difficulties making good slides, let a professional lab or someone who knows how to make them do it for you.

Before contacting a gallery, find out what type of art they show. Look at the work of the artists they represent and make sure that your photographs will fit into the gallery's profile and positioning. Inquire about the gallery's current reviewing procedures and comply with the review methods requested. The best way to do this is to ask the gallery. Methods of review vary. You might have to leave your portfolio overnight, or you might have to leave it for a week. Some galleries will review only artist slides. Others may ask for a recommendation from a gallery artist or a collector. It is important to follow the gallery's review procedure, especially on your first review. Request a special review only as a last resort, only if you are absolutely unable to comply with the standard review process. Find out the name and position of the person reviewing artists' portfolios and write down his or her name with correct spelling. This is important for future visits and correspondence with the gallery. If you expect the reviewers to remember who you are, have the same courtesy and remember them.

Call or write several weeks ahead of time requesting an opportunity to show your work. If writing, be sure to include a self-addressed envelope with a reply card. Always address your request to the person reviewing work. If you are not sure who that is, call the gallery and find out. Form letters are frequently sent to galleries and typically are not well-received. Avoid short-notice appointments (I'm in town for only one day! Can you look at my work?). Never cold call that is drop in without an appointment and ask for a review on the spot. On the day of your portfolio presentation, call to confirm your appointment and ask, Is this still a good time for you to look at my work or would another time be better? As in all aspects of business, your timing will be crucial. Be on time for your appointment. If you are unable to make your appointment, phone as far in advance as possible and try to reschedule. Be sensitive to the gallery's priorities. Don't try to get your work reviewed at a time when a new exhibition is being installed, or when the gallery has an opening or other scheduled event. Timing is one very important for a successful portfolio review.

Create a marketing card for your manual or computerized files. A marketing card is a record of who you have contacted and what you contacted them about. Include the following information. name of reviewer, name and address of the gallery, telephone number, date of review, type of work presented, impressions, comments, what material you left behind, results of the review, and type of follow-up you have planned. Be sure to send a thank you card to the person who looked at your portfolio. Send a postcard of one of your images, so that it will remind the reviewer of what work you presented. Follow-up in four to six months, or whenever you have a new portfolio of images to show. You can create and send real postcards from AmazingMail, click on the link try one. The quality is excellent and you can upload your own images to create a postcard.

Developing a relationship with a gallery is like developing any other valuable relationship. the chances are that it won't happen overnight. But if you are not patient, professional and polite, chances are it won't happen at all. A gallery owner or anyone else to whom you are showing your portfolio has many things to do beyond discovering new artists. Be aware and sensitive to the difference between your priorities and the priorities of whomever is seeing your photographs. To become a successful professional artist takes more than good artwork. To succeed, you must understand the business of art, create a good portfolio, and master your portfolio presentation. You can and will become a successful visual artist if you have good timing, some luck, and the desire to become successful.

Open Source Portfolio (OSP) is a robust, non-proprietary, open-source electronic portfolio application, developed by a community of individuals and organizations from around the world.

OSP Provides Tools for Students and for Faculty STUDENTS. The OSPortfolio provides an environment where portfolio owners — typically, students — can exhibit their work.

FACULTY. The OSPortfolio also offers tools for faculty — anyone who coordinates a Common Interest Group (CIG) such as a course or any other club or project — to provide structure and guidance for CIG participants (students). CIG coordinators, evaluators, reviewers and portfolio guests are able to review published portfolios — and can also provide formal evaluation or informal feedback and comments. Tools for analysis of portfolio items in aggregate also make it possible for CIG coordinators, administrators or program evaluators to measure program effectiveness or educational outcomes.

This site aims to provide faculty and graduate teaching associates (TAs) with a practical and self-reflective guide to the development of a teaching portfolio.

As an academic, there are different types of portfolios that you might prepare. These include the course portfolio, the professional (scholar) portfolio, and the teaching portfolio. A course portfolio includes information specific to a particular course. Such a portfolio would include syllabi, course materials, sample assignments, and an explanation for the rationale behind the assignments, and how your teaching methods and your course materials help students learn. A professional portfolio is a collection of documents that you might submit as you go through the promotion and tenure process. This type of portfolio would include all of your work as a scholar, including your research progress, your teaching experience and accomplishments, as well as your record of academic service. The teaching portfolio describes and documents multiple aspects of your teaching ability. There are two basic types of portfolio.

A summative portfolio is created for the purpose of applying for an academic job or for promotion and tenure within a department.

Because your teaching experience changes as your career progresses, it is a good idea to periodically update your portfolio(s) in order to keep current with your progress, and to give yourself a regular opportunity to reflect on your teaching. At some point in your career, you may find that you need to keep a summative as well as a formative portfolio, since they serve different purposes. note, though, that those two portfolios may have several materials in common. The materials provided here focus on the teaching portfolio. Some people describe a teaching portfolio as a place to summarize your teaching accomplishments and provide examples of classroom material. Others describe it as a mechanism and space for reflecting upon your teaching. And for the rest of us, it can be described as a space to do both. Top

The format of a portfolio varies considerably. An effective portfolio should be well documented and organized. The American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) suggests that a teaching portfolio should be structured, representative, and selective.

A structured portfolio should be organized, complete, and creative in its presentation. Some questions for you to think about might be. Is my portfolio neat? Are the contents displayed in an organized fashion? Are the contents representative for the purpose that it is intended?

In addition to attending to structure, a portfolio should also be comprehensive. The documentation should represent the scope of one's work. It should be representative across courses and time. Some questions for you think about might be. Does my portfolio portray the types and levels of courses that I have taught? Does my portfolio display a cross-section of my work in teaching?

The natural tendency for anyone preparing a portfolio is wanting to document everything. However, if a portfolio is being used either for summative or formative purposes, careful attention should be given to conciseness and selectivity in order to appropriately document one's work. Peter Seldin (1997) suggests limiting the contents of a portfolio to ten pages. We suggest that you limit the contents of your portfolio to what is required by the reviewer while also keeping the purpose in mind. Top

One would use a portfolio during the academic job search, promotion and tenure process, and for personal and professional development. Top

There are several ways that you can use your portfolio in the job application process. For example, you could do one or two of the following.

The portfolio describes and documents the abilities of a unique individual, and therefore, no two teaching portfolios look alike. A portfolio can include a number of different types of documents, and which you choose to include will depend on the type of teaching you have done, your academic discipline, the purpose for creating one, and the intended audience. For a list of items that are appropriate for inclusion in the teaching portfolio, go to Items that might be included in a teaching portfolio. In spite of the variation that exists across portfolios, here is a short list of documents that often are part of one.

A table of contents is an important tool in organizing the various sections of your portfolio. For examples of these, go to Examples of Table of Contents. Some of the sections above, such as the statement on teaching philosophy, are strictly narrative (reflective). Other sections consist of a set of materials as well as a narrative or rationale that explains what they are. The narrative component should answer the following questions.

The portfolio is not, however, simply a binder with all of the teaching documents inserted with random pages of reflection. It includes documents and materials which collectively suggest the scope and quality of a professors teaching performance. The portfolio is not an exhaustive compilation of all of the documents and materials that bear on teaching performance. Instead, it presents selected information on teaching activities and solid evidence of their effectiveness. (Seldin, 1997, p. 2) Top

Washington, DC. American Association for Higher Education. Kaplan, M. (1998). The teaching portfolio.

(2nd ed.). Bolton, MA. Anker Publishing, Inc. Wiedmer, T. (1998). Portfolios. A means for documenting professional development.

This site aims to provide faculty and graduate teaching associates (TAs) with a practical and self-reflective guide to the development of a teaching portfolio.

As an academic, there are different types of portfolios that you might prepare. These include the course portfolio, the professional (scholar) portfolio, and the teaching portfolio. A course portfolio includes information specific to a particular course. Such a portfolio would include syllabi, course materials, sample assignments, and an explanation for the rationale behind the assignments, and how your teaching methods and your course materials help students learn. A professional portfolio is a collection of documents that you might submit as you go through the promotion and tenure process. This type of portfolio would include all of your work as a scholar, including your research progress, your teaching experience and accomplishments, as well as your record of academic service. The teaching portfolio describes and documents multiple aspects of your teaching ability. There are two basic types of portfolio.

A summative portfolio is created for the purpose of applying for an academic job or for promotion and tenure within a department.

Because your teaching experience changes as your career progresses, it is a good idea to periodically update your portfolio(s) in order to keep current with your progress, and to give yourself a regular opportunity to reflect on your teaching. At some point in your career, you may find that you need to keep a summative as well as a formative portfolio, since they serve different purposes. note, though, that those two portfolios may have several materials in common. The materials provided here focus on the teaching portfolio. Some people describe a teaching portfolio as a place to summarize your teaching accomplishments and provide examples of classroom material. Others describe it as a mechanism and space for reflecting upon your teaching. And for the rest of us, it can be described as a space to do both. Top

The format of a portfolio varies considerably. An effective portfolio should be well documented and organized. The American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) suggests that a teaching portfolio should be structured, representative, and selective.

A structured portfolio should be organized, complete, and creative in its presentation. Some questions for you to think about might be. Is my portfolio neat? Are the contents displayed in an organized fashion? Are the contents representative for the purpose that it is intended?

In addition to attending to structure, a portfolio should also be comprehensive. The documentation should represent the scope of one's work. It should be representative across courses and time. Some questions for you think about might be. Does my portfolio portray the types and levels of courses that I have taught? Does my portfolio display a cross-section of my work in teaching?

The natural tendency for anyone preparing a portfolio is wanting to document everything. However, if a portfolio is being used either for summative or formative purposes, careful attention should be given to conciseness and selectivity in order to appropriately document one's work. Peter Seldin (1997) suggests limiting the contents of a portfolio to ten pages. We suggest that you limit the contents of your portfolio to what is required by the reviewer while also keeping the purpose in mind. Top

One would use a portfolio during the academic job search, promotion and tenure process, and for personal and professional development. Top

There are several ways that you can use your portfolio in the job application process. For example, you could do one or two of the following.

The portfolio describes and documents the abilities of a unique individual, and therefore, no two teaching portfolios look alike. A portfolio can include a number of different types of documents, and which you choose to include will depend on the type of teaching you have done, your academic discipline, the purpose for creating one, and the intended audience. For a list of items that are appropriate for inclusion in the teaching portfolio, go to Items that might be included in a teaching portfolio. In spite of the variation that exists across portfolios, here is a short list of documents that often are part of one.

A table of contents is an important tool in organizing the various sections of your portfolio. For examples of these, go to Examples of Table of Contents. Some of the sections above, such as the statement on teaching philosophy, are strictly narrative (reflective). Other sections consist of a set of materials as well as a narrative or rationale that explains what they are. The narrative component should answer the following questions.

The portfolio is not, however, simply a binder with all of the teaching documents inserted with random pages of reflection. It includes documents and materials which collectively suggest the scope and quality of a professors teaching performance. The portfolio is not an exhaustive compilation of all of the documents and materials that bear on teaching performance. Instead, it presents selected information on teaching activities and solid evidence of their effectiveness. (Seldin, 1997, p. 2) Top

Washington, DC. American Association for Higher Education. Kaplan, M. (1998). The teaching portfolio.

(2nd ed.). Bolton, MA. Anker Publishing, Inc. Wiedmer, T. (1998). Portfolios. A means for documenting professional development.

What's a digital or electronic portfolio? How can I develop a student or teacher portfolio? How can text, photos, diagrams, audio, video and other multimedia elements be integrated into a portfolio? Electronic Portfolios are a creative means of organizing, summarizing, and sharing artifacts, information, and ideas about teaching and/or learning, along with personal and professional growth. The reflective process of portfolio development can be as important as the final product. In many cases, they are used as part of faculty and student evaluation along with other assessment tools such as standardized tests. A portfolio is a sampling of the breadth and depth of a person's work conveying the range of abilities, attitudes, experiences, and achievements. Read and watch Dr. Helen Barrett on Electronic Portfolio Development from Apple Learning Interchange. Explore a couple examples.

Traditionally, portfolios have been stored in boxes and three-ring binders. Although this format works fine for paper and other print-based materials, it misses many other ways ways of communicating ideas. Over the past decade, many people have found electronic portfolios as an effective way to more clearly present information not only through text, but also through visuals, audio, and video formats. Documents can be stored on hard drives, Zip disks, or CD-ROM in many digital formats such as text documents, picture files, web pages, digital video, and presentation files. They can be stored on hard drives, Zip disks, websites, or CD-ROM. Use the following websites to learn more about the development of electronic portfolios.

The following articles and links pages provide good background information for electronic portfolios.

Explore examples of online portfolios. If you're searching for additional examples, use a search tool such as Google and include search words such as digital electronic teaching learning video portfolio.

Many companies produce software that can be used to develop or store portfolios. Some examples are provided below.

Many schools and universities are involving students in the development of portfolios. Consider using a webquest as a tool for motivating students as well as guiding them through the process. Explore the following examples, then create your own.

Professional portfolios help faculty document their teaching achievement, as well as their other scholarly activities including research and service. The reflective process of portfolio development can promote better teaching, develop fresh thinking about education, and encourage personal and professional growth. Teaching portfolios provide faculty with an opportunity to reflect on their teaching goals, instructional strategies, methods, and materials, as well as student/teacher relationships. Many materials may be included in a teaching portfolio including professional plan (goals, philosophy, reflections), teaching materials (syllabi, lessons, activities, student materials, presentations), sample student documents and projects, curriculum vitae, course evaluations (students, peers, administrators, self), reflections, video/audio teaching samples, recognitions (awards, publications, letters), and professional development (personal plans, teaching innovations, professional activities, service, research, publications, presentations, grants). The portfolio includes materials that provide evidence or information that document a specific activity, as well as an interpretation or reflection on the importance or relevance of this material. Electronic portfolios can be organized in many ways. According to the AAHE (American Association for Higher Education), a teaching portfolio should be structured, representative, and selective. Rather than being an archive of all professional work, a portfolio is intended to be comprehensive and representative of the breadth and depth of experience. Explore Electronic Portfolios Explore sample electronic portfolios. Discuss the aspects of each portfolio you find most valuable. Organize resources for your own electronic portfolio. Create guidelines for a student portfolio.

A portfolio is a purposeful collection of student work that exhibits the student's efforts, progress, and achievements in one or more areas of the curriculum. The collection must include the following.

In this new era of performance assessment related to the monitoring of students' mastery of a core curriculum, portfolios can enhance the assessment process by revealing a range of skills and understandings one students' parts. support instructional goals. reflect change and growth over a period of time. encourage student, teacher, and parent reflection. and provide for continuity in education from one year to the next. Instructors can use them for a variety of specific purposes, including.

The heart of successful Maryland School Performance Assessment Program preparation is the ongoing involvement of students in performance-based instruction and assessment experiences. Portfolios offer an ideal context for monitoring students' direct experience in MSPAP performance assessment asks and Dimensions of Learning meaningful-use tasks. They can record both final products and students' ongoing thinking reflections and decision-making processes while engaged in such tasks.

Portfolios are for protecting, carrying, and presenting works of art. Choose your portfolio based on how you plan to use it. Do you carry supplies and equipment in your portfolio, as well as finished works of art? The portfolio that's best for a job interview or client presentation might not be suited to the wear and tear of everyday use.

Presentation Cases are portfolios that contain a ring binder and sheet protectors. They are designed more for presentations than for transportation and everyday use. A presentation case typically comes with several sheet protectors, and it may have the capacity to store more. Additional sheet protectors, compatible with the ring mechanism, can be ordered separately.

Portfolio approaches to assessing literacy have been described in a wide variety of publications (Flood Lapp, 1989. Lamme Hysmith, 1991. Matthews, 1990. Tierney, Carter, Desai, 1991. Valencia, 1990. Wolf, 1989) so that many descriptions of portfolios exist. Generally speaking, a literacy portfolio is a systematic collection of a variety of teacher observations and student products, collected over time, that reflect a student's developmental status and progress made in literacy.

A portfolio is not a random collection of observations or student products. it is systematic in that the observations that are noted and the student products that are included relate to major instructional goals. For example, book logs that are kept by students over the year can serve as a reflection of the degree to which students are building positive attitudes and habits with respect to reading. A series of comprehension measures will reflect the extent to which a student can construct meaning from text. Developing positive attitudes and habits and increasing the ability to construct meaning are often seen as major goals for a reading program.

Portfolios are multifaceted and begin to reflect the complex nature of reading and writing. Because they are collected over time, they can serve as a record of growth and progress. By asking students to construct meaning from books and other selections that are designed for use at various grade levels, a student's level of development can be assessed. Teachers are encouraged to set standards or expectations in order to then determine a student's developmental level in relation to those standards (Lamme Hysmith, 1991).

Portfolios can consist of a wide variety of materials. teacher notes, teacher-completed checklists, student self- reflections, reading logs, sample journal pages, written summaries, audiotapes of retellings or oral readings, videotapes of group projects, and so forth (Valencia, 1990). All of these items are not used all of the time.

An important dimension of portfolio assessment is that it should actively involve the students in the process of assessment (Tierney, Carter, Desai, 1991).

There are many ways in which portfolios have proven effective. They provide teachers with a wealth of information upon which to base instructional decisions and from which to evaluate student progress (Gomez, Grau, Block, 1991). They are also an effective means of communicating students' developmental status and progress in reading and writing to parents (Flood Lapp, 1989). Teachers can use their record of observations and the collection of student work to support the conclusions they draw when reporting to parents. Portfolios can also serve to motivate students and promote student self-assessment and self-understanding (Frazier Paulson, 1992). Linn, Baker, and Dunbar (1991) indicate that major dimensions of an expanded concept of validity are consequences, fairness, transfer and generalizability, cognitive complexity, content quality, content coverage, meaningfulness, and cost efficiency. Portfolios are an especially promising approach to addressing all of these criteria.

Portfolios are an effective way to bring assessment into harmony with instructional goals. Portfolios can be thought of as a form of "embedded assessment". that is, the assessment tasks are a part of instruction. Teachers determine important instructional goals and how they might be achieved. Through observation during instruction and collecting some of the artifacts of instruction, assessment flows directly from the instruction (Shavelson, 1992). Portfolios can contextualize and provide a basis for challenging formal test results based on testing that is not authentic or reliable. All too often students are judged on the basis of a single test score from a test of questionable worth (Darling-Hammong Wise, 1985. Haney Madaus, 1989). Student performance on such tests can show day-to-day variation. However, such scores diminish in importance when contrasted with the multiple measures of reading and writing that are part of a literacy portfolio.

Portfolios are extremely valid measures of literacy. A new and exciting approach to validity, known as consequential validity, maintains that a major determinant of the validity of an assessment measure is the consequence that the measure has upon the student, the instruction, and the curriculum (Linn, Baker, Dunbar, 1991). There is evidence that portfolios inform students, as well as teachers and parents, and that the results can be used to improve instruction, another major dimension of good assessment (Gomez, Grau, Block, 1991).

A teaching portfolio is a compilation of information about a faculty member's teaching, made by that faculty member, often for use in consideration for tenure or promotion. It is not, in itself, an instrument for teaching evaluation, but a vehicle for presenting information which may include results of evaluations and which may itself contribute to evaluation. It can therefore be selective, emphasizing the positive--to serve as a showcase for the faculty member's achievements in teaching, not necessarily a comprehensive or balanced picture of everything. Purposes for the teaching portfolio include. provision of data for personnel decisions, including tenure and promotion. supplying data for aggregate information that might be communicated to, for example, legislative bodies. support of cases for internal or external awards. and, perhaps most importantly, provision to the faculty member of special and significant opportunities for reflection about his or her teaching. There are other possibilities. The very fact that the teaching portfolio is now in place should serve to underscore the increasing emphasis on the value of teaching at WSU and in higher education nationally. At WSU, this emphasis will be expressed in other ways, circumstances permitting. The format and uses of the portfolio will naturally vary from one part of the university or discipline to another. The outline that follows is meant to be an adaptable template, which can be modified for individual units or even individual faculty members. Nevertheless, there should be a degree of uniformity. The original impetus for proposing the portfolio at WSU was the fact that personnel documents from different units described teaching activities in such varied ways that often it was difficult, if not impossible, to use them fairly or to obtain useful aggregate results. Some guidance seemed in order. The problem is, and will surely continue to be, to strike a good balance between comparability and flexibility. In departments where something like a teaching portfolio is already used, adaptation to the format proposed here should be straightforward. Faculty members near the beginnings of their teaching careers should find it especially easy to assemble portfolios. Once started, the portfolio can be routinely updated. In no case should the development of a teaching portfolio be a burden that consumes an excessive amount of a faculty member's time. nor should reading one be a daunting task.

Typically, the teaching portfolio is expected to be not more than five pages long and should present information under headings selected appropriately from those listed below (and perhaps others) and organized in much the same way. Some faculty members may attach complementary information in the form of appendices or exhibits, but these are not always essential and should be used, if at all, in moderation. The outline that follows can therefore be regarded as a menu from which faculty members (or departments, or colleges) can select items to include in teaching portfolios to fit their particular circumstances. Each teaching portfolio should be dated and signed by the faculty member concerned. The Outline of a Teaching Portfolio that now follows is self-contained, and can be considered and used separately from the rest of this document. Return to Beginning

The Evaluation section in a portfolio should consist chiefly of summaries of data from whatever methods for evaluating teaching are used--not only evaluation by students. The data themselves may be attached in exhibits or offered as available on request. Some faculty members may wish to include explanations or rejoinders for evaluations which they believe to be potentially misleading. 1. Student evaluations Examples. Results of student questionnaires. interviews of students. the one-minute essay and other forms of classroom research. 2. Measures of student learning Direct evidence of the extent and quality of learning by the faculty member's students, e. g. performance on appropriate standardized tests. 3. Peer evaluation Reports from respected colleagues who have visited classes, examined instructional materials, talked with the faculty member, etc. Letters from colleagues may also be useful. 4. Letters from students, alumni, and employers of alumni Solicited letters, e. g. from former students, are not likely to carry the credibility of unsolicited statements. 5. Teaching awards Something should be said about the character of the awards if the names are not self-explanatory. 6. Other evaluations

[These examples do not present the portfolios with all the detail that they would ordinarily contain, but merely enough to suggest how each full portfolio might look. They are based on portfolios produced by members of the WSU faculty under the influence of the draft of February 4.] AN INFORMAL TEACHING PORTFOLIO IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES. TEACHING PORTFOLIO FOR X. Y.* August 1, 1994

Ronald Barnett, Linking Teaching and Research. A Critical Inquiry. Journal of Higher Education 63.6 (November/December 1992) us. Ernest L. Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered. Priorities of the a Professoriate (Princeton, NJ. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990). William E. Cashin, Defining and Evaluating College Teaching (IDEA Paper No. 21) (Manhattan, KS. Center for Faculty Evaluation Development, Kansas State University, 1989). John A. Centra, Reflective Faculty Evaluation. Enhancing Teaching and Determining Faculty Effectiveness (San Francisco, etc.. Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1993). Janet G. Donald and Arthur Sullivan, eds., Using Research to Improve Teaching (New Directions for Teaching and Learning 23) (San Francisco, etc.. Jossey-Bass, Publishers, 1985). Russell Edgerton, Patricia Hutchings, and Kathleen Quinlan, The Teaching Portfolio. Capturing the Scholarship in Teaching (Washington, DC. American Association for Higher Education, 1992). Elaine El-Khawas, Campus Trends 1993 (Higher Education Panel Report No. 83) (Washington, DC. American Council of Education, July 1993). Peter T. Ewell, To Capture the Ineffable. New Forms of Assessment in Higher Education. Review of Research in Higher Education 17 (1991), us. Barbara J. Millis, Putting the Teaching Portfolio in Context. To Improve the Academy, 10 (Stillwater, OK. New Forums Press, 1991) us. Earl H. Potter III, Mark W. Dubin, and Susan B. Stine, Undergraduate Education in the Public Research University. Defining a Shared Vision, Papers, Pew Higher Education Research Program, 1991. Peter Seldin, The Teaching Portfolio. A Practical Guide to Improved Performance and Promotion/Tenure Decisions (Bolton, MA. Anker Publishing Company, Inc., 1991). Peter Seldin and Associates, How Administrators Can Improve Teaching (San Francisco, etc.. Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1990). Peter Seldin et al., Successful Use of Teaching Portfolios (Bolton, MA. Anker Publishing Company, Inc., 1993). Peter Seldin and Linda Annis, The Teaching Portfolio. Teaching at UNL [Teaching and Learning Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln] Vol. 13, No. 2 (September 1991) 1-2, 4. Bruce M. Shore, et al., The Teaching Dossier. A Guide to Its Preparation and Use, revised (Montreal. Canadian Association of University Teachers, 1986). Beverly T. Watkins, New Technique Tested to Evaluate College Teaching. Effort Uses Portfolios to Document Professors' In-Class Performance. The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 16, 1990) A15f.

In its simplest terms an e-portfolio is a collection of evidence. Students use their personal Web space account to plan, reflect upon, and then publish evidence of what they've learned at Penn State. Students use either the Penn State Blog or common web publishing tools to share important aspects of their collegiate experience!

Launched in 2003, we currently feature around 15,000 illustrations by over 600 artists covering a broad spectrum of styles, techniques and specialisms. The Portfolios are managed by the individual artists themselves so the content is regularly changing as new images are added to the site

AOI Portfolios have been developed by theAssociation of Illustrators to promote illustration to the creative industries. www. theaoi. com 2008 Association of Illustrators and individual artists. All rights reserved

The main task in this course is for each student to build up the student portfolio. We use many Internet based tools in course and students are expected to work during the course at building up their on-line portfolio . It consists of all their assignments and a description of the learning process.

The student portfolios are not only showcases used for assessment in the end of the course, they are also a piece of a knowledge structure (semantic network ) that each student builds up. Many parts of the student assignments and exercised that are in the portfolio are linked to and depend upon other websites and it is expected that student will use modules of their on-line portfolio in projects in the future. The portfolio consists of both of collection finished tasks and of a learning journal - a weblog that each student keeps through the course.

Assessment in this course is based upon the student portfolio. The portfolio is both showcase of student work and includes documentation or a learning journal by the students about their learning process.

All students keep a weblog - a learning journal for four months. The journal became one part of the portfolio

Example of students personal web with links to various projects of the student and to portfolio pages of completed courses.

Is centered around individual students, each student builds up digital portfolio. The student portfolio is not static - it will eventually became a showcase of work of student but more importantly it is also dynamic, it includes a digital journal/diary (weblog)for several months

Launched in 2003, we currently feature around 15,000 illustrations by over 600 artists covering a broad spectrum of styles, techniques and specialisms. The Portfolios are managed by the individual artists themselves so the content is regularly changing as new images are added to the site

AOI Portfolios have been developed by theAssociation of Illustrators to promote illustration to the creative industries. www. theaoi. com 2008 Association of Illustrators and individual artists. All rights reserved

The main task in this course is for each student to build up the student portfolio. We use many Internet based tools in course and students are expected to work during the course at building up their on-line portfolio . It consists of all their assignments and a description of the learning process.

The student portfolios are not only showcases used for assessment in the end of the course, they are also a piece of a knowledge structure (semantic network ) that each student builds up. Many parts of the student assignments and exercised that are in the portfolio are linked to and depend upon other websites and it is expected that student will use modules of their on-line portfolio in projects in the future. The portfolio consists of both of collection finished tasks and of a learning journal - a weblog that each student keeps through the course.

Assessment in this course is based upon the student portfolio. The portfolio is both showcase of student work and includes documentation or a learning journal by the students about their learning process.

All students keep a weblog - a learning journal for four months. The journal became one part of the portfolio

Example of students personal web with links to various projects of the student and to portfolio pages of completed courses.

Is centered around individual students, each student builds up digital portfolio. The student portfolio is not static - it will eventually became a showcase of work of student but more importantly it is also dynamic, it includes a digital journal/diary (weblog)for several months

By Eileen M. Herteis (TLC Program Director, us. ) The teaching portfolio is both a process and a product. It is at once the receptacle for evidence of achievement in teaching and the means for teachers to discern ways to achieve more. Before you embark on your portfolio, visit the companion site about the

Then you will realize why, when you refer to your scholarly achievements, you should include teaching. Teaching, research, and community, professional and public service are all part of your scholarship. You are not a teacher-scholar. you are a scholar. Use the teaching portfolio and this web site to help you document that scholarship.

This web site allows University of Saskatchewan teachers to develop their portfolios at their own pace, to see examples of others' portfolios, and to link to the new standards of promotion and tenure at the university.

Please do not mail or e-mail draft portfolios to the TLC. University of Saskatchewan teachers or graduate students who would like a consultation to discuss their own portfolio should contact the TLC at us.

Acknowledgments. Thanks go to Darlene Froberg, former Instructional Technology Assistant at the Teaching Learning Centre, for her extensive work on the Portfolio site and the TLC site in general.

Is using HyperCard to keep track and assess the progress of their K-8 Students. See samples of student-created portfolios and an overview of how they make them.

Alaska are using HyperStudio to develop their electronic portfolios. Instructions are included as well as samples.

Included at the site are links to an online HTML tutorial of their electonic portfolio process. Student portfolios include information about their courses, skills, associations, personal information, interview responses and a resume.

Electronic Portfolios can be produced using anyone of a number of multimedia programs or it can be Web-based, coded with an HTML editor or a simple text editor. Six multimedia programs specifically customized for electronic portfolio documentation are reviewed at

The Ithaca City School District evaluated many approaches to constructing electronic portfolios. simple word processing portfolios, videotapes, Web pages, and multimedia software applications. Read about their experiences and a summary of possible software products.

For preservice and inservice teacher assessment. Dowload demos and get information about alternative assessment and electronic portfolios. Online demos available at

Is a comprehensive approach to maintaining a portfolio. The kit includes evertything you need to start building portfolios for every student in your class. The program includes I'm a Happy Writer Electronic Portfolio, which is a collection of individual portfolios targeted at specific subject areas.

This article addresses things to keep in mind when considering using technology as an assessment tool. It also includes a decision matrix to help implement electronic portfolio development.

Handout for Site'98. Good interactive piece summarizing approaches to electronic portfolio development

Provides information on the definition, creation and use of electronic portfolios to encourage students to review their own work, analyze their learning strateies and assess their collaboration with others in a K-8 school.

Davis explains the different mindset needed to change teachers from teaching prescribed lessons to tracking the learning process. A number of useful links about work on electronic portfolios is included.

Tells how a teacher of music and language arts used multimedia portfolios with her 4th and 5th grade students.

Eric Digest ED us. Lanke explains why portfolio assessment is becoming commonplace and describes kinds of portfolios and ways to electronically create them.

Proderick tells of his own experience developing an electronic portfolio and reviews his hardware and software decisions. Good bibliography included.

Welcome to AAHE's Electronic Portfolios resource site. For years, institutions have been engaged in the work of creating portfolios as alternative means of assessment with its work around teaching and course portfolios. As with anything electronic portfolios have expanded to now include institutional and community portfolios. This site points researchers and collaborators to the newest version of this work, the electronic portfolio. A database of institutions working with portfolios, and other resources, this site offers a constellation of information around this very important new higher education topic.

Digital portfolios - design develop optimise - web design, graphic design, corporate identity, online marketing, london, islington, SEM, SEO, PPC

World Wide Arts Resources and absolutearts. com offer three levels of online portfolios for all artists to actively promote their work. Our goal is to provide artists with real international exposure and valuable marketing tools. World Wide Arts Resources and absolutearts. com websites receive millions of page views every month, making the sites the most heavily trafficked contemporary arts portal on the Internet. Superb placement with the major search engines place absolutearts. com and wwar. com in front of millions of potential customers. Read some testimonials from artists around the world who have Portfolios. Three levels of portfolios offered are.

Where artists are selected by jury. Find out more info about each level of portfolio below Then make your choice and join absolutearts. com!

Give your art an edge with the Premiere Portfolio. Your art will be exposed at a higher level than the Artist Portfolio. Visitors will see your work featured through out the World Wide Arts Resources and absolutearts. com websites and newletter. Promote your work with additional marketing tools designed specifically for the professional artist. For a US$25 jury fee and an affordable yearly membership of US$100, you, the serious artist, can now effectively promote your art. MORE INFO

Create, maintain, scan and upload images to your portfolio for just $44 per year. Upload your statement, gallery representation, exhibition history, reviews, links, and up to 40 images. Use e-invitations and guestbook features to keep your potential buyers involved. MORE INFO

The free portfolio offers every artist with world wide exposure. Create, maintain your free artist portfolio. Upload up to eight images to your portfolio and receive free exposure. You can upgrade later to a more sophisticated portfolio if you choose to. SIGN UP NOW

For access or more information on the Career Portfolio, please contact. Jill Lumsden at the FSU Career Center (850) us.

The FSU Career Portfolio prepares students for the world of work through planning, reflection, skill development, and portfolio documentation. Welcome! This web site provides information on the continuous progress and development of the FSU Career Portfolio at Florida State University.

Career Portfolio Walk-through PresentationsTake a tour of the Career Portfolio as used by FSU Students Alumni.

View The FSU Online Career Portfolio Program. An Evaluation Report which documents the 7 year development and evaluation of the program.

Portfolio Bibliography View a bibliography of portfolio books, articles, web sites and related information.

+ talented freelancers who are seeking clients to hire them right now! BROWSE through our current portfolios, or SEARCH to narrow your selection.

Dear Client, FreelancePortfolios. com lets you find freelance talent that is perfect for your project. FreelancePortfolios. com lets you search by discipline, specialty, location, experience, etc. You can evaluate freelancers based on their experience, content, and samples. You also can create your own filters so when a new portfolio is added that matches your search terms, FreelancePortfolios. com will automatically notify you via e-mail. To set up filters, register for an account. To search for freelance talent, BROWSE through our current listings, or use our ADVANCED SEARCH feature to narrow your selections or to search for freelancers in your area.

Hello Fellow Freelancer, FreelancePortfolios. com lets you create a virtual portfolio of your services, client list and samples, and helps you market your services to clients nationally and internationally. Our service is free and will remain free. To get started, first create an account. Log in. Click on "Submit Portfolio" and you will be on your way. You can refer to our first sample portfolio as a source of inspiration and style. Get started now. Create your portfolio. Upload samples of your work. Reap the benefits of securing more clients in the future.

Portfolio models are NOT available from the Council of Europe. The details of national co-ordinators are provided in the Final Report of the Pilot Project in the Documentation section.

MyPortfolio, scheduled for release in September 2002, will allow students to collect, annotate, arrange, and display on the Web. their accomplishments throughout their University Careers. They will be able to make online portfolios for a variety of reasons. for their courses, for prospective graduate schools, to help them choose a career, as part of a job search, or to reflect on their time at UW."

Portfolio project lets students reflect on their learning University Week, (Univ. of Wash.) Thursday, November 07, 2002 (by Bob Roseth)

A team of technology experts, researchers and faculty has developed an electronic portfolio that will help students collect their work, collaborate with instructors and advisers, and present their accomplishments on the Web. The electronic portfolio is in many ways an extension of an approach that has been used for centuries in the arts and humanities.

Electronic Portfolios and Guided Reflection. What we Learned from 3,200 Freshman [Videos (did not perform in 3/03)]

. A major effort. is the addition of the Kalamazoo Portfolio as a graduation requirement. The "K" Portfolio is an electronic document that, through the non-linear linking metaphor of the World Wide Web, seeks to break the habit of bifurcated thought that is more common. Students will review their "K" Portfolios with their advisors at each course selection time and with other mentors at various times during the year."

. are expected to maintain an electronic learning portfolio as part of your liberal studies requirement. The portfolio provides you with opportunities to reflect on your work and your progress as a student, to set your own goals, and to demonstrate your strengths."

.You have entered the University with knowledge acquired through work and other life experiences. In the world outside the classroom, you have acquired skills for organizing and interpreting important information. Developing a prior learning portfolio through UWW can help you accomplish the following."

An individually prepared learning portfolio allows students to share and document the knowledge gained during the quarter. The students design their own web page to showcase key takeaways from."

A portfolio is a purposeful collection of student work that exhibits the student's efforts, progress, and achievements in one or more areas of the curriculum. The collection must include the following. Student participation in selecting contents. Criteria for selection. Criteria for judging merits. Evidence of a student's self-reflection."

If portfolios are 'simply a collection of documents relating to a learner's progress, development and achievements' (Beetham 2005) then e-portfolios could be defined as simply digital collections of these documents. However, ideas of what an e-portfolio 'is' are complex and to an extent the definition and purpose will vary depending on the perspective from which a particular person is approaching the concept. Consensus is beginning to grow as experience of e-portfolios develops which will help converge these different ideas and definitions. "An e-portfolio is a purposeful aggregation of digital items - ideas, evidence, reflections, feedback etc, which 'presents' a selected audience with evidence of a person's learning and/or ability." Sutherland and Powell (2007) A helpful starting point is to distinguish between e-portfolios as products, e-portfolios as tools or systems and the processes associated with e-portfolio development although they are intrinsically linked and in the case of product and process, interdependent. Essentially then, an e-portfolio is a product created by learners, a collection of digital artefacts articulating learning (both formal and informal), experiences and achievements. Learners create 'presentational' e-portfolios by using e-portfolio tools or systems. As part of this production process, learners can be inherently supported to develop one or more key skills such as collecting, selecting, reflecting, sharing, collaborating, annotating and presenting - these can be described as e-portfolio-related processes. Definitions of an e-portfolio tend to include the concepts of learners drawing from both informal and formal learning activities to create their e-portfolios, which are personally managed and owned by the learner, and where items can be selectively shared with other parties such as peers, teachers, assessors and employers.

Mp3 | Emma Purnell, University of Wolverhampton (1.21 mins) Emma talks about how e-portfolios can encourage self-expression and reflection - transcript

The diagram below is adapted from a 2007 Becta report 'Impact of e-portfolios on learning', (Hartnell-Young et al 2007) and illustrates the essential links between e-portfolio presentations and processes, as well as introducing the concept of learners creating different e-portfolios for different purposes.

The electronic portfolio, already a well-established tool in higher education, is beginning to appear in K-12 classrooms as well. Learn what electronic portfolios are and discover how they can help you and benefit your students.

The use of personal portfolios for assessment and presentation long has been a component of higher education. In fact, personal portfolios are a graduation requirement at many colleges and universities. Now, electronic portfolios have begun to enter the world of K-12 education as well.

During the past four years, Todd Bergman has helped more than 550 high school students produce digital portfolios. He offers these guidelines for other educators interested in developing electronic portfolio programs in their schools or classrooms. * Be realistic about your design and expectations. * Make use of relevant models. * Instill a sense of ownership in the students creating the portfolios. * Communicate implementation strategies and timelines clearly. * Be selective in design and strategy. * Allow for continuous improvement and growth. * Incorporate assessment stakeholders in all phases and components of your efforts. that is, make sure portfolio content meets the needs of those assessing the work.

A portfolio is a purposeful collection of student work demonstrating the student's achievement or growth as characterized by a strong vision of content," according to

In Sitka, Alaska. Helen Barrett, an assistant professor and educational technology coordinator for the School of Education at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, provides another definition, one developed by the Northwest Evaluation Association. A portfolio is a purposeful collection of student work that exhibits the student's efforts, progress, and achievements in one or more areas. The collection must include student participation in selecting content, the criteria for selection, the criteria for judging merit, and evidence of student self-reflection. "Portfolios can serve multiple purposes," Barrett told Education World. "They can support learning, play an assessment role, or support employment. The purpose dictates the structure and contents of a portfolio." The three most common types of portfolios are.

The working portfolio, which contains projects the student is currently working on or has recently completed.

The assessment portfolio, which presents work demonstrating that the student has met specific learning goals and requirements.

Most portfolios programs begin with the working portfolio. Over time, a student selects items from the working portfolio and uses them to create a display portfolio. Finally, the student develops an assessment portfolio, containing examples of his or her best work, as well as an explanation of why each work is significant. The explanation, or reflection, discusses how the particular work illustrates mastery of specific curriculum requirements or learning goals. Barrett identified five steps inherent in the development of effective electronic portfolios.

Selection. the development of criteria for choosing items to include in the portfolio based on established learning objectives.

The power of a digital portfolio," Barrett said, "is that it allows different access to different artifacts. The user can modify the contents of the digital portfolio to meet specific goals. As a student progresses from a working portfolio to a display or assessment portfolio, he or she can emphasize different portions of the content by creating pertinent hyperlinks. "For example," Barrett notes, "a student can link a piece of work to a statement describing a particular curriculum standard and to an explanation of why the piece of work meets that standard. That reflection on the work turns the item into evidence that the standard has been met." The ability to use hyperlinks to connect sections of portfolio content is one advantage of using electronic portfolios instead of paper portfolios. "A paper portfolio is static," Barrett points out. "In addition, a paper portfolio usually represents the only copy of portfolio content. When the portfolio is in digital format, students can easily duplicate and transport it."

I've helped teachers develop electronic portfolios for students of all ages --from primary students through adults," Todd Bergman told Education World. "Students in about fourth or fifth grade -- sometimes younger -- are capable of using Web-based publishing tools to build digital portfolios." Helen Barrett agreed, saying, "Electronic portfolios work best with students who have the technological capabilities to develop and maintain their own portfolios." Electronic portfolios are more popular in higher education than in K-12, Barrett added, because they require access to technology in classrooms. For electronic portfolios to become more commonplace at the K-12 level, schools need more computers in individual classrooms.

Developing personal portfolios incorporates many different technology tools," Bergman told Education World. "But it is also a process of self-reflection and personal growth. The process is very personal -- a story of self that involves a great deal of self-reflection and thought. "Kids really take ownership and pride in the portfolio process," Bergman added, "developing particular aspects of their portfolios based on what is important to them, their unique knowledge, and their unique skills. Demonstrations or displays in the portfolio include an explanation of the context of the material, where the demonstration was done, why it was done (its purpose), and what learning or capacities are demonstrated through its inclusion. Some students demonstrate a capacity for written expression, for example, while others highlight mathematical ability. Some illustrate leadership qualities, while others showcase musical talent."

Many people emphasize the electronic side of electronic portfolios," Barrett said. "I tend to emphasize the portfolio side. People often approach electronic portfolios as a multimedia or Web development project and lose sight of the portfolio component. Reflection, however, plays a critical role in the development of a portfolio. An electronic portfolio is not a digital scrapbook." Bergman sees electronic portfolios as a natural extension of the technology that today's K-12 students are growing up with. "This is an exciting time for digital technologies and digital tools and today's kids are tuned into this environment," he told Education World. "Digital portfolios are a natural fit."

Electronic Portfolio Resources This site, created by a professor of education at the University of Vermont, provides links to resources about online portfolios for K-12 students, online portfolios in higher education, selection of portfolio software, and online articles about electronic portfolios. Sample electronic portfolios are included.

Electronic Portfolios This summary of what an electronic portfolio is and how to create one includes listings of relevant print and online resources.

Electronic Portfolios This page from Tammy's Technology Tips for Teachers explains what electronic portfolios are and how to create them. The site also includes sample portfolios.

The Power of Portfolios Scholastic Online offers this excerpt from an article that appeared in the February 1999 issue of Early Childhood Today. The article explains the benefits of student portfolios in early childhood education.

Using Electronic Portfolios. A Description and Analysis for Implementation in SIGNET Classes at Woodbridge Middle School, Virginia This paper describes the portfolio system in general, the differences between paper and electronic portfolios, and the implementation of electronic portfolios. The page includes a discussion of hardware and software, an extensive list of references, and a rubric.

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WHAT ARE STUDENT PORTFOLIOS? Portfolios are collections of selected student work representing an array of performance. Beyond this simple definition, student portfolios vary widely in content and purpose and even in who decides what goes into the portfolio. A portfolio might be a folder containing a student's "best pieces" and the student's evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the pieces. Or, a portfolio may also contain one or more "works in progress" illustrating how a product, such as an essay, evolved through stages of design, drafting and revision. Decisions about what goes into the portfolio are typically made by the student creating the collection but may also involve teachers and peers as well as structural requirements for the entire project. The purpose of the portfolio may be simply to support instruction or it may also be seen to support administrative functions. This

Presents information on what has been learned about using portfolios for administrative purposes, some of the problems involved, and some possible solutions to those problems. HOW ARE PORTFOLIOS USED FOR INSTRUCTION? Many teachers, administrators, and policymakers have learned that portfolios can provide valuable support for quality teaching and improved learning in many ways, including the following.

Engaging students in activities that are likely to result in products worthy of sharing with others, retaining in a portfolio, and referring back to periodically. and

Chronicling student work and opening a new channel for substantive communication between students and classroom teachers that is focused on individual student work. HOW ARE PORTFOLIOS USED FOR ADMINISTRATIVE PURPOSES? While there is a growing understanding of instructional uses for portfolios, they are increasingly being called upon to serve administrative functions as well. Student portfolios are being used for accountability reporting, program evaluations, and a variety of administrative decisions affecting the future of individual students. Both inside and outside of schools, observers are uneasy about what role portfolios, commercial tests, and other assessment tools should play in these administrative activities. The foremost question being asked is.

What do we know about the technical adequacy of portfolios for administrative decision making and reporting? How comprehensive are portfolios in covering important cognitive skills? How valid are they for the purposes schools set for them, and for the uses that go beyond these purposes? How reliable are the ratings we assign to a student's portfolio? Would someone else give a different rating? How generalizable are portfolio assessments in a specific curriculum area? Would a different assessment of the same students in that curriculum area yield different results? These questions concerning technical quality take on heightened importance because of the potentially enduring effect of various administrative decisions on individual students. A wide variety of administrative decisions (such as retaining some students in grade, providing special services for others, and admitting still others to special programs) affect students' futures with or without assessment information from student portfolios. The issue is whether current portfolio systems are sufficiently informative and technically strong enough for these added functions. If they are, fine. If they are not, teachers and administrators need to understand what would be involved in making them technically adequate. A second question spins off the first.

How will using portfolios for administrative decisions and reports affect their utility as instructional tools? Any move to adopt structural and content requirements that may be needed to make portfolios more suitable for accountability, evaluation, and student-level administrative decisions may well have implications for both the attractiveness and utility of portfolios as instructional tools. Here, the crucial question is whether portfolios that have been revamped to satisfy technical requirements can still play a constructive role in teaching for understanding and in motivating students to be active learners? For example, would students work as enthusiastically on assigned projects as they would on projects they were allowed to choose on their own? Would the amount and quality of their work suffer? Before turning to a discussion of these two concerns, it is appropriate to step back and consider the use of portfolios in administrative decisions and reports. WHY ARE PORTFOLIOS USED IN ADMINISTRATIVE DECISIONS AND REPORTS? Experience shows that portfolios--as well as any other data source--will be used for any number of administrative matters, with little regard to their original purpose or limitations, simply because they are available at the time information is needed. Moreover, those who have observed how traditional multiple-choice tests narrow curriculum are determined not to tolerate continued dominance of multiple-choice items in any area that would influence curriculum and instruction. Thus, many educators find themselves willing to try portfolios as a way to support reform of both curriculum and assessment. WHAT DOES THE RESEARCH SAY? Experience with classroom-level portfolio projects shows that many portfolios are currently highly individualized, if not intensely personal. Judged in light of available standards--some district and school policies, court decisions, and professional association standards--many of our existing student portfolios appear to contain too little information for "high-stakes" administrative uses. Despite the obvious importance of student learning, no single measure of student knowledge--not even richly documented, broad-based portfolios--should be used as a mechanism for meting out rewards and sanctions for students, schools, or programs. Other indicators must be considered for fair and rational decision making. For example, even within the area of student learning, additional information can be gleaned from systematic teacher observations, short-answer quizzes, multiple-choice tests, and other assessment tools. Practical procedures for addressing technical problems in performance assessments, including portfolios, are discussed below. WHAT ARE SOME PROBLEMS AND POSSIBLE REMEDIES? Below are some of the problems and possible remedies concerning the use of portfolios for administrative decision making and reporting.

Students are ill-prepared to carry out work that is a required part of a portfolio. This, in fact, is an ever-present bundle of problems, which extends well beyond portfolios and assessment. Several strategies are needed.

If students have not had an adequate opportunity to learn the subject matter and appreciate some of the linkages among various concepts and procedures, any form of assessment--not just portfolios--will be both meaningless and unfair. Addressing this problem will likely involve changes in course offerings, curriculum coverage, and instructional strategies (as well as staff development programs and possibly school finance). Some assessment paradigms (Baker. See Ron Dietel, National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing--CRESST, below) mitigate the problem of student differences in background knowledge by providing fairly extensive subject matter material with each task.

Teachers have used different criteria for rating portfolio work or come up with different scores even when they use the same criteria. This problem can be solved with training, planning time, and the involvement of teachers and other people with subject matter and instructional expertise. Teachers need to be involved in the development of a common set of criteria and the selection of rubrics that very specifically define performance. Research shows that under these conditions teachers and other raters can be trained to rate student work consistently (referred to as high inter-rater reliability).

Parent, sibling, or other help may also present a problem in assessing student performance based on portfolio projects that extend over a period of time. Sending notes home with guidance for parents has been one approach, and student honor codes have been another.

Students have worked on only a small number of tasks. Because performance tasks and extended projects take time to plan and carry out, many portfolios contain a small number of products. However, since not all tasks are alike, it is difficult to specify how many should be required. But researchers (Shavelson et al. See CRESST, below) have learned that about 10 tasks are needed to assess a student's understanding of a particular subject area, such as science. With fewer than 10 tasks, we can only judge how a student did on the particular tasks undertaken (the student might perform quite differently on a different set of tasks). This problem of limited generalizability of tasks can be addressed by increasing the number of tasks for all students or by not relying solely on portfolio work to judge a student's accomplishments. Occasionally, fewer tasks would be needed if each task came with fairly extensive passages of task-related information, such as those used by some researchers (Baker, See CRESST, below) to assess deep understanding of history, social science, and science. On the other hand, more tasks would be needed if the tasks were less carefully structured or less carefully researched, or the content area to be assessed were defined more broadly, for example, mathematics and science combined. Increasing the number of tasks in a portfolio may not be a bad idea anyway. It would give additional emphasis to student production of papers and other work products. In terms of administering tasks or assigning work, the 10 might be carried out over an extended period of time as a continuing cycle of instruction, performance, and assessment. At the opposite extreme, 10 tasks that require 15 minutes each might be administered in a single morning at the high school or junior high school level. In addition to these problem-specific strategies, several general strategies have been used to buttress the technical underpinnings of portfolios--that is, training raters to criterion (a pre-established standard of acceptability), continued in-service training for teachers, periodic sharing of portfolios across classrooms, auditing, and various research and development activities. WHAT INSTRUCTIONAL UTILITY DO TECHNICALLY STRENGTHENED PORTFOLIOS HAVE? Where the sole purpose of portfolios is to provide instructional support or curriculum reform, they and the rules that govern them can be created and changed by students in collaboration with their own teacher. Adding administrative uses to portfolios results in an increasing standardization and at least a partial shift in ownership. The shift is away from individual students, teachers, and classrooms, and to the education system in general--a broader but less well defined audience. A student's sense of ownership of his or her portfolio may well be linked with interest, motivation, and actual engagement and learning, but this is no reason to conclude that students must have complete control over their own portfolios to make portfolio systems work. Some compromise between centralized structure and local, classroom-level discretion may work just as well. Moreover, a variety of other factors may be equally important in fostering student motivation and learning. More experimentation and research may provide an answer to this controversy. Meanwhile, giving priority to staff development and equity issues--which is essential if portfolios are to be used in administrative decisions and reporting--can be an area of agreement and an important step in advancing student performance.

(a publication of the Portfolio Assessment Clearinghouse). It provides 20 to 30 pages of articles, project briefs, and other materials by teachers, project directors, and researchers about local and state portfolio projects and serves as an information exchange for people interested in portfolios.

PROPEL is a continuation of ARTS PROPEL, a cooperative research project involving the Pittsburgh Public Schools, Harvard Project Zero, and Educational Testing Service (ETS). Throughout both stages of the project, portfolios have been used along with classroom observations and external assessments to assess learning in three content areas. imaginative writing, music, and the visual arts. Information on the PROPEL/ARTS PROPEL approach is now available from ETS in four handbooks. a general overview handbook and one for each of the three content areas. The handbooks describe program and teacher strategies and illustrate student production, perception, and reflection in projects that extend over time. PROPEL has also used an audit procedure to verify portfolio ratings. (See PROPEL/ARTS PROPEL, below.)

Several states are using student portfolios in combination with other information on student accomplishments in their accountability systems. For example, Vermont is assessing 4th and 8th grade students in writing and mathematics using three methods. a portfolio, a "best piece" from the portfolio, and a set of equivalent performance tasks. California has also launched 21 pilot projects (11 with portfolios) involving the collaborative efforts of school districts for improving alternatives in assessment. Kentucky will be monitoring schools on the changes, over time, in their percentage of successful students and has established an elaborate system that includes portfolio work for measuring success.

Lauren Resnick and Marc Tucker are co-directors of the New Standards Project. They are developing a new assessment system to support world-class standards of performance for all students. The system employs advanced forms of performance assessment, such as portfolios, exhibitions, projects, and timed performance examinations. Among its partners are the following states. Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington.

Dozens of research projects are investigating new forms of assessment, including portfolios. Most of those cited in this Consumer Guide were carried out by CRESST researchers, with funding from OERI, the National Science Foundation, or both. A listing of all large projects in this area is maintained by CRESST.

ARTS PROPEL Educational Testing Service (ETS) 18-R Princeton, NJ 08541 Dale Carlson California Department of Education 721 Capitol Mall Sacramento, CA 95814 (916) us. Winfield Cooper Portfolio News Portfolio Assessment Clearinghouse San Dieguito Union High School District 710 Encinitas Boulevard Encinitas, CA 92024 Ron Dietel CRESST--National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing UCLA 145 Moore Hall 405 Hilgard Avenue Los Angeles, CA us. (310) us. Joe McDonald Coalition of Essential Schools Brown University Box 1969 Providence, RI 02912 (401) us. Richard P. Mills Commissioner of Education Vermont Department of Education Montpelier, VT 05602 (802) us. New Standards Project Learning, Research and Development Center/University of Pittsburgh 3939 O'Hara Street, Room 408 Pittsburgh, PA 15260 (412) us. PROPEL/ARTS PROPEL Pittsburgh Public Schools 341 South Bellefield Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Ed Reily Office of Assessment and Accountability Kentucky Department of Education 19th Floor Capitol Plaza Tower 500 Mero Street Frankfort, KY 40601 (502) us. Ed Roeber Council of Chief State School Officers 1 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Suite 700 Washington, DC us. (202) us.

In reviewing the literature, several definitions of a teaching portfolio emerge. Some definitions restrict the portfolio to a summary of your accomplishments as a teacher. Other definitions are much broader in scope, suggesting that the portfolio be a comprehensive, self- reflective record of a teacher's strengths and weaknesses. Still others (Edgerton, et al., 1991),

Claim that a definition for a teaching portfolio simply does not exist. Probably the best advice for establishing a definition (and thus a framework for content selection) is offered by Murray (1995). He suggests that you must decide how the portfolio is to be used before deciding on the content. If the portfolio is to be used for summative evaluation, such as tenure decisions, then it should probably only contain the best of a teacher's work. If, however, the portfolio is to be used for formative evaluation, then it should be more comprehensive and "needs to contain reflections on difficulties in teaching" (Murray, 1995, p. 169). Overall, the following definition might tentatively be given for a teaching portfolio. It is a record that documents your work as a teacher.

The content of a portfolio will depend on its intended use. Many sources offer various recommendations and categories for designing the portfolio. The following list might help you in deciding what should go into your portfolio.

Perhaps it is easier to conceptualize the content of portfolios by thinking in terms of general categories. The Center for Teaching Excellence ( suggest seven areas of content.

Just as the definition of the portfolio can vary, so can its uses. The following list of potential uses of the portfolio was comprised from a review of the work of Seldin (1993)

A tool for self-evaluation and self-reflection. Many portfolio proponents feel this is the best use of the teaching portfolio. "The very process of collecting and sifting documents and materials that reflect a professor's teaching, gets them thinking about what has worked and what hasn't in the classroom. And why they do what they do in the classroom. It forces them to review their activites, strategies, and plans for the future" (Seldin, p. 13).

If your effectiveness as a teacher is challenged, the portfolio can provide evidence of teaching quality.

Lead to the improvement of teaching, which in turn increases student learning. The teaching portfolio "can promote growth by providing a textured picture of teaching and learning as they unfold over time, enabling teachers to examine, discuss, and reflect on their performance" (Wolf, Whinery, Hagerty, 1995, p. 32).

A tool for long-term, ongoing, authentic evaluation. The portfolio "allows teachers. to examine actual work performances over time and across contexts in ways that other forms of assessment cannot" (Wolf, 1991, p. 8).

If used for summative evaluation, faculty must be given clear criteria and standards by which the portfolios will be judged. Also, some standardization of content should occur

Centra (1994) examined the use of portfolios for faculty evaluation at a community college. In the portfolios, faculty documented their accomplishments and wrote personal statements in four areas. (1)teaching effectiveness. (2)service to the college and community. (3) personal credentials. and (4) professional activities (p. 557). The area of most interest in this study was teaching effectiveness. The raters of the portfolios were two peer faculty members and four deans (one dean to rate for each department). One peer (peer A) was chosen by the faculty member being evaluated, while the other peer (peer B) was chosen by the department dean. The study compared the ratings made by the different raters. Also, Centra compared the ratings on teaching effectiveness with end of the course student evaluations. The students completed the Student Instruction Report (SIR). Results indicate that all three groups of raters judged the portfolios very high. However, the three groups of raters differed significantly when rating teaching effectiveness. The deans gave the lowest ratings for total teaching effectiveness. Peer A gave the highest ratings for teaching effectiveness. Peer B gave higher ratings than the deans, but, lower ratings than Peer A. The ratings of Peer A did not significantly correlate with any student evaluation measure. Peer B and dean ratings correlated with three student evaluation measures (quality of instruction, faculty and student interaction, and organization and planning).

Considering that request were made for only positive portfolio content, Centra is not surprised that the ratings were generally high. Also, it is not particularly surprising that the peers chosen by the faculty did not seem to rate the portfolios very objectively. Centra suggests that the seemingly invalid ratings of peers chosen by faculty is probably attributable to the fact that these peers knew that they were also being evaluated at same time by another peer. In essence, the faculty peers seemed to "stick together" and give each other high ratings. The peers chosen by the deans seemed more objective than peers chosen by faculty. The student ratings correlated with dean and peer B ratings for many dimensions rated in the portfolio for teaching effectiveness.

Centra notes that a problem with the portfolio assessment in this study is that no standard criteria was used to rate the portfolios. The deans and peers were expected to formulate their own criteria. Centra recommends that when using portfolios for evaluation, a standard criteria by which they are to be judged should be established. (Click here to see more guidelines for a portfolio program). Even though the conditions of evaluation were not ideal in this study, Centra concludes thatusing portfolios were still useful for evaluating teaching performance. Overall, he sees portfolio evaluation asuseful, especially when combined with student ratings.

A study by Ross, Bondy, Hartle, Lamme, and Webb (1995) had 5 qualitative researchers evaluate the effectiveness of teaching portfolios designed to support claims of excellence made by teachers. All portfolios were prepared at the University of Florida for the Teaching Improvement Program. In essence, the study was designed to identify characteristics of effective portfolios. Ross, et al. suggest seven guidelines for portfolio development based on the portfolios found to be exceptional in this study.

In a qualitative study, Robinson (1993) interviewed 22 faculty members from 3 departments with reputations of excellent teaching. These faculty had used portfolio review for two semesters prior to the interview. Portfolios were reviewed by peers for evaluation purposes. Interview questions were designed to investigate the value faculty placed on teaching, their ideas about what effective teaching means, and their opinions about whether or not portfolios capture their ideas about teaching. In general, the faculty had different ideas about what constitutes effective teaching. Also, faculty placed high personal value on teaching but did not see teaching as professionally valuable when compared to research. Furthermore, the faculty indicated that they did not gain anything from constructing portfolios. Most faculty neither liked portfolio review as a means for evaluating teaching effectiveness, nor believed that portfolios effectively evaluated teaching.

Robinson notes ways that he believes portfolio implementation could have been better. To see a list of guidelines for developing a portfolio program, which encompass those suggested by Robinson, click here (Guidelines)

Advisory Centre for University Education, University of Adelaide. (No date). Evaluation service. teaching portfolios.[On-line], Febuary 21, 1997. Available HTTP.

Boileau, D. M. (1993). Scholarship reconsidered. A challenge to use teaching portfolios to document the scholarship of teaching. Journal of the Association for Communication Administration (JACA). (3), 19-23.

Centra, J. A. (1994). The use of the teaching portfolio and student evaluations for summative evaluation. Journal of Higher Education, 65, (5), us.

DeFina, A. (1996). An effective alternative to faculty evaluation. The use of the teaching portfolio. Paper Presented at the Fifth Annual International Conference for Community Technical College Chairs, Deans and Other Organizational Leaders, Phoenix/Mesa, AZ (ERIC Document Reproduction Services No. ED 394 561)

The teaching portfolio. Capturing the scholarship in teaching. Washington D. C.. America Association for Higher Education. (ERIC Document Reproduction Services No. ED 353 892) Thoroughly examines the concept of the teaching portfolio, its uses, and its content. Includes sample entries. Very useful reading if you are just starting you own portfolio project.

Murray, J. P. (1995). The teaching portfolio. A tool for department chairpersons to create a climate of teaching excellence. Innovative Higher Education, 19, us.

Robinson, J. (1993). Faculty orientations toward teaching and the use of teaching portfolios for evaluating and improving university-level instruction. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Atlanta, GA. (ERIC Document Reproduction Services No. ED 358 149)

Ross, D. D., Bondy, E., Hartle, L., Lamme, L. L. Webb, R. B. (1995). Guidelines for portfolio preparation. Implications from an analysis of teaching portfolios at the University of Florida. Innovative Higher Education, 20, (1), 45-62.

Wolf, K., Whinery, B., Hagerty, P. (1995). Teaching portfolios and portfolio conversations for teacher educators and teachers. Action in Teacher Education, 17, (1), 30-39.

Wolf, K. P. (1991). Teaching portfolios. Synthesis of Research and annotated bibliography. San Francisco, CA. Far West Lab for Educational Research and Development. (ERIC Document Reproduction Services No. ED 343 890)

Boice, R. (1992). The new faculty member. Supporting and fostering professional development. San Francisco, CA. Jossey-Bass Publishers. In particular, pages us., discusses cataloguing, which is much like a description of portfolio development. -Cerbin, W. (1994). The course portfolio as a tool for continuous improvement of teaching and learning. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 5, (1), us. Cerbin discusses a specific type of portfolio, the course portfolio. His course portfolio "represents.specific aims and work of its author and is structured to explain what, how, and why students learn or do not learn in a class. Includes 4 parts. (1)Teaching Statement. (2)Analysis of student learning. (3)Analysis of student feedback. and (4) a course summary. -Ramsden, P. (1992). Learning to teach in higher education. New York, NY. Routledge. Does not specifically mention portfolios. However, discusses what is needed for adequate evaluation of teaching and learning. The teaching portfolio as described by other writers (such as Seldin) probably fits well with Ramsden's ideas. Particulary useful information in chapter entitled (Evaluation the Quality of Higher Education) pages us. -Seldin, P. (1991). The teaching portfolio. Anker Press. Bolton, MA. This book is cited and referenced in many articles. Seldin is an active proponent and major initiator of the teaching portfolio movement. -Shackelford, R. (1995). Using teaching portfolios to improve and assess teaching. Paper presented at Center for Educational Development and Assessment Conference on Evaluating Faculty Performance, San Jaun, PR. (Eric Document Reproduction Services No. ED 382 147). Excellent sections on using mentors to help develop portfolios, guidelines for portfolios preparation, and assessment of portfolios. Includes a sample portfolio assessment form.

Center for Teaching Excellence. (No date). How to document your teaching. [On-line], February 21, 1997. Available HTTP. Devlin, B. (1996). Teaching portfolios. Short list of web sites. [On-line], February 21, 1997. Available HTTP. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. (1995). Teaching Portfolios. [On-line], February 21, 1997. Available HTTP.

1. Edgerton, R., Hutchings, P., Quinlan, K. (1991). The teaching portfolio. Capturing the scholarship in teaching. Washington D. C.. America Association for Higher Education. (ERIC Document Reproduction Services No. ED 353 892) Thoroughly examines the concept of the teaching portfolio, its uses, and its content. Includes sample entries. Very useful reading if you are just starting you own portfolio project. 2. Seldin, Peter Associates (1993). Successful use of teaching portfolios. Bolton, MA. Anker Publishing Company, Inc. Peter Seldin is highly influential in the teaching portfolio movement. In fact, he might even be considered the founder of this movement in higher education. This book is a must read if you are seriously interested in developing a teaching portfolio. Send ideas for other virtual workshops to. Karen I. Adsit, EdD, Director

A Portfolio enables you to record your experiences and achievements relevant to graduate attributes. Reflecting on these experiences helps you to plan the further development of graduate attributes. Documentation of the experiences and achievements allows you to demonstrate to prospective employers the skills and knowledge you have gained while at university. WHY are Graduate Attributes IMPORTANT? and WHAT CAN UNSW DO? With the information explosion occurring in todays society and with the probability of changes in ones career path throughout life, there is now a much greater need for a constant upgrading of knowledge and skills. thus, learning is becoming a life-long experience. UNSW is promoting student-centred learning and the development of skills required for life-long learning such as higher order thinking, problem solving, critical thinking, reasoning, communication and management skills. These skills or attributes are being seen as increasingly essential by employers. When you start applying for jobs, employers will ask for evidence of these skills and attributes they seek, and you will need to draw on examples from your study, employment, extracurricular activities, and general life experience. ABOUT THIS WEBSITE The

Will give you all the information that will help you answer these questions. Why should I create a Portfolio? What do employers want? How do I develop a portfolio, and use it in job applications? This website is designed to help you construct a portfolioeither by yourself, as part of your university volunteer experience, or as a course requirement. This website will help you to make the most of your time at UNSW and help you to get the job you really want! WHAT DO THE ICONS MEAN? While you are going through this website, you will find highlighted sections on WHAT IF, DEFINITIONS, LINKS and EXAMPLES. These are denoted by the following icons.

WHAT IF? While you are developing your portfolio you may have questions relating to your own personal circumstances. Throughout this website, you will find questions and answers. Keep your eyes open for the WHAT IF? icon. The information may well apply to you.

FOR EXAMPLE This website provides many examples of students experience, how they describe them for the portfolio and the benefits of using portfolios. These examples could give you a starting point for describing your own personal experiences.

This site was created thanks to the dedication and assistance of following people “The Student Portfolio Support Website Working Party”. Jacquelyn Cranney (Psychology), Steve Gore (The Union), Kerry Howells (Faculty of Commerce), Lene Jensen (Careers and Employment), Michelle Kofod (Faculty of Science), Iain McAlpine (EDTeC), Iona Reid, Carol Russell (EDTeC), Michele Scoufis (LTU), Sue Starfield (The Learning Centre), and Melissa Wood (psychology student)

Teacher portfolios are invaluable. They provide important insight into a teachers' individual talents and beliefs about education. The National Board of Professional Teaching Standards requires portfolios from experienced teachers seeking national certification. Some principals are also requiring portfolios from their teaching staff. With this process, teachers have gained valuable experience in selecting the types of materials they collect as well as ways in which to store the information. Teachers are no longer confined to maintaining a portfolio in a binder. One option being electronically. Teacher electronic portfolios are concise, annotated collections of teacher work and things they have accomplished, in and outside the classroom. What makes them very different from traditional portfolios is that they can include scanned or digital photos, video and sound clips, animations, recordings of students, text, traditional writings and drawings. Teacher portfolios are a collection of work produced by a teacher. The portfolio is designed to highlight and demonstrate the teachers' talents, knowledge and skills in teaching.

This WebQuest is designed to assist you in creating your teacher portfolio electronically. Your portfolio is to display your teaching talents and proficiencies demonstrating your knowledge and skills. The question that you should ask is "What am I trying to tell the reader about myself?" How you answer this question depends on your targeted audience. Remember, your portfolio is a personal reflection. It should look very professional and should include the following. (What is actually included will vary depending on how you intend to use your portfolio.)

Nice samples presented here by educators. To view, click on Electronic portfolios at the bottom of the first page. Web publishing of electronic portfolios. When deciding what to put into your portfolio, here's a site you may want to browse to help you gather your ideas and materials. This site gives you a good overview of what's needed to get started on creating your own electronic portfolio for teachers and students. Here's a good site for information on electronic portfolios. It also gives you an idea of what you will need to get started. A collection of Bookmarks that deal with Electronic Portfolios. This is Dr. Helen Barretts-links portfolio pages. #top

To accomplish this task, you will need to use a multimedia software program such as HyperStudio or a Web Authoring program such as Netscape Composer. Other equipment needed includes a scanner for scanning pictures and documents, a digital camera or photos so that you can scan into your portfolio. For storage of your portfolio you will need CD's that allow you to write, floppies, or Zip cartridges. Click here for assistance creating your portfolio.

Click on this link to access the rubric checklist to evaluate your portfolio. This is to be used as a guideline. Remember, what you decide to include in your portfolio depends on its' intend to use. #top

Congratulations! You now have a professional electronic portfolio that shares your talents, accomplishments and skills with your administrators, colleagues and friends. #top

Portfolios provide documented evidence of teaching from a variety of sourcesnot just student ratingsand provide context for that evidence.

The process of selecting and organizing material for a portfolio can help one reflect on and improve one's teaching.

Portfolios can offer a look at development over time, helping one see teaching as on ongoing process of inquiry, experimentation, and reflection.

Teaching portfolios capture evidence of one's entire teaching career, in contrast to what are called course portfolios that capture evidence related to a single course. For more on course portfolios, see the Peer Review of Teaching Projects's page on course portfolios.

Job applicants for faculty positions can use teaching portfolios to document their teaching effectiveness.

Faculty members up for promotion or tenure can also use teaching portfolios to document their teaching effectiveness.

Faculty members and teaching assistants can use teaching portfolios to reflect on and refine their teaching skills and philosophies.

Faculty members and teaching assistants can use teaching portfolios, particularly ones shared online, to go public with their teaching to invite comments from their peers and to share teaching successes so that their peers can build on them. For more on going public with one's teaching, see the CFT's Teaching Guide on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

Start now! Many of the possible components of a teaching portfolio (see list below) are difficult, if not impossible, to obtain after you have finished teaching a course. Collecting these components as you go will make assembling your final portfolio much easier.

Make your organization explicit to the reader. Use a table of contents at the beginning and tabs to separate the various components of your portfolio.

Make sure every piece of evidence in your portfolio is accompanied by some sort of context and explanation. For instance, if you include a sample lesson plan, make sure to describe the course, the students, and, if you have actually used the lesson plan, a reflection on how well it worked.

The following web sites provide sample teaching portfolios from a variety of disciplines. As you look at these portfolios, ask yourself,

Increased Accessibility. Teaching portfolios are intended, in part, to make teaching public. Distributing a portfolio on the web makes it even more accessible to peers and others.

Multimedia Documents. Technology allows for inclusion of more than just printed documents. For example, you can include video footage of yourself teaching, an audio voiceover providing context and reflection on the portfolio, or instructional computer programs or code you have written.

Nonlinear Thinking. The web facilitates nonlinear relationships between the components of your teaching portfolio. The process of creating a portfolio in this nonlinear environment can help you think about your teaching in new ways. For example, since readers can explore an e-portfolio in many different ways, constructing an e-portfolio gives you an opportunity to consider how different audiences might encounter and understand your work.

One option for constructing electronic teaching portfolios is the KEEP Toolkit, a free, online service provided by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching that enables one to construct and share web pages describing one's SoTL work.

While these data indicate that teaching portfolios are not frequently requested of job applicants to faculty positions, it is not just the physical document that plays a role. The process of constructing a teaching portfolioand reflecting on your teachingwill prepare you to

The following books on teaching portfolios are available for check-out in the Center for Teaching's library.

Developing a Teaching Portfolio, from the Center for Instructional Development and Research at the University of Washington

Developing a Teaching Portfolio, from the Office of Faculty and TA Development, The Ohio State University

The Teaching Portfolio, an Occasional Paper from the University of Michigan's Center for Research on Learning and Teaching

Teaching and Learning Portfolios, from the DELTA Program for current and future faculty members in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Teaching Portfolios, from the Center for Effective Teaching and Learning at the University of Texas-El Paso

Preparing a Teaching Portfolio. A Guidebook, from the Center for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Texas-Austin

EPortfolio is a secure Web site at the University of Minnesota (U of M) for entering, saving, organizing, viewing, and selectively sharing your personal, professional, and educational records. ePortfolio is built on the OSeP open source software.

Questions, feedback, and general comments should be directed to portfolio@umn. edu or your campus HelpDesk.

Enter, view, and organize personal, professional, and educational records. Share selected materials in private or public Portfolios (presentations). View other people's Portfolios to which access has been granted.

Announcing a Listserv devoted to issues related to Electronic and Digital Portfolios, beginning July 15, 1998.

Books and Articles on Portfolios, Alternative Assessment and Tools for Developing Electronic Portfolios

Electronic Portfolios in Adult Learning. Presentation for NIACE online e-MOOT Conference, October 3, 2007 (27 minutes) (several versions of video, all requiring QuickTime)

Keynote address at the First VideoFunet Conference. Digital Stories and ePortfolios. Documenting Lifelong and Life Wide Learning, Finland. May 11, 2007. (48 minutes, 44.3 MB)

Keynote address at the ePortfolio Hong Kong Conference. Voice and Interactivity in ePortfolios. Digital Stories and Web 2.0. Hong Kong, March 20, 2007. (several versions of video, all requiring QuickTime - 45 minutes)

Keynote address at the University of New Hampshire statewide ePortfolio Conference. Manchester, NH., November 17, 2006. (a Podcast that requires QuickTime - 56 minutes, 30.5 MB)

Keynote address at the Fourth International Conference on the ePortfolio, Oxford, England, October 13, 2006. (a Podcast that requires QuickTime - 30 minutes, 16.4 MB)

High School Portfolios. To e or not to e BCCampus webcast, February 15, 2005 (Required latest Flash Player and certain Web browsers)

University of British Columbia's e-Portfolio Conference. Reflection Is Not a Mirror, It's a Lens, November 19, 2004 (Requires QuickTime)

First International Conference on the ePortfolio, Poitiers, France. October 9, 2003. (Requires Windows Media Player)

Paper presented at American Educational Research Association 2008. The REFLECT Initiative. Researching Electronic portFolios. Learning, Engagement and Collaboration through Technology. PDF Version of Paper (297K)

Authentic Assessment with Electronic Portfolios using Common Software and Web 2.0 Tools by Helen Barrett. - a work in progress (August 2006) - to be published in an updated version of Coming of Age. an introduction to the new World Wide Web

Researching Electronic Portfolios and Learner Engagement. The REFLECT Initiative by Helen Barrett. Electronic Portfolio issue of the

Using Electronic Portfolios for Formative/Classroom-based Assessment by Helen Barrett. Connected Newsletter (Classroom Connect). Original Version Submitted June 2006 - 37K Final PDF Version, October 2006 | Volume 13, No. 2, pp. 4-6 (169K)

White Paper. Researching Electronic Portfolios and Learner Engagement - Produced for TaskStream, Inc,. as part of the REFLECT Initiative.

Professional Development for Implementing Electronic Portfolios by Helen C. Barrett (a work in progress)

Differentiating Electronic Portfolios and Online Assessment Management Systems by Helen C. Barrett (2004) Published in SITE 2004 Conference Proceedings.

E-Portfolios. Issues in Assessment, Accountability and Preservice Teacher Preparation, American Educational Research Association, Chicago, April 22, 2003. [PDF Version - 156K]

Directions in Electronic Portfolio Development by David Gibson and Helen Barrett, posted to ITFORUM listserv, December 2002 [PDF Version - 84K]. Also published as. Gibson, D. Barrett, H. (2003). Directions in electronic portfolio development.

Pedagogical Issues in Electronic Portfolio Systems by Helen Barrett, October 2002 [PDF Version - 100K]

Researching the Process and Outcomes of Electronic Portfolio Development in a Teacher Education Program - Conference Proceedings of the Society for Technology and Teacher Education (SITE), Nashville, March, 2002. [PDF version of paper (16K)] - [Original survey (in Word format - 48K)] - [PDF version of Introduction to Proceeding section on Electronic Portfolios - 12K]

ICT Support for Electronic Portfolios and Alternative Assessment - A paper in the proceedings of the 2001 World Conference for Computers in Education. [PDF Version (36K)]

Electronic Portfolios - A chapter in Educational Technology. An Encyclopedia to be published by ABC-CLIO, 2001. [PDF version (24K)]

Electronic Portfolios = Multimedia Development + Portfolio Development. The Electronic Portfolio Development Process by Helen C. Barrett - A chapter in a book on Electronic Portfolios to be published by the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), Summer, 2001

Using Adobe Acrobat for Electronic Portfolio Development by Helen C. Barrett - Conference proceedings for the Society for Technology and Teacher Education (SITE), Orlando, March, 2001 [PDF version (28K)] (Winner of BEST Technical Paper!)

Electronic Teaching Portfolios. Multimedia Skills + Portfolio Development = Powerful Professional Development - Conference proceedings for the Society for Technology and Teacher Education (SITE), San Diego, February, 2000 [PDF version (28K)]

Create Your Own Electronic Portfolio (using off-the-shelf software) by Helen C. Barrett, Ph. D. (April, 2000, issue of Learning and Leading with Technology)

Electronic Portfolios = Multimedia Development + Portfolio Development. The Electronic Portfolio Development Process by Helen C. Barrett

Electronic Teaching Portfolios - Conference proceedings for the Society for Technology and Teacher Education (SITE), San Antonio, March, 1999 [PDF version on paper (26K)]

Electronic Portfolios and Standards by Helen C. Barrett, Ph. D. (1998) Submitted for the proceedings of the Tel-Ed Conference, October 31, 1998.

Electronic Portfolios, School Reform and Standards by Helen C. Barrett, Ph. D. (October, 1998) published online by PBS Teacher Connex, as premiere article in new web site for K-12 teachers

Electronic Teaching Portfolios - paper based on a presentation at the Society for Technology and Teacher Education (SITE), Washington, D. C., March 12, 1998.

Collaborative Planning for Electronic Portfolios. Asking Strategic Questions - Published in the Proceedings of the National Educational Computing Conference, June, 1997.

Technology-Supported Portfolio Assessment by Helen C. Barrett, Ph. D. published in The Computing Teacher, March, 1994 and in Student Portfolios. A Collection of Articles edited by Robin Fogarty (1996). Palatine, Illinois. IRI/Skylight Training Publishing, Inc., pp. us.

Next Generation ePortfolios. Campus Technology Conference, Boston, MA, July 29, 2008. Web page with embedded GoogleDocs version of presentation

Digital Storytelling. Lifelong ePortfolios as Digital Stories of Deep Learning - Multimedia Memories Multiple Purposes of Digital Stories in ePortfolios.. National Council of Teachers of English 21st Century Literacies Institute, Indianapolis, IN, July 21, 2008. Web page with embedded GoogleDocs version of presentations

The REFLECT Initiative. Studying ePortfolio Implementation in Secondary Schools. National Educational Computing Conference, San Antonio, July 1, 2008. PDF Version of Presentation (1.5 MB)

Lifelong, Life Wide ePortfolios. Keynote address at ePortfolio Montreal, May 7, 2008. PDF Version of Presentation (5.5 MB)

EPortfolio 2.0. using Web 2.0 for Authentic Assessment. Workshop at ePortfolio Montreal, May 5, 2008. PDF Version of Presentation (4.8 MB)

Voice and Reflection in ePortfolios. Multiple Purposes of Digital Stories and Podcasts in ePortfolios. Making Connections. ePortfolios, Integrative Learning Assessment National Conference April 12, 2008, LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York. PDF Version of Presentation (6.25 MB)

Online Personal Learning Environments. Structuring Electronic Portfolios to Support Lifelong and Life Wide Learning. Making Connections. ePortfolios, Integrative Learning Assessment National Conference April 11, 2008, LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York. PDF Version of Presentation (5.7 MB)

The REFLECT Initiative. Researching Electronic portFolios. Learning, Engagement and Collaboration through Technology. American Educational Research Association, New York, March 24-28, 2008. PDF Version of Presentation (132K).

Multiple Purposes of Digital Stories and Podcasts in ePortfolios. Computer-Using Educators (CUE), Palm Springs. March 8, 2008. PDF Version of Presentation (615K)

Multiple Purposes of Digital Stories and Podcasts in ePortfolios. Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education, Las Vegas (round table discussion - no handouts or slides. March 5, 2008. PDF Version of Paper in Proceedings (59K)

Online Personal Learning Environments. Structuring Electronic Portfolios to Support Lifelong and Life Wide Learning. Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education, Las Vegas. March 4, 2008. HTML Version of Presentation (no audio) PDF Version of Paper in Proceedings (183K) .

Interactive ePortfolios. Using Web 2.0 tools to Provide Feedback on Student Learning. Northwest Council for Computer Education, Seattle. February 28, 2008. HTML Version of Presentation (no audio)

Online Personal Learning Environments. Structuring Electronic Portfolios to Support Lifelong and Life Wide Learning. Hawaii International Conference on Education, Honolulu, January 5-8, 2008. HTML Version of Presentation (no audio)

Personal Online Learning Environments. Reclaiming E-Portfolios for Lifelong and Life-wide Learning. Eife-L E-Portfolios Conference, Maastricht, Netherlands. October 17 18, 2007. PDF version of presentation (2.5 MB)

Multiple Purposes of Digital Stories and Podcasts in ePortfolios. National Educational Computing Conference, Atlanta, GA. June 26, 2007. PDF Version of presentation (590K)

Researching Electronic Portfolios in Schools. The Role of Teacher Professional Development. American Educational Research Association Conference. April 11, 2007, Chicago, IL. PDF Version of presentation (34K )

Voice and Interactivity in ePortfolios. Digital Stories and Web 2.0. Keynote Addresses, ePortfolio Asia Trilogy Tour. Hong Kong, March 20, 2007. Melbourne, March 26, 2007. Wellington, New Zealand, March 30, 2007. PDF version of Hong Kong keynote presentation (232K)

Electronic Portfolios in Language Learning. Video Conference (using Skype), Computer-Assisted Language Learning conference for Latin America (in Durango, Mexico). January 19, 2007. PDF version of presentation (478K)

The REFLECT Initiative. Researching and Developing a Continuum of E-Portfolios for Tomorrow's Teachers. Workshop, Hawaii International Conference on Education, Honolulu, Hawaii, January 9, 2007. PDF version of presentation (168K)

Voice and Interactivity in ePortfolios. Digital Stories and Web 2.0 Workshop, Hawaii International Conference on Education, Honolulu, Hawaii, January 8, 2007. PDF version of presentation (655K)

Voice and Interactivity in ePortfolios. Digital Stories and Web 2.0. Keynote Address, ePortfolio 2006 Conference, Oxford, England, October 13, 2006. PDF version of presentations (508K) (see podcast)

Purpose of Digital Stories (and Podcasts) in ePortfolios. Camp Podcast, Vancouver, B. C. October 2, 2006. PDF version of presentation (244K)

EPortfolios. Digital Stories of Deep Learning. Closing Keynote Address, Impact 2006 WebCT Annual Users Conference, Chicago, July 14, 2006. PDF version of presentation (743K)

Supporting Electronic Portfolio Implementation and Research with Reflective Professional Development. National Educational Computing Conference, San Diego,.July 5, 2006. PDF version of presentation (86K)

EPortfolios. Digital Stories of Lifelong and Life Wide Learning. Keynote, Social Skills and Social Software conference sponsored by Salzburg Research, Salzburg, Austria. May 24, 2006. PDF version of presentation (561K)

Enhancing Student Voices in ePortfolios through Blogging, Podcasting, and Digital Storytelling. California CUE Palm Springs. March 10, 2006. PDF version of presentation (136K)

Researching Electronic portFolios. Learning, Engagement, Collaboiration through Technology. California CUE Palm Springs. March 10, 2006. PDF version of presentation (186K)

Electronic Portfolios. Digital Stories of Deep Learning. Illinois Council on Continuing Higher Education (ICCHE). Chicago, IL. February 9, 2006. PDF Version of presentation (928K)

EPortfolios. Digital Stories of Lifelong and Lifewide Learning. Opening Keynote, EIfEL's EuroPortfolio Conference, Cambridge, England, October 27, 2005. Opening Keynote, ePortfolio Auckland Conference, New Zealand. December 12, 2005. PDF Version of presentation (647K)

Digital Storytelling for Reflection and Deep Learning in ePortfolios. Opening Keynote, University of St, Thomas, Minneapolis, MN, September 24, 2005. PDF Version of presentation (1.2MB)

Digital Storytelling for Reflection and Deep Learning in ePortfolios. Closing Keynote, ULearn05 Conference, Auckland, New Zealand. July 13, 2005. PDF Version of Slides (847K) Digital stories shown. 2nd grade autobiography, Coming Full Circle and Choices

Enhancing Student Voices in ePortfolios through Blogging and Digital Storytelling. National Educational Computing Conference, Philadelphia, PA, June 28, 2005..PDF Version of Slides (139K) Digital stories shown. 2nd grade autobiography, Coming Full Circle and Choices

Digital Storytelling in Electronic Portfolios for Reflection and Deep Learning. Digital Stories Conference, Kean University, Union, N. J. June 23, 2005. PDF Version of Intro (376K) and PDF version of Breakout Session (1 MB)

Digital Storytelling in Electronic Portfolios. Using Reflection on Experience to Improve Learning for K-12 students and Teacher Professional Development. Breakout session. International Reading Association, San Antonio, May 3, 2005. Digital Stories. Choices, Coming Full Circle, Tori K, 1st grade 2nd grade autobiography and Legacy. PDF Version of slides (543K)

What is your e-Portfolio? a High-Stakes Test or a Story of Deep Learning? Keynote address, BCEd Online Preconference on ePortfolios, Vancouver, B. C. April 20, 2005. PDF Version of slides (861K) Digital Stories. 2nd grade autobiography, Coming Full Circle and Choices

Researching ePortfolios in the high school. Lifia Pan American ePortfolio Working Forum, Vancouver, B. C. April 19, 2005. PDF Version of slides (86K)

What is your e-Portfolio? a High-Stakes Test or a Story of Deep Learning? Saginaw Valley State University teleconference. March 18, 2005. PDF Version of slides (640K) Digital Stories. Coming Full Circle and Choices

Competing Paradigms in Electronic Portfolios. Balancing Portfolio-as-Test with Portfolio-as-Story. Northwest Council for Computers in Education, Seattle. March 17, 2005. PDF Version of slides (1.3 MB)

Digital Storytelling in e-Portfolios for Reflection and Deep Learning. Northwest Council for Computers in Education, Seattle. March 16 17, 2005. PDF Version of slides (1.3 MB)

EPortfolios. Digital Stories of Deep Learning. Keynote presentation at ePortfolio Australia, Melbourne, Australia. December 6, 2004. PDF version of slides (902K) ePortfolios for Lifelong Learning. Cradle to Grave. Breakout session, December 7, 2004. PDF version of slides (55K)

Supporting Reflection in Electronic Portfolios. Blogs, Wikis and Digital Storytelling. University of British Columbia's e-Portfolio Conference (includes streaming video of presentation), Vancouver, B. C. November 19, 2004. PDF version of slides (409K)

EPortfolios. Past, Present and Future. ePortfolio Canada, Montreal, Canada. November 13, 2004. PDF version of slides (1.1 MB)

Digital Stories of Deep Learning. ePortfolio 2004, LaRochelle, France. October 29, 2004. PDF version of slides (1 MB)

Balancing Portfolio as Test with Portfolio as Story. NJEDge Conference, New Jersey. October 13, 2004. PDF version of slides (2.1MB).

Electronic Portfolios. the voice of the student. South East England Virtual Education Action Zone (SEEVEAZ) Leadership Conference, Old Harlow, England, April 29, 2004. PDF version of slides (331K)

Digital Portfolios. the voice of the student. Center for Recording Achievement, Stoke-on-Trent, England, April 28, 2004. PDF version of slides (216K)

Electronic Portfolios and Digital Storytelling. Day of Dialogue on ePortfolios, CSU Monteray Bay, Monterey, CA. April 23, 2004. PDF version of slides (214K)

EPortfolios in K-12 and in Higher Education. ePortfolio Canada Conference, Vancouver, B. C, April 17-18, 2004. PDF version of slides and handout.(1.5 MB)

Symposium. Setting an Agenda for Research on Electronic Portfolios. Past Practices and New Directions (chair and discussant). American Educational Research Association (AERA), San Diego - April 14, 2004. PDF version of slides (664K) and Handout (228K)].

Electronic Portfolio Symposium - Society for Information Technology in Teacher Education (SITE), Atlanta, March 2, 2004. [David Gibson's Slides - 132K] [Joanne Carney's presentation (website)] [Wilkerson Lang presentation - 53K] [Barrett presentation - 226K] [Kennesaw State Global Pocket Portfolios Presentation]

Conference on the ePortfolio. Western Illinois University, Macomb, IL. November 21, 2003. [PDF version of banquet presentation - 132K] [PDF version of morning keynote - 218K ]

International Conference on the ePortfolio, Poitiers, France, October 9, 2003. [PDF Version of Keynote Slides- 211K] [PDF Version of Tools Workshop session - 268K]

Electronic Portfolios. Decisions and Dilemmas, American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), Seattle, June 23, 2003 ISTE Assessment Forum, Seattle, June 28, 2003. [PDF Version of Slides - Barrett 245K] [PDF Version of Slides - Carney 854K]

Supporting Electronic Portfolios in High Schools - Association of Computer Professionals in Education (ACPE 2003), Mt. Hood, May 9, 2003 - [PDF Version of slides - 150K]

E-Portfolios. Issues in Assessment, Accountability and Preservice Teacher Preparation, American Educational Research Association, Chicago, April 22, 2003. [PDF Version of slides- 1.1MB ]

Electronic Portfolio Symposium - Society for Information Technology in Teacher Education (SITE), March 26, 2003. PDF version of Joanne Carney's slides (49K) PDF version of Barrett's 2002 Research results (391K) PDF version of David Gibson's slides (95K) PDF version of Mike Searson's slides (271K)

Electronic Portfolios in Education. Definitions, Decisions and Dilemmas - Florida Educational Technology Conference (FETC), February 5, 2003. PDF version of presentation (82K)

Developing a Support System for Electronic Portfolio Development (Decisions to make) - PT3 Annual Meeting CEC Workshop- July August, 2002 PDF version of presentation (1.1MB)

Assessment Technology Forum, San Antonio, June 14, 2002. Opening Presentation [PDF Version of slides - 220K] Electronic Portfolio Planning Handout [PDF Version - 236K]

Researching the Process and Outcomes of Electronic Portfolio Development in a Teacher Education Program - Society for Technology and Teacher Education (SITE), Nashville, March 21, 2002 PDF version of presentation (92K)

Family Involvement in Electronic Portfolio Development in Elementary School - Northwest Council for Computers in Education, Seattle, March 15, 2002 and National Educational Computing Conference, San Antonio, June 17, 2002. PDF version of presentation (396K)

Design and Develop Standards-Based Electronic Portfolios Using Common Software Tools - Florida Educational Technology Conference, March 6, 2002. Latest slide presentation (300K)

Using Adobe Acrobat for Electronic Portfolio Development - Society for Technology and Teacher Education (SITE), Orlando, March 9, 2001. PDF version of presentation (344K)

Standards-Based Electronic Portfolios for Aspiring Teachers - Florida Educational Technology Conference (FETC), Orlando, January 12, 2001.

Designing Developing Standards-Based Electronic Portfolios, National Educational Computing Conference, Atlanta, June 27, 2000. PDF version of presentation (BW)

Electronic Teaching Portfolios. Multimedia Skills + Portfolios presentation at the Alaska Society for Technology in Education (ASTE), Anchorage, April 3, 2000. PDF version of presentation (976K)

Electronic Teaching Portfolios. Multimedia Skills + Portfolio Development = Powerful Professional Development - presentation at Society for Technology and Teacher Education (SITE), San Diego, February 9, 2000. PDF version of presentation (220K)

Making Learning Visible. ePortfolio Forum on ePortfolios at Boston University, September 26, 2008. Web page for keynote presentation with embedded GoogleDocs presentation.

Web 2.0 Tools for Classroom-Based Assessment and Interactive Student ePortfolios. National Educational Computing Conference, June 29, 2008. Web page for workshop with embedded GoogleDocs presentation.

EPortfolio 2.0. using Web 2.0 for Authentic Assessment. ePortfolio Montreal, May 5, 2008. PDF Version of Presentation (4.8 MB)

EPortfolios and their roles in Higher Education. Digital Stories of Deep Learning. University of Oregon, Eugene, OR. July 9. 2007. PDF version of presentation (966K)

Using Wikis for Classroom-Based Assessment and Interactive Student ePortfolios. National Educational Computing Conference, Atlanta, GA. June 23, 2007. PDF version of presentation (199K)

Role and Implementation of Electronic Portfolios. Sympsium. Mie University, Tsu, Japan. March 16, 2007. PDF version of presentation.(284K) (podcast under development)

Creating Electronic Portfolios with GoogleDocs. Hands-on Workshop. Mie University, Tsu, Japan. March 17, 2007. PDF version of presentation (100K)

EPortfolios and their roles in Higher Education. Digital Stories of Deep Learning. New Hampshire Universities. Manchester, NH. November 17, 2006. PDF version of presentation (1.24 MB) (see podcast)

EPortfolios. Digital Stories of Deep Learning. NERCOMP SIG, Vassar College, November 3, 2005. PDF version of presentation (832K)

Implementing Electronic Portfolios in Higher Education. San Jose State University, October 6, 2005. PDF version of presentation (1.6MB) ePortfolios. Digital Stories of Deep Learning. San Jose State University, October 7, 2005. PDF version of presentation (830K)

Balancing Portfolio as Test withPortfolio as Story. Northern Arizona University, September 7, 2005. PDF version of presentation (1.5 MB)

Create online portfolios using common tools and open source software. Pre-conference workshop, National Educational Computing Conference, Philadelphia, PA. June 26, 2005. PDF version of presentation PDF version of handout (300K)

Pedagogical Uses of ePortfolios in Higher Education sponsored by Villanova University, March 30, 2005. PDF version of presentation (1.05Mb) - PDF version of breakout session (31K) - Digital Stories. Coming Full Circle and Choices

EPortfolio Dialogue Day sponsored by Maricopa Community Colleges, February 25, 2005. PDF version of morning presentation (1008K) - PDF version of afternoon presentation (42K)

Teaching and Learning Mentors Institute, Council of Independent Colleges, Columbus, OH. July 28-30, 2004. ePortfolios in Higher Education. PDF version of slides (132K) Balancing Portfolio as Test with Portfolio as Story PDF version of slides (2.85MB)

Electronic Portfolios. Dilemmas and Decisions. Society for Technology and Teacher Education (SITE), Albuquerque, March 24, 2003. PDF version of presentation (521K)

Design Develop a Standards-Based Electronic Teaching Portfolio (half day workshop), Society for Technology and Teacher Education (SITE), Orlando, March 5, 2001.

Electronic Portfolios for Students - Two-day workshop at Southeast Kansas Education Service Center, Girard, Kansas, February 27-28, 2001.

Electronic Portfolios = Multimedia Skills + Portfolio Development (half-day workshop), National Educational Computing Conference, Atlanta, June 25, 2000

Create your own Electronic Teaching Portfolio (full day hands-on workshop), National Educational Computing Conference, Atlanta, June 26, 2000

Electronic Portfolio Development - SUNRAY Higher Education Institute, University of Central Florida, live presentation. April 28, 2000. videotape and CUSeeMe videoconference, May 19 and May 26, 2000. PDF version of video handouts (776K)

5th ed. Halifax, NS. Dalhousie University Office of Instructional Development and Technology. -- pp. 75-94 shows complete portfolios (1 in biology, 1 in business administration).

The Teaching Portfolio is best thought of as a documented statement of a faculty member's teaching responsibilities, philosophy, goals and accomplishments as a teacher. It is a flexible document, and can be used in a number of ways, depending upon the needs and interests of the faculty member. It can be an extensive collection of information, or something much more compact and limited. Below, the basic structure of a teaching portfolio, one that can be adjusted to suit the needs of any department or faculty member, is presented.

Sample course syllabi Descriptions of innovation in course or curricula, including new courses, new materials, new teaching tools, or innovative class assignments. Grants received for the improvement of teaching. Awards for teaching. Methods used to evaluate and improve one's teaching. i) Results of student rating forms ii) Reports on peer review of teaching and classroom observations iii) Reports on mid-course evaluations of teaching. iv) Letters from students v) Letters from alumni vi) Evidence of student learning. assessment of student learning. A good teaching portfolio is one that has clear statements of teaching responsibilities and goals, and solid evidence showing how those goals have been reached. A teaching portfolio is a dynamic document, in that it must be

Bolton, MA.Anker Publishing Company, 1991. [Available in CTAAR library] Reaction. If you would be interested in attending a CTAAR presentation on teaching portfolios, please send your name, department and phone number to the CTAAR at 116 College Avenue, e-mail.

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Design portfolios come in various forms. Traditionally, they have been print-based and something you would carry to a client pitch or meeting to showcase what youve done and how you did it. Today, many designers take advantage of the Internet to publish and showcase their work via their online portfolios. Having your work displayed online removes the geographical restraints that traditional portfolios impose on you. With many portfolios online, its often hard to stand out from the sea of competition out there. It takes a creative design to grab the users attention long enough for him or her to enjoy sifting through your work. Adding rich interactive elements, framing your work in a unique way, and concocting a means of providing a unique experience can not only get the users attention but also show your capabilities as a designer. In this showcase, youll find a variety of beautiful, unique and highly creative portfolio designs. The aim here is to stimulate your creativity and inspire you to create your own portfolio or re-think your existing one. Youll see portfolios from a wide range of fields, including Web design, product design, illustration, photography and even animation. So, we now present to you 50 beautiful and creative portfolio designs. You may also want to take a look at the following related articles.

Creating A Successful Online Portfolio In this article, we review five pitfalls that commonly plague portfolio design. Then we’ll offer portfolio tips that, if carefully considered and well executed, will deliver quality results for your portfolio.

Pikaboo This portfolio showcases a creative navigation scheme. use the scroll button on the mouse to navigate up and down the showcase. Alternatively, the designer gives you a columned view of the showcased work if you click on Overview. Lyndon Wade This portfolio effectively integrates the interface of the design. Clicking a category link of the portfolio expands a film-strip view of the thumbnails in the section. Upon clicking a thumbnail, it expands to a full-screen view. clicking on the left or right allows you to navigate through all of the showcased paragraphs in full-screen mode. Jesse Willmons fall 2008 DESIGN-TACULAR Jesse Willmon presents his portfolio in a unique fashion, through doodles, giving it a memorable user interface. Daniel Stenberg Daniel Stenberg frames each of his works beautifully and allows users to navigate through them horizontally. The result is a clean and simple but effective portfolio design. Domenico Tedone Design Unconventional navigation schemes can be a great way to leave a lasting impression on users (but they can also make users

In an instant). Domenico Tendone capitalizes on Flashs strength of being responsive to user events by showcasing his work via a revolving 3-D wheel. Use the scroll button to scroll through his work. Marc Dahmen Marc Dahmen gives us a creative user interface by showing his projects as business cards. Clicking on a business card gives you a nifty animation as it enlarges. To make navigation easier, the portfolio provides keyboard shortcuts (you can see them at the top left of the page). SuperLover The excellent selection of colors in this portfolio complements the showcased artwork, and the organization of each piece makes it stand out. Aline Caron Portfolio The presentation of the thumbnails in this portfolio gives it a unique interface, reminiscent of the chemical table of elements. chris woods Minimalist portfolios focus the users attention on the works being presented, as seen in the portfolio of Chris Woods. Deep Deeps portfolio gives users a unique navigation interface. the plain solid background and text make the showcase the highlight of the home page. Dave Werners Portfolio Dave Werners portfolio gallery is shown as an artistic collage. clicking on a piece in the collage expands it. Booreiland Booreilands portfolio gives users a breadcrumb navigation scheme so that they can easily jump through sections. vivified In this showcase, the projects dominate the entire page, and a thumbnail gallery on the right-hand side gives you a way to browse through the projects. nisgia. com Interactive designers can show off their creative skill in user interaction by having a portfolio with distinctive interactive elements, as shown by nisgias portfolio. Rob Young Rob Young frames his projects in a MacBook Pro laptop, alluding to the nature of his job as an art director and designer. Sid Lee This clean and simple portfolio gives focus to the active work being viewed by allowing it to take up a large part of the viewing area. Hovering over the right-hand side of the page opens up an alternate navigation menu. Nile Inside Artwork is displayed in a film-strip view, and clicking on a piece expands it without navigating away from the film strip. Even with the rich interactivity of the portfolio, it doesnt rely on Flash. Les illustrations de Lapin Illustrations displayed side by side beautifully showcase the illustrations made in the artists sketchbook, giving the portfolio an unprocessed, raw, natural look. Contrast Conventional design portfolios are visual, but that isnt the case with Contrasts portfolio, which displays its thumbnail gallery in a text-based format. sroown sroown effectively uses its logo to frame its design gallery. Note the red Jump back to top element along the right-hand side that follows you along as you scroll down the page, a subtle enhancement of the interface that gives you insight into the small details they pay attention to in their designs. OnWired OnWired showcases its design process by taking us from conception to final product in each of its projects. Michael Muller Photography Michael Mullers portfolio directs the users attention to his photographic work by making it the focal point of the page. Hover over each piece to navigate through his work. EveningLab A creative interface makes EveningLabs portfolio stand out. Die Neue Modern Irregular shapes and sizes of the thumbnails in this portfolio give it a unique and systematic disorder. Made Like Me This portfolio shows the typical way of displaying thumbnail galleries. but by leveraging the artworks vivid colors and placing the art against a dark background, each piece pops out of the page and the gallery achieves a unified look. Marius Roosendaal An accordion user interface gives Marius Roosendaals portfolio a nifty way of showcasing his work while allowing it to remain compact, thus maximizing valuable screen real estate. Jason Reed Web Design Jason Reeds portfolio features a horizontal accordion menu, which minimizes the need to scroll and, again, makes the design compact. Thibauds portfolio Thibauds portfolio uses color swatches as interactive elements, which not only hints at the nature of his work but also effectively showcases his skill, experience and creativity in interactive design. standardimage Standardimage features a unique navigation scheme that auto-scrolls down the page when you click on a menu item. The portfolio design is clean, simple and minimal, which makes each piece stand out. bcandullo. com Brad Candullo beautifully frames his creations with worn notebook pages, giving them an organic look and feel. James Lai Creative James Lai Creatives portfolio sits on the front page. Each thumbnail is in a frame, and you can navigate through them horizontally. formrausch This portfolio puts each project in a beautiful frame, showing the designers meticulous attention to detail. Serial Cut Another minimalist portfolio design that focuses attention on the artwork. Dawghouse Design Studio Dawghouse Design Studio displays its projects on a notebook paper background. The hand-drawn concept is carried through with each graphical element, including the View site button and the Next and Previous buttons. Hot Meteor Eye-catching, smooth animation that uses horizontal and vertical movement creates a memorable user experience. Oneover. com The unconventional 3-D showcase seen in this portfolio provides a great user experience. 13 Creative 13 Creative houses its portfolio on a steno pad. A beautiful navigation scheme and subtle, fluid animation make this portfolio a memorable design. TROZO GALLERY Eduardo Valdiviesos style of art transcends the canvas and works well as part of a Web design, allowing the two media to complement each other. Danny Blackman Danny Blackmans animated navigation makes navigating through his projects a pleasant experience. Frisk Web Frisk Web displays thumbnails of its projects as taped-on Polaroid shots, giving the portfolio design an uncommon and remarkable layout. foxies graphic design This creative portfolio interface uses books sitting on a bookshelf for navigation. Visualbox Visualbox takes advantage of the vivid colors of its work by placing its portfolio against a plain dark background, effectively emphasizing the Visual in its company name. Ed Peixoto An unconventional layout for a thumbnail gallery and subtle yet memorable hover-over animation make this portfolio design impressive. Odd Web Things Odd Web Things stays true to its name by showcasing its work in an unusual fashion. You just might think about the design long enough to remember the companys name, or even explore the rest of its website looking for an explanation. NANAMIart NANAMIart integrates its portfolio in the design by displaying it near the header, giving users access to it at all times. Vault49 This portfolio is text-based until you click on the name of a project. the name then expands to show a preview of the artwork. SKINS INTERACTIVE Fluid, smooth 3-D animation makes browsing through Skin Interactives portfolio an enjoyable user experience. adncom A rotating display that revolves around an illustrated sheep gives adncoms portfolio a unique twist. SeymourPowell The deck-of-cards introduction gives users a sense of what SeymourPowell is all about in a matter of seconds. hellokarl hellokarl combines subtle, fluid animation along with great large-scale product shots to create an engrossing mood.

Creating A Successful Online Portfolio In this article, we review five pitfalls that commonly plague portfolio design. Then we’ll offer portfolio tips that, if carefully considered and well executed, will deliver quality results for your portfolio.

Always nice to see how other designers publish there portfolios and which techniques they use. Was looking on the Internet for some smashing portfolios my self earlier this week. Nice addition to what i have already seen. Good job

These are really good-looking portfolios. It amazes me again and again how creative and innovative people can get to achieve great results. Portfolio designs can also be a wonderful source of inspiration that can bring something unique to the table when youre mocking up something new or want to display something in a very unique way in your designs. Keep up the good work!

Theyre all very impressive and creative at first glance, but I find myself lost on these pages so quickly I simply give up. Theyre very pretty, just not very usable which can obviously lead to people not actually finding the work in your portfolio. (Just my opinion)

I agree tom - i have my flashy non-user-friendly portfolio site (Link [whatkatiedoes. net]) but also a low-bandwith HTML one for people who dont have the time to spare exploring it.

Not a designer portfolio, but a fantastic Link [] (photographer named Strogalski) just came across it while diggin into the designer portfolios.

This post is a great source of inspiration indeed, however the only thing these portfolios have in common is the confusing navigation. I just dont understand why people choose to implement a tricky sliding annoying navigation instead of a regular css based navbar. Someone pls tell me what is to be gained from the pathetic flash garbage on a portfolio site. When i visit a site, i want content and i want it accessible immediately. Otherwise i just go away. Not just me. SM editors should consider this as well when compiling the next selection.

I am constantly amazed with your posts. You should really give yourself a pad on the back for all the hard work you do. I cant have been easy to find these 50 different portfolio displays.

Great post and some nice work! One of my favorite portfolio sites and another for the list. Link [www. arteye. com] [www. arteye. com]

I remember stumbling across Deeps site a moon or two ago and was utterly blown away by how stellar their work is and how they display it. The older site I prefer, yet they still go over the top with their new one. Lots of amazing portfolios to check out.

Hey guys, what do you think about this image gallery portfolio, turned into an interactive barcode ? Link [www. lisapram. com] Here were my intentions. The interface is a specific design approach to online image galleries aiming to produce an integrated graphical product based on the work itself. The result of this search is an interactive barcode, generating a unique representation of Lisa Pram’s work in a non-metaphorical manner, through indexing of her image sets according to four main keywords, which stand for the main areas of her work - Professional, Experimental, Advertising and Editorial. Clicking on each of them allows the visitor to filter through her image galleries. Each gallery is represented by a line which thickness reflects the number of images it contains - 1 image is 1 pixel width. This simple principle leads to the barcode representation. Clicking each of these lines unfolds its pictures in a continuous strip inside the barcode, thus introducing the user into the colors and contrasts of her work. Thanks Smashing !

Ah man, not my cup of tea. Every portfolio screams ADHD designers with starburst vomit. Come the fudge down PEOPLE!

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Imagine trying to condense a summary of your abilities, educational background, and professional experience onto a typed page. Imagine a prospective employer using it to compare your abilities with those of other job seekers. You know that this type of conventional resume inadequately represents your potential as a candidate for the job. In today's competitive job market, students seeking employment in the design and often teaching fields need more than a paper or electronic resume. A digital/multimedia professional portfolio exhibits an individuals professional skill, growth, and achievement more effectively than an old-fashioned resume. This site will help you plan, organize, and develop a digital/ multimedia portfolio which will showcase your experience/background and successfully propel you into the instructional design and/or education fields. A digital portfolio goes beyond a conventional resume. A portfolio is a visual representation of your finest work. It provides visual evidence of your abilities, achievements, and interests. It demonstrates your uniqueness and sets you apart from others competing in the job market. More importantly, a portfolio tells the story of the road you've traveled and the direction in which you are heading. Although portfolios can be created in a number of ways, this tutorial will focus on the development of digital (computer-based or web-based) portfolios specifically for Instructional Technology Designers and teachers. Click on the [Planning] button in the menu on the left to get started with this tutorial.

While I was a graduate teaching assistant.I sympathized with students who told me that there were two ways of taking college science classes. One was to learn and understand the material and the other was to get an A..I realized that what I loved about doing science was DOING science.I began exploring ways to adopt the procedures already well understood in the fine arts areas (photographers always have a portfolio) to the excitement of scientific inquiry.I now believe.portfolios supports student-centered instruction better than any short-duration examination that I can imagine.

WHY USE PORTFOLIOS?Portfolio assessment strategies provide a structure for long-duration, in-depth assignments. The use of portfolios transfers much of the responsibility of demonstrating mastery of concepts from the professor to the student. WHAT ARE PORTFOLIOS? Student portfolios are a collection of evidence, prepared by the student and evaluated by the faculty member, to demonstrate mastery, comprehension, application, and synthesis of a given set of concepts. To create a high quality portfolio, students must organize, synthesize, and clearly describe their achievements and effectively communicate what they have learned. WHAT IS INVOLVED?

As we survey the wreckage of our portfolios in the new year, it's worth considering this. You can beat the great majority of investment professionals by employing simple strategies that use low-cost index funds. Index funds track a broad swath of the stock market, such as big-company stocks, small-company stocks, emerging-markets stocks, and so on. Some of the biggest brains in the world of finance -- from Nobel Prize-winning professors, such as William F. Sharpe, to, arguably, the greatest money manager of our time, Warren Buffett -- advocate a "passive" style of investing epitomized by index funds. The evidence seems to back up these intellectual heavyweights. Over the past 15 years through December 31, Standard & Poor's 500-stock index performed better than 71% of mutual fund managers who specialize in the stocks of large U. S. companies. How well have you done by picking managers who actively buy and sell securities? It's true that some fund managers can beat their relevant index. But as Princeton professor Burton Malkiel asserts in his famous book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, there's no good way to "find such skill before it has been demonstrated over time." Building a simple portfolio based on index funds is, well, simple. You can find my take on index funds in Three Winning Portfolios. But we thought it would be interesting to ask some of the champions of easy, low-cost investing to suggest their own portfolios. So we kick off the Simple Portfolios corner of Kiplinger. com with recommendations from three experts. Our request was straightforward. balanced, low-cost portfolios, with no more than eight investments, for people investing for the long term. We're not fanatical about our guidelines. we allowed our experts to use actively managed funds as well as index funds. They submitted their portfolios in December 2008, and we decided to begin tracking performance as of January 1, 2009. We will rebalance the portfolios twice a year, on the last day of June and the last day of December. The first is from Larry Swedroe, director of research for St. Louis-based Buckingham Asset Management, and author of several useful books, including The Successful Investor Today and The Only Guide to a Winning Investment Strategy You'll Ever Need. Swedroe doesn't mince words. Believing in active management is "absurd," he says, calling it "the triumph of hope over wisdom and experience." The wise investor knows that some managers will beat the indexes occasionally, but when they do, Swedroe says, it's "purely out of luck." Swedroe's simple portfolio reflects these sentiments, as well as the tendency of value stocks and small-company stocks to do better than other stocks over time. Swedroe's portfolio. 15% Vanguard Value Index (symbol VIVAX) (Tracks an index of undervalued stocks from the largest 750 U. S. companies) 15% Vanguard Small Cap Value Index (VISVX) (Tracks an index of stocks of small, undervalued U. S. companies) 13% iShares MSCI EAFE Value Index (EFV) (Tracks an index of stocks of large, undervalued foreign companies) 13% iShares MSCI EAFE Small Cap Index (SCZ) (Tracks an index of stocks of small overseas companies) 4% Vanguard Emerging Markets Stock Index (VEIEX) (Tracks an index of companies from developing nations) 40% Vanguard Inflation-Protected Securities (VIPSX) (Invests at least 80% of assets in inflation-indexed bonds issued by the U. S. government) Next is the portfolio of Princeton professor Burton Malkiel, whose latest book (with three co-authors) is From Wall Street to the Great Wall. How Investors Can Profit from China's Booming Economy. In Malkiel's view, managers in developed markets will be hard-pressed to beat their indexes over time. So he has the bulk of his portfolio's assets in index funds. And Malkiel keeps the majority of the assets in foreign stocks because, he says, foreign markets offer better growth opportunities than the U. S. does. While most of his portfolio consists of passively managed and exchange-traded funds, which also follow indexes, Malkiel has stakes in actively managed funds as well. (In fact, this portfolio represents his actual investments.) He owns Vanguard Capital Opportunities because of his "enormous" respect for the managers at Primecap Management Company, who run the fund for Vanguard. Malkiel, a former director of the Vanguard Group, says he feels he can make a small bet on Primecap's expertise because the core of his portfolio is in index funds. More interesting are his picks of Templeton Dragon and Matthew's India, both actively managed. "I believe that of all the places in the world, China and India are the two that will have the highest growth rates," says Malkiel. Templeton Dragon, a closed-end fund that focuses on Chinese stocks, is managed by longtime emerging-markets hand Mark Mobius. While Malkiel is not sure that Mobius can beat the relevant index, he thinks Mobius is an excellent manager. "If I can buy Mark Mobius at 85 cents on the dollar, I'm happy to do it." At its January 16 closing price of $16.52, Templeton Dragon sold for 6.9% less than the value of its underlying assets. Malkiel says that there aren't many good ways to play India, and if there were a good closed-end India fund trading at a discount to its net asset value, he'd buy it. For now, he'll take the Matthew's fund. Malkiel's portfolio. 20% Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VTI) (Tracks a broad index of U. S. companies) 20% Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US ETF (VEU) (Tracks a broad index of stocks from developed and emerging foreign markets.) 20% Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF (BND) (Tracks a broad index of high-quality U. S. bonds) 10% Vanguard Capital Opportunity (VHCOX) (An actively managed fund that likes big growth companies down on their luck) 10% Vanguard Emerging Markets ETF (VWO) (Tracks an index of stocks developing nations) 10% Templeton Dragon (TDF) (Invests in stocks from China and nearby nations) 10% Matthew's India (MINDX) (Invests in stocks from India) Given the interest in fixed-income investing (and the fear and loathing surrounding the stock market these days), we also sought a stockless portfolio. William Larkin, fixed-income portfolio manager at Cabot Money Management, in Salem, Mass., says his portfolio was originally designed for conservative clients who wanted conservative investments. These days, though, he finds that many clients who hadn't considered themselves conservative in the past are now interested in fixed-income investing only. This portfolio represents all parts of the fixed-income market at the lowest possible cost, he says, and recently yielded 6.3%. It also has a healthy slug of inflation protection, which is particularly reassuring given all the money that's being printed for various government stimulus and rescue plans around the world. Larkin's portfolio. 25% iShares Barclays Aggregate Bond ETF (AGG) (Tracks a broad index of high-quality U. S. bonds) 25% iShares iboxx $ Investment Grade Corporate (LQD) (Tracks an index of the most liquid, long-term corporate bonds) 10% Fidelity Floating Rate High Income (FFRHX) (Invests in floating rate bank loans that automatically adjusts to rising short-term interest rates. It offers additional inflation hedge) 10% iShares MBS Fixed Income (MBB) (Tracks a broad index mortgage-backed securities) 7.5% SPDR DB International Govt Inflation-Protected Bond (WIP) (Invests in an index of non-U. S., inflation-linked bonds) 7.5% PowerShares Emerging Markets Sovereign Debt (PCY) (Tracks an index of emerging markets government debt) 7.5% iShares Barclays TIPS Bond (TIP) (Tracks an index of inflation-protected, U. S. Treasury securities) 7.5% iShares Iboxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond (HYG) (Tracks an index of high yield bonds)

POSTED BY. Don (January 27, 2009 03.07 PM) This is an interesting article, Mr. Frick. Your followup should be a 5 and 10 year backtest of each portfolio. POSTED BY. Leonard Sahn (January 27, 2009 04.00 PM) It's right to go for index funds because in explosive recovery phase, which will eventually come, it's hard to beat the index. But the shift by anon conservative investors to fixed income is a reliable contrary indicator. IMHO, the time to shun risk is not when there is extreme fear and market is ALREADY down nearly 50%. That time passed us in 2007. Why buy bonds now and lock in 2-3% when you can buy any number of great companies, some below tangible book value, and get 4% yield while you wait? Fear is rampant. buy equities. POSTED BY. Scott (January 27, 2009 04.30 PM) Is there ever any mention of funds other than Vanguard? Seriously. POSTED BY. carefreeretiree (January 27, 2009 10.14 PM) Wow! What an interesting article offering a new perspective on investing after the meltdown in 2008. I have resisted index funds thus far but may yet change my mind. . . How about a similar simple portfolio for us retirees--something offering a balanced portfolio with somewhat less risk? POSTED BY. Bob (January 28, 2009 10.36 AM) All of these portfolios contain a little too much risk for me. I always chuckle at stories about emulating someone like Warren Buffett. The people he rubs elbows with daily have much more inside and advance knowledge than folks like us reading articles like this. While he may know when its safe to cross the highway, many of us trying to follow are likely to end up as road kill. If he loses half his money, he will still be rich. That puts acceptable risk in a whole different perspective. POSTED BY. mona (January 28, 2009 11.42 AM) please if possible post historical performance of these 3 portfolios POSTED BY. Jack (January 28, 2009 07.59 PM) American Funds is the one of the largest mutual fund companies in the world, with some of the best long term performance results, low fees, but you rarely, if ever recommend them. Why? POSTED BY. Yog (January 29, 2009 02.27 AM) American Funds has very high entry fees compared to other funds. That is why very rarely you will find any advisor recommending it. but if you talk to your plannner he will definitely recommend Funds from American.

In program evaluation as in other areas, a picture can be worth a thousand words. As an evaluation tool for community-based programs, we can think of a portfolio as a kind of scrapbook or photo album that records the progress and activities of the program and its participants, and showcases them to interested parties both within and outside of the program. While portfolio assessment has been predominantly used in educational settings to document the progress and achievements of individual children and adolescents, it has the potential to be a valuable tool for program assessment as well.

Many programs do keep such albums, or scrapbooks, and use them informally as a means of conveying their pride in the program, but most do not consider using them in a systematic way as part of their formal program evaluation. However, the concepts and philosophy behind portfolios can apply to community evaluation, where portfolios can provide windows into community practices, procedures, and outcomes, perhaps better than more traditional measures.

Ortfolio assessment has become widely used in educational settings as a way to examine and measure progress, by documenting the process of learning or change as it occurs. Portfolios extend beyond test scores to include substantive descriptions or examples of what the student is doing and experiencing. Fundamental to "authentic assessment" or "performance assessment" in educational theory is the principle that children and adolescents should demonstrate, rather than tell about, what they know and can do (Cole, Ryan, Kick, 1995). Documenting progress toward higher order goals such as application of skills and synthesis of experience requires obtaining information beyond what can be provided by standardized or norm-based tests. In "authentic assessment", information or data is collected from various sources, through multiple methods, and over multiple points in time (Shaklee, Barbour, Ambrose, Hansford, 1997). Contents of portfolios (sometimes called "artifacts" or "evidence") can include drawings, photos, video or audio tapes, writing or other work samples, computer disks, and copies of standardized or program-specific tests. Data sources can include parents, staff, and other community members who know the participants or program, as well as the self-reflections of participants themselves. Portfolio assessment provides a practical strategy for systematically collecting and organizing such data.

*Providing information that gives meaningful insight into behavior and related change. Because portfolio assessment emphasizes the process of change or growth, at multiple points in time, it may be easier to see patterns.

*Evaluating programs that have very concrete, uniform goals or purposes. For example, it would be unneccessary to compile a portfolio of individualized "evidence" in a program whose sole purpose is full immunization of all children in a community by the age of five years. The required immunizations are the same, and the evidence is generally clear and straightforward.

*Comparing participants or programs to standardized norms. While portfolios can (and often do) include some standardized test scores along with other kinds of "evidence", this is not the main purpose of the portfolio.

Using portfolios can help you to document the needs and assets of the community of interest. Portfolios can also help you to clarify the identity of your program and allow you to document the "thinking" behind the development of and throughout the program. Ideally, the process of deciding on criteria for the portfolio will flow directly from the program objectives that have been established in designing the program. However, in a new or existing program where the original objectives are not as clearly defined as they need to be, program developers and staff may be able to clarify their own thinking by visualizing what successful outcomes would look like, and what they would accept as "evidence". Thus, thinking about portfolio criteria may contribute to clearer thinking and better definition of program objectives.

Critical to any form of assessment is accountability. In the educational arena for example, teachers are accountable to themselves, their students, and the families, the schools and society. The portfolio is an assessment practice that can inform all of these constituents. The process of selecting "evidence" for inclusion in portfolios involves ongoing dialogue and feedback between participants and service providers.

Portfolio assessment of the program or participants provides a means of conducting assessments throughout the life of the program, as the program addresses the evolving needs and assets of participants and of the community involved. This helps to maintain focus on the outcomes of the program and the steps necessary to meet them, while ensuring that the implementation is in line with the vision established in Tier 1.

Items are selected for inclusion in the portfolio because they provide "evidence" of progress toward selected outcomes. Whether the outcomes selected are specific to individual participants or apply to entire communities, the portfolio documents steps toward achievement. Usually it is most helpful for this selection to take place at regular intervals, in the context of conferences or discussions among participants and staff.

One of the greatest strengths of portfolio assessment in program evaluation may be its power as a tool to communicate program impact to those outside of the program. While this kind of data may not take the place of statistics about numbers served, costs, or test scores, many policy makers, funders, and community members find visual or descriptive evidence of successes of individuals or programs to be very persuasive.

*Portfolio assessment offers the possibility of addressing shortcomings of traditional assessment. It offers the possibility of assessing the more complex and important aspects of an area or topic.

*Can be very time consuming for teachers or program staff to organize and evaluate the contents, especially if portfolios have to be done in addition to traditional testing and grading.

*If goals and criteria are not clear, the portfolio can be just a miscellaneous collection of artifacts that don't show patterns of growth or achievement.

*Like any other form of qualitative data, data from portfolio assessments can be difficult to analyze or aggregate to show change.

Three main factors guide the design and development of a portfolio. 1) purpose, 2) assessment criteria, and 3) evidence (Barton Collins, 1997).

The primary concern in getting started is knowing the purpose that the portfolio will serve. This decision defines the operational guidelines for collecting materials. For example, is the goal to use the portfolio as data to inform program development? To report progress? To identify special needs? For program accountability? For all of these?

Once the purpose or goal of the portfolio is clear, decisions are made about what will be considered sucess (criteria or standards), and what strategies are necessary to meet the goals. Items are then selected to include in the portfolio because they provide evidence of meeting criteria, or making progress toward goals.

In collecting data, many things need to be considered. What sources of evidence should be used? How much evidence do we need to make good decisions and determinations? How often should we collect evidence? How congruent should the sources of evidence be? How can we make sense of the evidence that is collected? How should evidence be used to modify program and evaluation? According to Barton and Collins (1997), evidence can include artifacts (items produced in the normal course of classroom or program activities), reproductions (documentation of interviews or projects done outside of the classroom or program), attestations (statements and observations by staff or others about the participant), and productions (items prepared especially for the portfolio, such as participant reflections on their learning or choices) . Each item is selected because it adds some new information related to attainment of the goals.

Although many variations of portfolio assessment are in use, most fall into two basic types. process portfolios and product portfolios (Cole, Ryan, Kick, 1995). These are not the only kinds of portfolios in use, nor are they pure types clearly distinct from each other. It may be more helpful to think of these as two steps in the portfolio assessment process, as the participant(s) and staff reflectively select items from their process portfolios for inclusion in the product portfolio.

Step 1. The first step is to develop a process portfolio, which documents growth over time toward a goal. Documentation includes statements of the end goals, criteria, and plans for the future. This should include baseline information, or items describing the participant's performance or mastery level at the beginning of the program. Other items are "works in progress", selected at many interim points to demonstrate steps toward mastery. At this stage, the portfolio is a formative evaluation tool, probably most useful for the internal information of the participant(s) and staff as they plan for the future.

Step 2. The next step is to develop a product portfolio (also known as a "best pieces portfolio"), which includes examples of the best efforts of a participant, community, or program. These also include "final evidence", or items which demonstrate attainment of the end goals. Product or "best pieces" portfolios encourage reflection about change or learning. The program participants, either individually or in groups, are involved in selecting the content, the criteria for selection, and the criteria for judging merits, and "evidence" that the criteria have been met (Winograd Jones, 1992). For individuals and communities alike, this provides opportunities for a sense of ownership and strength. It helps to show-case or communicate the accomplishments of the person or program. At this stage, the portfolio is an example of summative evaluation, and may be particularly useful as a public relations tool.

Certain characteristics are essential to the development of any type of portfolio used for assessment. According to Barton and Collins (1997), portfolios should be.

The items selected or produced for evidence should be related to program activities, as well as the goals and criteria. If the portfolio is assessing the effect of a program on participants or communities, then the "evidence" should reflect the activities of the program rather than skills that were gained elsewhere. For example, if a child's musical performance skills were gained through private piano lessons, not through 4-H activities, an audio tape would be irrelevant in his 4-H portfolio. If a 4-H activity involved the same child in teaching other children to play, a tape might be relevant.

An important feature of portfolio assessment is that data or evidence is added at many points in time, not just as "before and after" measures. Rather than including only the best work, the portfolio should include examples of different stages of mastery. At least some of the items are self-selected. This allows a much richer understanding of the process of change.

The portfolio assessment process should require that the participants engage in some reflection and self-evaluation as they select the evidence to include and set or modify their goals. They are not simply being evaluated or graded by others.

A well-designed portfolio assessment process evaluates the effectiveness of your intervention at the same time that it evaluates the growth of individuals or communities. It also serves as a communication tool when shared with family, other staff, or community members. In school settings, it can be passed on to other teachers or staff as a child moves from one grade level to another.

As with any qualitative assessment method, analysis of portfolio data can pose challenges. Methods of analysis will vary depending on the purpose of the portfolio, and the types of data collected (Patton, 1990). However, if goals and criteria have been clearly defined, the "evidence" in the portfolio makes it relatively easy to demonstrate that the individual or population has moved from a baseline level of performance to achievement of particular goals.

Subjectivity of judgements is often cited as a concern in this type of assessment (Bateson, 1994). However, in educational settings, teachers or staff using portfolio assessment often choose to periodically compare notes by independently rating the same portfolio to see if they are in agreement on scoring (Barton Collins, 1997). This provides a simple check on reliability, and can be very simply reported. For example, a local programmer could say "To ensure some consistency in assessment standards, every 5th portfolio (or 20%) was assessed by more than one staff member. Agreement between raters, or inter-rater reliability, was 88%".

There are many books and articles that address the problems of analyzing and reporting on qualitative data in more depth than can be covered here. The basic issues of reliability, validity and generalizability are relevant even when using qualitative methods, and various strategies have been developed to address them. Those who are considering using portfolio assessment in evaluation are encouraged to refer to some of the sources listed below for more in-depth information.

Barton, J., Collins, A. (Eds.) (1997). Portfolio assessment. A handbook for educators. Menlo Park, CA. Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.

A book about portfolio assessment written by and for teachers. The main goal is to give practical suggestions for creating portfolios so as to meet the unique needs and purposes of any classroom. The book includes information about designing portfolios, essential steps to make portfolios work, actual cases of portfolios in action, a compendium of portfolio implementation tips that save time and trouble, how to use portfolios to assess both teacher and student performance, and a summary of practical issues of portfolio development and implementation. This book is very clear, easy to follow, and can easily serve as a bridge between the use of portfolios in the classroom and the application of portfolios in community evaluations.

Bateson, D. (1994). Psychometric and philosophic problems in "authentic" assessment. Performance tasks and portfolios. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 40 (2), p. us.

Cole, D. J., Ryan, C. W., Kick, F. (1995). Portfolios across the curriculum and beyond. Thousand Oaks, CA. Corwin Press.

Authors discuss the development of authentic assessment and how it has led to portfolio usage. Guidelines are given for planning portfolios, how to use them, selection of portfolio contents, reporting strategies, and use of portfolios in the classroom. In addition, a chapter focuses on the development of a professional portfolio.

Courts, P. L., McInerny, K. H. (1993). Assessment in higher education. Politics, pedagogy, and portfolios. London. Praeger.

The authors describe a project using portfolios to train teachers to assess exceptional potential in underserved populations. The portfolio includes observations of the children's behavior in the school, home, and community. The underlying assumption of the project is that teachers learn to recognize exceptional potential if they are provided with authentic examples of such behavior. Results indicated that participating teachers experienced a sense of empowerment as a consequence of the project and became both involved in and committed to the project.

This book is an attempt to identify and define current practices and present alternatives that can better meet the needs of a wider range of students in facilitating literacy and readiness for life outside the classroom. Discussion centers on current curriculum and the need for instruction that meets the changing educational context. Included is information about portfolio assessment, design and implementation, as as examples of a new curricular style that promotes flexible and individualistic instruction.

This book explains how to design an assessment system that can authentically evaluate students' progress in an interdisciplinary curriculum. It offers step-by-step procedures, checklists, tables, charts, graphs, guides, worksheets, and examples of successful assessment methods. Specific to portfolio assessment, this book shows how portfolios can be used to measure learning. Provides some information on types and development of portfolios.

Shaklee, B. D., Barbour, N. E., Ambrose, R., Hansford, S. J. (1997). Designing and using portfolios. Boston. Allyn and Bacon.

Discusses the history of portfolio assessment, decisions that need to be made before beginning the portfolio assessment process (eg., what it will look like, who should be involved, what should be assessed, how the assessment will be accomplished), designing a portfolio system (eg., criteria and standards), using portfolio results in planning, and issues related to assessment practices (eg., accountability).

Shaklee, B. D., Viechnicki, K. J. (1995). A qualitative approach to portfolios. The Early Assessment for Exceptional Potential Model. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 18 (2), us.

The creation of a portfolio assessment model based on qualitative research principles is examined by the authors. Portfolio framework assumptions for classrooms are. designing authentic learning opportunities, interaction of assessment, curriculum and instructions, multiple criteria derived from multiple sources, and systematic teacher preparations. Additionally, the authors examine the qualitative research procedures embedded in the development of the Early Assessment for Exceptional Potential model. Provided are preliminary results for credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability of the design.

Winograd, P., Jones, D. L. (1992). The use of portfolios in performance assessment. New Directions for Educational Reform, 1 (2), 37-50.

Authors examine the use of portfolios in performance assessment. Suggestions are offered to educators interested in using portfolios in aiding students to become better readers and writers. Addresses concerns related to portfolios' usefulness. Educators need support in learning how to use portfolios, including their design, management, and interpretation.

Teaching Portfolios offer university professors and graduate TAs spaces to reflect on their teaching (as they create and revise), as well as to demonstrate to others what they have done already as teachers and how they plan to continue developing as professionals. The links below offer suggestions for how to create a teaching portfolio, with special attention to preparing portfolios for the various CTLT sponsored teaching awards. Currently, many schools are moving toward electronic and web-based teaching portfolios. These portfolios carry the advantage of not being as space-constrained as portfolios in three-ring binders, and because the artifacts are linked documents, teachers can use the web-based portfolio as a portal for directing readers to class Web sites and other pedagogical initiatives, which often contain a wealth of materials for demonstrating teaching effectiveness, innovation, etc. As teachers move toward web-based portfolios, however, they should be especially careful to check that they have abided by current policies regarding the legal and ethical use of student work.

This site contains useful tips for what to put in your portfolio, including a thoughtful discussion of the value of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, as well as how a teaching portfolio actually improves the teacher who creates it.

Kaplan outlines some of the key parts of effective teaching portfolios. Especially interesting are his suggestions in Appendix A for how to document your teaching.

This manual includes tips for assembling the portfolio, including how to represent peer and student evaluations.

ETP. Multimedia Skills + Portfolio Development = Powerful Professional Development (Helen Barrett, UA-Anchorage)

Barrett highlights how electronic portfolios differ from print-based ones and offers suggestions for a stages method of developing an ETP.

An excellent collection of teaching portfolios, representing various disciplines and teachers from around the country. Particularly strong is the Teaching Portfolio of Joseph Braun, Jr., a faculty member in the College of Education at Illinois State University.

Although Love and McKean have used this system primarily for students, it could be equally useful for faculty who need to update their teaching portfolios frequently. This interface allows the user to select what materials to show at a given time - without removing them from the system altogether - so it becomes a highly customizable portfolio that can be modified for different teacher needs (job search, tenure promotion, teaching award submission, etc.).

Digital or electronic portfolios are selective and purposeful collections of student work. Portfolios are records of learning, growth, and change on the part of the student. They provide meaningful documentation of students' abilities. Portfolios provide information to students, parents, teachers, and members of the community about what students have learned or are able to do. They represent a learning history. Portfolios bring together curriculum, instruction and assessment. Through the use of portfolios teachers and students can develop a shared understanding of what constitutes quality work. The main characteristics of a porfolio include.

Portfolios can be produced in both paper and digital formats. Several software programs make it easy to create digital portfolios. Suggested titles include. Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Word, Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Hyperstudio, and Adobe Acrobat. The digital portfolio can be a mini-documentary for each student and burned to a CD-ROM. Using an html format eliminates searching for portfolio software. Anyone with limited computer skills can create a digital portfolio, but teachers would need to learn to use computer equipment, digital cameras, and scanners. It would be very helpful to team with a computer class instructor who could help you and the students work on the portfolios

Using a template can be helpful and there are many available that you may adopt or adapt to your needs. Below are links to template resources and sample portfolios.

50 Good Reasons Why a High School Student should have a portfolio ~ www. what-is-the-speed-of-light. com/webquests/high-school-portfolio-webquest. html

Campus Technology has an article on Electronic Student Assessment The Power of the Portfolio At Bentley College (MA), the interdisciplinary Liberal Studies program has undergone quite a makeover. Educators there have completely revamped the way in which they assess student performance in class. For years, the process was “old school”—students were required to submit all work in person, printing out assignments on paper, stapling them, and handing them over to professors upon request. These days, however, the school handles assessment with nextgeneration ePortfolio tools that enable students and teachers to exchange assignments electronically. Read more here. Electronic Student Assessment The Power of the Portfolio

The Joint Information Systems Committee posted a summary of their e-portfolio projects on their website. e-Portfolios. an overview of JISC activities. PDF version of the paper can also be found here. e-Portfolio Overview October 2006 (PDF)

Campus Technology Magazine has published an article, "Electronic Student Assessment >> The Power of the Portfolio", that examines the innovative ways a number of U. S. post-secondary schools are using portfolios as assessment tools.

Helen Barrett has posted an online document, titled "Purposes of Digital Stories in ePortfolios", that examines how to merge these two learning tools. She provides a number of good examples of digital stories.

During our last CoP meeting, Regina Lyakhovetska, from Student Development talked about her experience with the International Peer Program's e-Portfolio project using Elgg. She talked about how the project's structured, students' experience, successes and challenges of the project. Regina agreed to share her presentation with the community. You can download the presentation in different formats.

Monitor Design Jobs site activity in real time See what others are doing right now on Design Jobs. Find out immediately when new jobs get posted, new portfolios are added or when members update their portfolios.

A teacher portfolio serves as a collection or record of your professional background and experience as a teacher and documents what you believe about language learning and teaching and how you teach.

Items often found in a portfolio include a statement of your philosophy of teaching, your curriculum vitae, examples of materials, activities, or lesson plans you have developed, video clips of your classroom teaching, samples of student, peer, or administrative evaluations of your teaching, and so on. Increasingly, employers are asking for various portfolio elements before, during, and after the interview/hiring process. By putting together an organized, cohesive, reflective, and ever-growing portfolio, you better prepare yourself to show who you are as a teacher and what you offer to a potential employer and to make a good impression.

Bullock, Ann Adams, Hawk, Parmalee P. (2001). Developing a teaching portfolio. A guide for preservice and practicing teachers. Upper Saddle River, NJ. Merrill Prentice Hall.

An issue totally devoted to a variety of issues regarding teacher portfolios. Available in print or online

Murray, John P. (1997). Successful faculty development and evaluation. The complete teaching portfolio. Washington, DC. Graduate School of Education and Human Development, George Washington University

Seldin, Peter (1991). Teaching portfolio. A practical guide to improved performance and promotion/tenure decisions. Bolton, MA. Anker Pub. Co.

A good place to start - we often use this article for a quick overview of teacher portfolios, their contents, and uses.

The websites that follow were found via an internet search and are designed for you to review and learn from (we're not saying that any of them are exemplary -- nor are we saying that they are not exemplary). As you look at some of these portfolios, here are a few things to look for.

Although they use technology, web portfolios are not about technology. they are about habits of thinking and the practices that cultivate those habits.

To promote reflection on the coherence of their academic careers, students completing individual majors maintain web portfolios of their work.

A web portfolio is collection of work that a student chooses in order to illustrate the unfolding meaning of their career. The work is stored and presented as a web site, with links that demonstrate how the student understands the relationships he or she has built among many individual achievements. These portfolios make the CIS interest in making meaningful connections concrete. Works of almost any imaginable kind (art, lab reports, film and audio clips, essays) can be included in a web portfolio.

Besides demonstrating a student's grasp of the central subject of their studies, web portfolios promote four goals of liberal learning. recognizing connections, being reflective about intellectual and personal growth, building intellectual community, and building bridges to communities outside the academy.

Excellent web portfolios are characterized by the meaningful coherence of the whole, the quality of the individual pages, the clarity and logic of the overall design, the creativity of the links and the degree to which the rationale for particular links is explicit and sensible, the critical judgment apparent in the selection of external sites, the extent of the portfolio, and the overall aesthetic quality of the portfolio.

This global arts resource provides you with access to artist portfolios, museums, galleries, high quality art by living artists, discussion forums and much more. Add your site to our searchable link directory. Contact the artists directly through our easy to use form. Overview | Submissions | View Submissions

A teacher portfolio serves as a collection or record of your professional background and experience as a teacher and documents what you believe about language learning and teaching and how you teach.

Items often found in a portfolio include a statement of your philosophy of teaching, your curriculum vitae, examples of materials, activities, or lesson plans you have developed, video clips of your classroom teaching, samples of student, peer, or administrative evaluations of your teaching, and so on. Increasingly, employers are asking for various portfolio elements before, during, and after the interview/hiring process. By putting together an organized, cohesive, reflective, and ever-growing portfolio, you better prepare yourself to show who you are as a teacher and what you offer to a potential employer and to make a good impression.

Bullock, Ann Adams, Hawk, Parmalee P. (2001). Developing a teaching portfolio. A guide for preservice and practicing teachers. Upper Saddle River, NJ. Merrill Prentice Hall.

An issue totally devoted to a variety of issues regarding teacher portfolios. Available in print or online

Murray, John P. (1997). Successful faculty development and evaluation. The complete teaching portfolio. Washington, DC. Graduate School of Education and Human Development, George Washington University

Seldin, Peter (1991). Teaching portfolio. A practical guide to improved performance and promotion/tenure decisions. Bolton, MA. Anker Pub. Co.

A good place to start - we often use this article for a quick overview of teacher portfolios, their contents, and uses.

The websites that follow were found via an internet search and are designed for you to review and learn from (we're not saying that any of them are exemplary -- nor are we saying that they are not exemplary). As you look at some of these portfolios, here are a few things to look for.

This global arts resource provides you with access to artist portfolios, museums, galleries, high quality art by living artists, discussion forums and much more. Add your site to our searchable link directory. Contact the artists directly through our easy to use form. Overview | Submissions | View Submissions

Over the last few years the prominence of, and interest in, e-portfolios in allsectors of educationhas grown, driven in part by national policy and lifelong and personalised learning initiatives. Thepicture has often been a complex one, withconfusion over what an 'e-portfolio' is. More recently consensus is gathering, and clarity is being brought to the discussions, as our experience with using e-portfolio toolsgrows.

Fundamentally an 'e-portfolio' is the product created by learners, a collection of digital artefacts articulating experiences, achievements and learning

The term 'e-Portfolio'often means different things to different people. Fundamentally an 'e-portfolio' is the product created by learners, a collection of digital artefacts articulating experiences, achievements and learning.

An e-portfolio is a purposeful aggregation of digital items - ideas, evidence, reflections, feedback etc. which 'presents' a selected audience with evidence of a person's learning and/or ability' [1]

Learners create 'presentational' e-portfolios through the use of e-portfolio tools or systems, and in the process (depending on the tools or systems used) can be inherently supported to develop one or more key skills such as collecting, selecting, reflecting, sharing, sharing, collaborating, annotating and presenting (e-portfolio related processes). Descriptions of e-portfolio processes also tend to includethe concepts of learners drawing from both informal and and formal learning activities to create their e-portfolios, which are personally managed and owned by the learner, and where items can be selectively shared with other parties such as peers, teachers, assessors or employers [2].

DfES e-Strategy (2005) proposes a personal online learning space for every learner, which will contribute to an electronic portfolio, building a record of achievement for lifelong learning

Students using an e-portfolio in the medium term, with students themselves as the translators and conveyors of information about their learning and achievement

Our aim in this area is to explore and develop effective practice in the use of e-portfolio systems and tools through the co-development of standards and piloting of e-portfolio related technologies and standards. We are working in partnership with other sectors and partners to develop the effective use of e-portfolios to support lifelong and lifewide learning. We also aim to provide guidance for institutions on effective practice in the area where our programmes are learning lessons of use to the wider community, in collaboration with the Higher Education Academy,

Is the latest in the established series of JISC Effective Practice guides. It focuses especially on the role e-portfolios play in the formative processes of learning – for example, by supporting dialogue with peers and tutors, evaluating and celebrating personal achievements and skills development, and, in the process, engaging learners – and professionals – in more profound reflection on their personal development planning (

) and continuing professional development (CPD). The guide investigates the concept of ‘e-portfolio-based learning’ from different perspectives – those of the learner, the practitioner, the institution, a professional body and a potential audience, summarising key points of guidance in each case. To request a copy of the publication, please fill in your details on the form available from.

A further source of e-portfolio guidance from JISC for the post-16 and higher education sector comes from JISC infoNet, the

This online resource covers the main drivers, purposes, processes, perspectives and issues around e-portfolio use and gives a valuable synopsis of JISC-funded projects on e-portfolios.

Anoverviewpaperproduced in September 2007 providing an overview of all of the JISC e-portfolio related project activities.

A presentation delivered at the Telling Stories e-portfolio conference in 2007, providing an overview of the JISC work around e-portfolios.

TheCETIS Portfolio Special Interest Group is open to the community with an interest or experience in this area, with a particular focus on supporting an open standards-based approach to e-portfolio tools and systems. They hold regular meetings, have a wiki for resource sharing, and promote community discussion on their mailing list.

JISC funded projects have been investigating a number of issues around the use of e-portfolio tools and systems, andtechnology supported personal development planning (

These areas of e-portfolio usage are not exhaustive and will inevitably overlap, and are at different stages of maturity. See a further expansion of the contexts above, with links to all JISC-funded projects working in these areas See a list of key e-Portfolio resources 1. Sutherland, S.and Powell, A., 9 July 2007,

Portfolio SIG mailing list discussions ( 2. Beetham, H. (2005) 'e-portfolios in post-16 learning in the UK. developments, issues and opportunities'. JISC e-Learning Pedagogy Strand.

The case studies and sample portfolios in this book are offered as examples of how schools arranged their systems to participate in the Digital Portfolio project. While the case studies are not models to be followed, they do suggest some possible steps a school can take to get started. If you are interested in starting to work on Digital Portfolios in your school, please understand that they are not a magic bullet. Digital Portfolios can be a provocation to help a school think about its systems, its vision, and what it wants students to be able to say about themselves. They can also be just another gimmick that turns off a school to technology, portfolios, or both. The assumption underlying this project is that the most effective use of Digital Portfolios is as a school-wide innovation. This suggests that the entire school needs to be involved in the preparation, planning, and implementation of a Digital Portfolio system. This will undoubtedly take longer than an innovation that can be carried out by a couple of teachers in their classrooms -- but the students will gain more from the experience if it is clear that the portfolios represent a tool used in a larger agenda of school reform. If you have read through these caveats, and are still interested in pursuing the development of a Digital Portfolio system, the following ideas on the following might help you get started.

The main menu of the Digital Portfolios represents a vision of what a graduate of each school should know and be able to do. Creating that vision is one thing. helping staff and students internalize that vision is quite another. The Digital Portfolio can help, but only if the vision is reasonably clear in the first place. Of all the questions listed above, establishing a vision is perhaps the most important. The other systems can come together later -- but it's much easier when the faculty, students, and community know what the school expects of its students.

It's fairly easy to list all the possible audiences for a Digital Portfolio. The more important question is, which audiences are most important to us? Is the Digital Portfolio's purpose is to help students understand themselves? Or, is it to serve a gatekeeping function to help determine who should graduate and who should not? There are many appropriate audiences, but it is not fair to students to ask them to develop a Digital Portfolio for a set of potential readers. There need to be some defined readers of the portfolio that will be receptive to examining student work. Before a school considers how the portfolios might be used by outside readers, such as college admissions officers, for use after the student leaves school, the school should ask itself how it will use the information in a portfolio to help the student while he or she is still in school.

Each of the schools in the Digital Portfolio project collected some information, in addition to student work, that helped to put student work in context. Most of the schools asked for some kind of self-reflection, where the student explains why a particular piece fits in the portfolio. The original assignment can be help the reader understand what the student was responding to. Evaluations can be very useful -- but collecting evaluations either means that teachers need to enter their evaluations into the portfolio, or students need to be trusted to accurately enter teacher assessments. The student work itself can have multiple components. Do you want to encourage the collection of multimedia pieces? Do you want to see works in process (rough drafts, early attempts at experiments) as well as completed works? Again, it is very useful to think about the audience, and the purpose, of the Digital Portfolio. This will help you determine what information will be useful to the reader, and how the student can best present him- or herself.

Digital Portfolios can be hard to visualize. For many teachers and students, Digital Portfolios only become clear when they see a sample portfolio of work from a student from their school. Thus, it often helps to have a little demonstration of a Digital Portfolio, using your school's vision, and designed for the audience your school thinks is important. At some of the project schools, such a mock-up was created by digitizing an existing student's paper portfolio. At others, teachers or administrators created their own portfolios, and used that information as the basis for the mock-up. The mock-up need not be a fully working program. its purpose is similar to an architectural model -- to provide a visual sense of what the final version might look like. In fact, the developers of the mock-up should assume that they will have to make changes on the prototype before it can be used within the school. The mock-up is also an opportunity to test the limits of the school's technology. It is one thing to know how a scanner should work. it is another to actually use the scanner for the purpose of developing the portfolio.

A mock-up can be used to begin a discussion among teachers, students, administrators, parents, and community members about what students should know and be able to do. Often, the examination of a mock digital portfolio is the first time many of these individuals will have read a multimedia document, and the facilitator of the conversation will have to be aware of when reviewers are commenting on the multimedia technology and when they are commenting on the portfolio itself. Bringing a group together to look at student work through the medium of a Digital Portfolio helps the group to understand what potential the Digital Portfolio has, and what it would take for the school to use it well. The key to a school-wide innovation is continual communication among all involved, both to help keep the project on track and to provide constructive feedback on what the portfolios can be useful for in the long run.

None of the schools in the study thought it wise to assume that every student would immediately begin creating Digital Portfolios from the first year. Instead, all began with pilot projects, involving from 1 to 50 students. The pilot can be a block of time when students have the opportunity to create their own portfolios. This is a chance to test the technology in the school, as well as the format of the portfolios themselves. In the pilot phase, we have found that the best students are those who can handle things when they don't go perfectly. The pilot phase will show the glitches in the system, ranging from the limits of the hardware and software to the internalizing of the vision across the entire faculty. Some students who regularly receive good grades may have trouble with a system which still has bugs, while other students who do not feel particularly well versed in technology or exhibitions may be very good at describing what has gone wrong or dealing with the experimental nature of the pilot. Your pilot needs to have a goal. x number of students will create portfolios with x entries within x weeks. One possible guideline is to select about 10% of your student population, and ask each student to find at least one piece from each course that he or she is currently taking. Remember, though, that these students will need more guidance and support, and will be taking on a responsibility above and beyond what is expected of other students. For this pilot project, you will want to observe rather than judge the process of creating digital portfolios. if students do not deliver exactly what you expect, consider how much of that process was due to factors outside the students' control. Students need to know what is expected of them in this pilot, and what incentives the school will provide for their participation.

The pilot phase helps teachers and students to understand both the process of creating a Digital Portfolio and what an interesting product (i. e., a completed portfolio) might look like. It may be worth re-gathering the group that had joined together or had participated in developing the vision, to examine both the process of developing a Digital Portfolio and the actual products created by students within the pilot phase. It's worth considering not just what can be improved but also whether the project, using the current hardware and software, is using resources that could better be used elsewhere.

The group may want to reconsider the answers to the questions listed in the first section (Inventory on the School's Systems). Are the answers clearer or muddier? What systems need to be enhanced to allow the Digital Portfolio to be used beyond the pilot group?

If the school's goal is to have all students develop digital portfolios, the school needs to consider how it will move beyond the pilot project. Are there strategic groups of teachers and / or students who would be first to adopt this system? Might there be an ongoing project at the school that would benefit from the use of a Digital Portfolio? Again, the key is an open dialogue. Some teachers or students may resist the idea of putting together a Digital Portfolio. it's worth considering why that resistance is there, and what legitimate issues are being raised -- because, eventually, you will want all of those resistors to be a part of the project. The school's systems will have to be revisited, but you can learn from what the pilot phase has suggested and determine how to rearrange the systems to best support Digital Portfolios throughout the school.

Picturing Performance with Digital Portfolios, by David Niguidula. Educational Leadership, November 1997, pp. 26-29.

The Digital Portfolio. A Richer Picture of Student Performance by David Niguidula. (Providence, RI. Coalition of Essential Schools, Studies on Exhibitions, No. 13, 1993). This paper outlines the original conception of the digital portfolio and its intent.

Redesigning School, by Joseph McDonald. Jossey-Bass, 1996. This book describes the research efforts on Exhibitions from the Coalition of Essential Schools that spawned the Digital Portfolio project.

The Digital Portfolio project was also one of eleven educational technology projects presented at the 1996 National Education Summit of governors and business leaders held at IBM's Palisades, New York facility in March 1996. For more information on the summit, see the summit's web site --

Barrett, Helen C., Technology-Supported Assessment Portfolios, The Computing Teacher, March 1994, pp. 9-12. Helen Barrett also maintains a web site about constructing digital portfolios -- see it at

Wiedmer, Terry L., Digital Portfolios. Capturing and Demonstrating Skills and Levels of Performance, Phi Delta Kappan, April 1998, pp. us.

The specific digital portfolio software used in this project is not commercially available. However, schools interested in working with digital portfolios can choose from a number of software products. These fall into two broad categories. software specifically designed for work with portfolios, and general hypermedia software tools. Please note that this listing of software by no means constitutes an endorsement of these products.

These tools are specifically designed for collecting information about student work. The particular features vary, and thus you should carefully consider what you want from your portfolio system, and how each tool might help. To purchase any of these tools, you may want to contact the company directly, or go through an educational software mail order firm, such as Learning Services ( us., east, or us., west) or Educational Resources ( us., or us. in Illinois).

Portfolio Assessment Toolkit, Designer Software for Learning, Aurora, CO, us. www. hyperstudio. com/catalog

Portfolio Assessment Kit, Super School Software, Long Beach, CA, us. www. consultantalliance. com/Superschoolsoftware

A number of schools are using hypermedia tools to build portfolios from scratch. In a typical project, students are given some guidelines (include five pieces of work, including the assignment and an assessment. on a front page, include buttons to link for work in writing or that show problem solving), and some instruction on how to use the particular software tool. These tools allow for greater flexibility than those listed in the previous section, but they require at least a little more time to learn and use. In addition to the hypermedia software products listed below, some schools are considering how to create digital portfolios using web-based tools. The assumption is that student work will be available on a school's local intranet, rather than to the entire Internet. You may want to consider HTML and web page editors and organizers for your development.

Digital Chisel, Pierian Spring Software, Portland, OR, us. (Digital Chisel's current release contains a template for creating digital portfolios.) www. digitalchisel. com

Using portfolios as an assessment tool will allow your students to successfully demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of scientific concepts using their own talents and abilities.

Provide for a successful scientific experience. Implementation of a portfolio should be systematic and within your own "comfort zone". Your individual teaching style will dictate the types of activities the students perform and the management of their materials. For most people the management of the physical portfolio is difficult to comprehend. Be assured that if you use portfolios with all your classes there will be a fair amount of space needed. It all depends on the level of organization you are comfortable with and the degree of responsibility for the organization which you give to the students. I have some space for storage within my room, but I give the students most of the responsibility for the storage of the entries for the portfolio. My students vary in ability and motivation, but the portfolio is a barrier free vehicle which encourages them to be successful science students. Following is a suggested flow for the implementation of a portfolio project. I suggest that you start small or with a single topic, entry or science concept to work out the system that is best for you.

Portfolio Introduce the topic, entry, concept or project in a clear and concise manner. (See "Start-Up" below)

Give all of these plenty of thought because as you get into the workings of the portfolio the creative energy will be exciting. The project develops a flow of its own.

Determine how the portfolio will demonstrate these goals. What assignments? How many entries? How the students will reflect on their work?

Acquiring new clients via your online graphic design portfolios is no easy task, especially for designers who do not have the time to dive into extensive online marketing and search engine tactics. So if you would like to make the most of the traffic you DO get, check out the tips below. All these tips are meant to make your portfolio more client friendly, which means more money for you!

1. Create a One Page Portfolio One page Graphic Design Portfolios are a proven method of showcasing work online. They follow a similar format seen on many sales letters such as on my ebook site about how to Start a Clothing Line. The point is to keep the viewers eyes and actions focused. With one page the person only has the option to go from the top of your site to the bottom and by the time they get to the bottom, your text content or great designs should convince them to want to buy or work with you. Your call to action probably wont be a Buy Now button, but it could be your contact information or a Get a Free Project Quote. Having a prominent call to action and contact information, which we will cover more is extremely important and keeping your portfolio to one page can produce great results. 2. Keep Your Portfolio Up to Date Most designers improve over time and thats why you need to keep your portfolio fresh with new projects, as long as they are better! Many bloggers and other design sites feature content from portfolios, and they will actually check to see if you have new work on your site. You can also submit your new work to design galleries, which can get your more traffic and potential clients! 3. Take Multiple Photos of Print Work Taking professional photos of your print work can really give you an edge. Obviously your work appears more realistic when its printed and taking photos of the printed pieces just gives your work that extra special touch. Just make sure the photos are crisp, in focus, have proper lighting and a good background. You should also play around with different view points. Even if you cant get a sample of the prints from your client you can still do short run prints of your projects yourself. Its worth it! If you wanna see some great photos of business cards check out CardObserver. com and you will see for yourself how much better cards that are photographed look compared to digital representations. 4. Provide Live Demos of Web Work Providing live demos of web work can have as big an impact as the tip above. People will feel more confident in your services if they can see your work in action! So if your web designs are live, provide a clear live demo link. If that is not possible code the framework yourself or at least host a screen shot of the site on your server and code in the background images so it mimics the appearance of a live site. To prove my point at why live demos are important, just take a look at any good site that sells html themes or WordPress themes and you will see most of them have live demo links! 5. Make Your Contact Info Easy to Find I have seen too many portfolio sites with impossible to find contact information. People have a short attention span on the internet so when they get an urge to contact you, they should be able to do so within 3 seconds! Always have your contact information Above the Fold meaning your contact info or link to a contact page should be easily seen without any scrolling or minutes looking around. I also recommend putting your contact info in the footer of your site and possibly have a Call to Action in your content area. 6. Offer Multiple Forms of Contact Everyone has different comfort levels when it comes to contacting another person. I prefer email or instant messenger, while some people always want to chat on the phone. You should offer as many contact options as possible, phone and email being the most important two. The more methods of contact you have the more comfortable you will make a potential client feel about getting in touch with you. 7. Show Customer Testimonials or Previous Clients A big part of building trust with a viewer is showing them you have experience! Showing testimonials or a list of previous clients is a great way to quickly build trust with a viewer of your portfolio. Its ok if you dont have huge clients like Apple or Honda, but if you have worked with major clients you better have them on your site! So consider creating a page just for testimonials or previous clients you have worked with. Got any more tips or elements you have seen work well? Leave us a comment below!

John - February 13th, 2009 Thanks for the post. Keeping your portfolio up to date is a hard one but its good to do. When you let it go for years without updating and then you find yourself out of work suddenly, it can be a daunting task to update. Thanks again.

Big Slick Web Design - February 13th, 2009 I like the tips here. Im still working on my portfolio before I post it up on my website, but until then Ill use this site as a resource. Thanks

Robins Blog Blog Archive Building Your Own Portfolio Site - February 13th, 2009 [.] 2/13/09 - 7 Tips For Improving Graphic Design Portfolios Category. Design and Layout, Web Development You can follow any responses to this entry through [.]

Rene - February 14th, 2009 Hey thanks for the tip, this will definitely help me out with my new online portfolio.

Links for us. | This Inspires Me - February 14th, 2009 [.] Improve Your Graphic Design Portfolio (tags. graphicdesign portfolio) [.]

Patternhead - February 14th, 2009 Great article. Ive been meaning to update my personal portfolio for over 18 months. Im gonna take some of your ideas on borad. Thanks.

Alex H - February 16th, 2009 Excellent tips. I have been neglecting my online portfolio for too long!. It is time for action.

The Best of the Week | Logos Guide | The visual works of Otba Mushaweh - February 18th, 2009 [.] 7 Tips For Improving Graphic Design Portfolios [.]

By JOE GRIMM Detroit Free Press Recruiting and development editor Your portfolio is an essential part of your application. For writers, we mean clips. For photographers, designers and artistsm, it's usually a CD, DVD or Web site. Let's call all of those things portfolios. The nature and size of a portfolio vary greatly, depending on application requirements and the type of job, but some characteristics are common to all good portfolios. As you put together the work samples that will accompany your cover letter and rsum, touch these bases. Meet the application requirements. If the newspaper wants 10 clips from writers, send 10. Not six. Not 20. If the newspaper doesn't say, reporters and writers should be safe with six to 10 clips. Artists and designers should go with about a dozen samples and photographers should go with about 20. Edit your package down to requirements, but don't go under. Limit material with shared bylines. Be neat. Clear, crisp, dated photocopies, well exposed photos, pages that are nice to look at and easy to handle. Don't shrink type, chop off the edges of your stories, submit grayed-out copies or poorly exposed images. Sloppy packages that take a second to make aren't going to get a second look. For writing clips especially, photocopy them on to 8 1/2 by 11 paper, one side only. You may have to scissor and paste the clips, but your effort will make it easier for others to read your work, copy it for others or file it. Web printouts are acceptable. Once upon a time, a corporate HR executive paid a lot of attention to application blank analysis. He said that the care people took filling out applications said a lot about them. The same might be said for how we create portfolios. Show variety. If you're a writer, choose a breaking news story or two, a feature, a profile, an enterprise story and maybe a personal essay, if others tell you it's good. Include news you broke as well as breaking news you covered. If you're a photographer, submit news, sports and features images. Show portraits, a studio shot under controlled lighting and a picture story with a clear beginning, middle and end. If you're a designer, include feature pages and news pages. Throw in a brilliant solution to a slow-news or no-art day. Choose examples that show how you handle display type, photos and color. Make a good first impression. Choose stories that have great leads. Strong stories with lame leads may not get read. Strong word pictures that pop will pull the eye into some of your subtler work, but a collection of subtle images might not get noticed. Provide context. If you got the photo of the firefighter rescuing the baby while everyone else was at the other end of the building, include a note that explains how you came to be in the right place at the right time. If the remarkable thing about that story is that you turned it around in three hours, attach a neat note explaining the conditions under which you worked. Stuck for what to say in a cover letter? Use it to tease editors into your portfolio.

Creating Electronic Portfolios in HyperStudio Directions are given for constructing an electronic portfolio in HyperStudio.

The author defines portfolios and tells why to use them, how to do them electronically, and identifies potential problems and some solutions.

Focus on Technology. Digital Teaching Portfolios Build, Display Talent (Clare Kilbane and Robert McNergney)

How to Create Your Own Electronic Portfolio Clear directions on how to design your own electronic portfolio.

Professional Teaching Portfolio. A Catalyst for Rethinking Education The purpose of this paper is to briefly describe how portfolio assessment was implemented and to focus on how this process impacts faculty, students, and program development.

Product Description We’.re been trawling the web looking for the most interesting and well-designed portfolios—.of designers, photographers, artists, illustrators, and motion graphic pros—.to profile the creators working behind the scenes. The focus is not so much the work presented, but the way the portfolios are designed. Presentation, elegance, and style are key, and the individuals and studios featured in this guide represent the best the web has to offer. Entries include screenshots, designers’. contacts, tools and content used (HTML, Flash, XML, music, video, etc.), awards received, and cost in hours per website for creation and maintenance. With designers hailing from 33 countries, from the United States to Croatia to Japan, this selection of portfolios demonstrates how today’.s best designers are pushing the limits and experimenting with innovative ways of navigation outside of corporate contexts. About the Author The editor. Julius Wiedemann was born and raised in Brazil. After studying graphic design and marketing, he moved to Japan, where he worked in Tokyo as art editor for digital and design magazines. Since joining TASCHEN in Cologne, he has been building up TASCHEN’.s digital collection with titles such as Digital Beauties, 1000 Game Heroes, Animation Now!, and TASCHEN’.s 1000 Favorite Websites.

Lovely resource I love this book because it inspired me and gave me great ideas for different portfolios.

E design, copy write and host online portfolios for artists, designers, software engineers, writers, executives and consultants across a wide range of industries. Our attractive online portfolio designs and professionally-written copy ensure that your online portfolio becomes an integral part of your job search and networking efforts. Take a look at our online portfolio samples, or learn more about our portfolio process.

Don't wait for someone to ask for your book or demo reel. With an online portfolio, you'll be able to include your URL on every email, resume and business card. Choose a template - or have us create a one-of-a-kind look. Learn more.

In the October 1998 issue of Learning Leading with Technology, I outlined the strategic questions to ask when developing electronic portfolios. This article describes the electronic portfolio development process further and covers seven different software and hardware tools for creating portfolios. Some very good commercial electronic portfolio programs are on the market, although they often reflect the developerís style or are constrained by the limits of the software structure. Many educators who want to develop electronic portfolios tend to design their own, using off-the-shelf software or generic strategies. Here, I discuss the structure of each type of program, the advantages and disadvantages of each strategy, the relative ease of learning the software, the level of technology required, and related issues. The seven generic types of software are.

Portfolio assessment has become more commonplace in schools because it allows teachers to assess student development over periods of time, sometimes across several years.

People develop portfolios at all phases of the lifespan. Educators in the Pacific Northwest (Northwest Evaluation Association, 1990), developed the following definition of portfolio.

A portfolio is a purposeful collection of student work that exhibits the studentís efforts, progress, and achievements in one or more areas. The collection must include student participation in selecting contents, the criteria for selection. the criteria for judging merit, and evidence of student self-reflection.

Electronic Portfolios. My definition of electronic portfolio includes the use of electronic technologies that allow the portfolio developer to collect and organize artifacts in many formats (audio, video, graphics, and text). A standards-based electronic portfolio uses hypertext links to organize the material to connect artifacts to appropriate goals or standards. Often, the terms electronic portfolio and digital portfolio are used interchangeably. However, I make a distinction. an electronic portfolio contains artifacts that may be in analog (e. g., videotape) or computer-readable form. In a digital portfolio, all artifacts have been transformed into computer-readable form. An electronic portfolio is not a haphazard collection of artifacts (i. e., a digital scrapbook or multimedia presentation) but rather a reflective tool that demonstrates growth over time.

Electronic portfolio development brings together two different processes. multimedia project development and portfolio development. When developing an electronic portfolio, equal attention should be paid to these complimentary processes, as both are essential for effective electronic portfolio development. (See the online supplement at www. iste. org/LL for a complete discussion of these processes.)

Collection. The portfolioís purpose, audience, and future use of the artifacts will determine what artifacts to collect.

Selection. Selection criteria for materials to include should reflect the learning objectives established for the portfolio. These should follow from national, state, or local standards and their associated evaluation rubrics or performance indicators.

I add a Connection stage, in which you create hypertext links and publish your portfolio to enable feedback from others, which can occur before or after the projection/direction stage.

Assess/Decide. The focus is on needs assessment of the audience, the presentation goals, and the appropriate tools for the final portfolio presentation.

I have created a process for developing an electronic portfolio based on the general portfolio and multimedia development processes (Table 1).

In addition to the stages of portfolio development, there appear to be at least five levels of electronic portfolio development. Just as there are developmental levels in student learning, there are developmental levels in digital portfolio development. Table 2 presents different levels for electronic portfolio development, which are closely aligned with the technology skills of the portfolio developer.

Portfolio data is entered into a structured format, such as a database or HyperStudio template or slide show (such as PowerPoint or AppleWorks) and stored on a hard drive, Zip, floppy disk, or LAN.

Portfolio is organized with a multimedia authoring program, incorporating digital sound and video. Then it is converted to digital format and pressed to CD-R/W or posted to the Web in streaming format.

What is the assessment context, including the purpose of the portfolio? Is it based on learner outcome goals (which should follow from national, state, or local standards and their associated evaluation rubrics or observable behaviors)? Setting the assessment context frames the rest of the portfolio development process.

What resources are available for electronic portfolio development? What hardware and software do you have and how often do students have access to it? What are the technology skills of the students and teachers? Some possible options are outlined in Tables 3 4.

Who is the audience for the portfolioóstudent, parent, professor, or employer? The primary audience for the portfolio affects the decisions made about the format and storage of the presentation portfolio. Choose a format the audience will most likely have access to (e. g., a home computer, VCR, or the Web).

What is the content of portfolio items (determined by the assessment context) and the type of evidence to be collected? This is where the standards become a very important part of the planning process. Knowing which standards or goals you are trying to demonstrate should help determine the types of portfolio artifacts to collect. For example, if the portfolio goal is to demonstrate the standard of clear communication, then examples should reflect studentís writing (scanned or imported from a word processing document) and speaking abilities (sound or video clips).

Which software tools are most appropriate for the portfolio context and the resources available? This question is the theme of the rest of this article. The software used to create the electronic portfolio will control, restrict, or enhance the portfolio development process. The electronic portfolio software should match the vision and style of the portfolio developer.

Which storage and presentation medium is most appropriate for the situation (computer hard disk, videotape, LAN, the Web, CD-ROM)? The type of audience for the portfolio will determine this answer. There are also multiple options, depending on the software chosen.

What multimedia materials will you gather to represent a learnerís achievement? Once you have answered the questions about portfolio context and content and addressed the limitations on the available equipment and usersí skills (both teachersí and studentsí), you will be able to determine the type of materials you will digitize.

Collected digital portfolio artifacts that represent your efforts and achievement throughout the course of your learning experiences, and

Used the graphics and layout capability of your chosen software to interject your vision and style into the portfolio artifacts.

How will you select the specific artifacts from the abundance of the working portfolio to demonstrate achieving the portfolioís goals? What are your criteria for selecting artifacts and for judging merit? Having a clear set of rubrics at this stage will help guide portfolio development and evaluation.

How will you record self-reflection on work and achievement of goals? The quality of the learning that results from the portfolio development process may be in direct proportion to the quality of the studentsí self-reflection on their work. One challenge in this process is to keep these reflections confidential. The personal, private reflections of the learner need to be guarded and not published in a public medium.

Process. Teachersí feedback should also be kept confidential so that only the student, parents, and other appropriate audiences have access. Security, in the form of password protection to control access, is an important factor when choosing electronic portfolio development software.

How will you record goals for future learning based on the personal reflections and feedback? The primary benefit of a portfolio is to see growth over time, which should inspire goal setting for future learning. It is this process of setting learning goals that turns the portfolio into a powerful tool for long-term growth and development.

How will you organize the digital artifacts? Have you selected software that allows you to create hyperlinks between goals, student work samples, rubrics, and assessment? The choice of software can either restrict or enhance the development process and the quality of the final product. Different software packages each have unique characteristics that can limit or expand the electronic portfolio options.

How will you evaluate the portfolioís effectiveness in light of its purpose and the assessment context? In an environment of continuous improvement, a portfolio should be viewed as an ongoing learning tool, and its effectiveness should be reviewed on a regular basis to be sure it is meeting the goals set.

Depending on portfolio context, how will you use portfolio evidence to make instruction/learning decisions? Whether the portfolio is developed with a young child or a practicing professional, the artifacts collected along with the self-reflection should help guide learning decisions. This process brings together instruction and assessment in the most effective way.

Will you develop a collection of exemplary portfolio artifacts for comparison purposes? Many portfolio development guidebooks recommend collecting model portfolio artifacts that demonstrate achievement of specific standards. This provides the audience with a frame of reference to judge a specific studentís work. It also provides concrete examples of good work for students to emulate.

How will you record the portfolio to an appropriate presentation and storage medium? These will be different for a working portfolio and a presentation portfolio. I find that the best medium for a working portfolio is videotape, computer hard disk, Zip disk, or network server. The best medium for a formal portfolio is CD-Recordable disc, Web server, or videotape.

How will you or your students present the finished portfolio to an appropriate audience? This will be a very individual strategy, depending on the context. An emerging strategy is student-led conferences, which enable learners to share their portfolios with a targeted audience, whether parents, peers, or potential employers. This is also an opportunity for professionals to share their teaching portfolios with colleagues for meaningful feedback and collaboration in self-assessment.

Relational Databases (e. g., FileMaker Pro, Microsoft Access). In recent years, new database management tools have become available that allow teachers to easily create whole-class records of student achievement. A relational database is actually a series of interlinked structured data files linked together by common fields. One data file could include the studentsí names, addresses, and various individual elements. another could include a list of the standards that each student should be achieving. still another could include portfolio artifacts that demonstrate each studentís achievement of those standards. The purpose of using a relational database is to link together the students with their individual portfolio artifacts and the standards these artifacts should clearly demonstrate.

Databases are really teacher-centered portfolio tools. They allow teachers to keep track of student achievement at every level. They are less appropriate for students to use to maintain their own portfolios. You may save appropriate pages from the database as PDF files for students to include in their own portfolios.

Hypermedia programs are most appropriate for elementary or middle school portfolios. Templates and strategies are widely available to help you begin using your chosen hypermedia tool as a portfolio development and assessment tool.

Multimedia authoring programs would be most appropriate for high school, college, or professional portfolio creation.

Web Pages (e. g., Adobe PageMill, Claris Home Page, Microsoft FrontPage, Netscape Composer). An emerging trend in the development of electronic portfolios is to publish them in HTML format. With wide accessibility to the Web, many schools are encouraging students to publish their portfolios in this format. Students convert word processing documents into Web pages with tools built into those programs and create hyperlinks between goals and the artifacts that demonstrate achievement.

The advantages of creating Web-based portfolios center on its multimedia, cross-platform, and Web capabilities. Any potential viewer simply needs Internet access and a Web browser. However, the learning curve is steep. Web pages require much more file-management skill than other types of portfolio development tools, and the security can be a problem.

Students in upper-elementary grades and beyond can create Web pages, but this type of portfolio is especially appropriate for those who wish to showcase their portfolio for a potential employer.

PDF Documents (Adobe Acrobat). One of the more interesting development environments for electronic portfolios is Adobe Acrobatís Portable Document Format (PDF). PDF files are based on the Postscript page layout language originally developed for printing to a laser printer. PDF files are created using the tools provided by Adobe, either the PDF Writer or Distiller program. Adobe Acrobat files are called Portable Document Format because the same file can be read by a variety of computer platforms and require only the free Acrobat Reader software. The process of creating an Acrobat file can be as easy as printing to a printer. in fact, the PDF Writer is a printer driver that is selected when the user wants to convert a document from any application into a PDF file. Another software package, PrintToPDF, is a less powerful shareware Macintosh printer driver that creates simple PDFs for a much lower price ($20).

Once a PDF file is created, the user can navigate page by page, by using bookmarks they create, or with hypertext links or buttons they can create with the Acrobat Exchange program. My own electronic teaching portfolio is published on CD-ROM with Adobe Acrobat.

Multimedia Slideshows (e. g., AppleWorks and PowerPoint). These programs allow the user to create electronic slideshows most often shown in a linear sequence. Most of these tools allow the integration of sound and video, and Microsoft PowerPoint allows some buttons and links. Other software can also be used to create electronic portfolio documents, such as a word processor or spreadsheet.

Video (digital and analog). Digital video can be a powerful addition to many of the other portfolio development tools outlined here. Nonlinear digital video editing could be used to organize videotaped portfolio artifacts.

Analog video can be used to gather evidence of student learning in a low-cost storage medium, and videotape is a popular final publishing medium for sharing student presentation portfolios with family and friends.

Video is appropriate for a wide range of students and audiences. It is the best way to capture classroom interaction, including nonverbal cues, and it is often the method by which final portfolios are shared.

With all of these choices, which strategy should you choose? Are different tools more appropriate at different stages of the electronic portfolio development process? These questions can only be answered after addressing some of the questions posed at the beginning of the article, especially the purpose and audience for the portfolio, the resources available (equipment and technology skills required), and where the advantages of the strategy outweigh the disadvantages for your situation.

Barrett, H. (1998). Strategic questions. What to consider when planning for electronic portfolios. Learning Leading with Technology 26(2), 6?13. Available. www. iste. org/LLóselect Archive, then Volume 26, Number 2. Barrett, H. (1999). Using technology to support alternative assessment and electronic portfolios [Online document]. Anchorage. University of Alaska?Anchorage. Available. Danielson, C., Abrutyn, L. (1997) An introduction to using portfolios in the classroom. Alexandria, VA. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Ivers, K., Barron, A. E. (1998) Multimedia projects in education. Englewood, CO. Libraries Unlimited, Inc.

Relational databases FileMaker Pro ( Microsoft Access ( Hypermedia card formats HyperStudio ( HyperCard ( Digital Chisel ( Asymetrix Toolbook ( SuperLink ( Some commercially available electronic portfolio templates use some of these programs. Multimedia authoring software Macromedia Authorware ( Macromedia Director ( Network-compatible hypermedia HTML Web page editors Adobe Page Mill ( Adobe GoLive ( FileMaker Home Page ( Macromedia DreamWeaver ( Netscape Composer ( Öand many, many more HTML Editors Adobe Acrobat portable document format (PDF) files ( PDF Conversion Programs. PrintToPDF ( (Macintosh only) $20 shareware single user, $300 site license Win2PDF (Windows NT or 2000) free for non-commercial use, $35 single user license fee 5D PDF Creator (Windows or Mac) $99 PDF Converter (Windows 3.1/95/98/2000/NT) $129 single user PDF Driver 4.0 (Windows 95/98/NT/2000) $12.50 Education Version Other tool software programs Integrated "Works" programs, especially those that allow creation of slideshows AppleWorks ( Microsoft PowerPoint (

Creating Electronic Portfolios in HyperStudio Directions are given for constructing an electronic portfolio in HyperStudio.

The author defines portfolios and tells why to use them, how to do them electronically, and identifies potential problems and some solutions.

Focus on Technology. Digital Teaching Portfolios Build, Display Talent (Clare Kilbane and Robert McNergney)

How to Create Your Own Electronic Portfolio Clear directions on how to design your own electronic portfolio.

Professional Teaching Portfolio. A Catalyst for Rethinking Education The purpose of this paper is to briefly describe how portfolio assessment was implemented and to focus on how this process impacts faculty, students, and program development.

Guidelines, suggestions, and examples of course portfolios. information on preparing a teaching portfolio

Teaching Portfolio information at Iowa State University, including how to document your teaching, recommended portfolio contents, writing a teaching philosophy statement, and selected readings about teaching portfolios (

The teaching portfolios website at the University of Texas at El Paso's Center for Effective Teaching and Learning provides a description of how to create a teaching portfolio, and also provides links to sample teaching portfolios. ( See also the Course Portfolio bibliography resources using the BiblioSearchpage.

An electronic portfolio, or E-Portfolio, is a purposeful collection of artifacts and reflections saved on a CD, disk or website that demonstrates how you have met the current established standards for teaching art. The standards used on this E-Portfolio web site are based on the ten Wisconsin Teaching Standards, the National Art Education Associations Standards for Teaching Art, the INTASC Standards and the new WI PI 34 rules. These standards can serve as a guide or framework for your E-Portfolio.

To improve your teaching practices In addition, preservice art teachers across many higher education institutions nationwide are now required to create electronic portfolio development as a requirement for graduation. In the next few years, portfolio reviews will become a regular part of the initial, professional and master teacher licensing process. If you are a beginning art teacher seeking initial licensure, or an inservice art teacher seeking master or professional licensure, you will be required to develop an E-Portfolio to enable a professional review of the current status of your knowledge, competencies, and skills for teaching art. If you are a cooperating teacher, you will likely be asked to review portfolios of your student teachers. If you are an inservice art teacher who is seeking NBPTS certification, an E-portfolio is the recommended that demonstrates how you have met your professional development plan (PDP). If you compile your E-Portfolio according to the suggested guidelines on this website, it will contain evidence of your competencies that correlate with state and national standards.

For Pre-Service Art Teachers. Many of the artifacts that are in your E-Portfolio will be outcomes of your general education, studio art and art education courses. Some examples of these artifacts include, but are not limited to.

Selected journal entries As you collect your artifacts and write reflections, you will engage in formative or on-going assessment. When you exit your art education program, you will engage in summative evaluation with your advisors and faculty. For In-Service or Practicing Art Teachers. Many of the artifacts in your E-Portfolio will occur directly from your teaching and your professional activities. Some examples of these artifacts include, but are not limited to.

There are several kinds of portfolios. An E-Portfolio that is required for licensure can be considered an assessment portfolio. This means that the aim of this portfolio is to assist you to improve your teaching practices. Improved teaching practices can occur through a process that allows you to assess your performance through artifacts and reflections. The process of developing an E-Portfolio includes opportunities for making judgements about your performance and setting new goals to improve your performance.

Selecting [and editing] artifacts. Sufficient care must be taken to select and edit your portfolio so that it represents your best efforts in demonstrating your competencies.

Learning appropriate software to create your portfolio (depends on your access, comfort level and programmatic requirements)

Web designers often browse through portfolio websites of other designers for inspiration and ideas that can be used in their own work. Photographers, like designers, have a need to display an attractive portfolio for their websites visitors, and many photographers have excellent portfolio sites. In this post Id like to take a look at 25 of the best. This collection is based on the quality of the portfolio site itself, not necessarily the work being displayed inside the portfolio. Andrew Gransden Photography Robert Dann Photography Eric Ryan Anderson Paolo Boccardi Stan Seaton Rebecca Ruth Walters Walters Martin Lawrence Photography Michael Potts Photography Piotr Kulczycki Travel Photography John Morris Photography Hoops Photography Steffen Knudsen Allen C. S. Ling Photography Maurice Krijtenberg Jeremy Cowart Anthony Phillips Agnieszka Czarnocka Christina OBrien Photography Gio Bautista Chris Phelps Photography Clayton Bozard Mark Velasquez Photography Isabelle Ribeiro For more design inspiration, see.

Those are nice, but my favorite photographers portfolio is . Beautiful work and really nice design. Very cool that their designer could take the grunge look and apply it to a site that specializes in portraits and weddings, and make it work so perfectly.

[.] Inspired by photography? Check out this list of 25 photographic portfolios. # Previous Post. Typographical Art [.]

[.] 30 Beautifully Blue Web Designs 25 Beautifully Colorful Web Designs 20 Websites with Unique Layouts 25 of the Best Photographer Portfolio Websites The Best Designs Vi. sualize. us Possibly related posts. (automatically generated)exploring [.]

[.] months ago I published a post title 25 of the Best Photographer Portfolio Websites. The post drew a good number of bookmarks and wound up on the Delicious front page. As a result, it [.]

Minimalist Websites Minimalist Websites Part II Minimalist Websites Part III Minimalist Websites Part IV Beautifully Colorful Websites Beautifully Colorful Websites Part II Beautifully Colorful Websites Part III Websites with Minimal Color Schemes Beautifully Dark Websites Beautifully Dark Websites Part II Inspiration E-Commerce Websites Unique Layouts Incredibly Artistic Websites Incredibly Artistic Websites Part II Incredibly Artistic Websites Part III The Best Church Websites The Best Church Websites Part II The Best Photographer Portfolio Sites Innovative Flash Designs Gorgeous Navigation Menus Gorgeous Navigation Menus Part II Examples of Creative Navigation Creative Website Headers Impressive Blog Footers Design by Land, Air and Sea 15 Tutorials for Creating Product Advertisements 35 Tutorials for Creating Website Layouts 35 Tutorials for Mastering Photoshop Brushes 35 Tutorials Inspired by Apple 35 Tutorials for Designing Your Own Posters 35+ Nature-Inspired Tutorials 40 Tutorials for Lighting and Abstract Effects 40 Tutorials for Textures and Backgrounds 40 Tutorials for Designing Icons 40 Tutorials for Creating Wallpaper (Pt. 2) 45 Tutorials for Creating Wallpaper 45 Tutorials for Navigation Menus 45 Photo Editing Tutorials 50 Essential Text Tutorials

Focused Portfolios is an Authentic Assessment Process Designed for professionals serving childrenfrom birth through age five. Adopted by the New MexicoDepartment of Children, Youth and Families and widely used in the state of Oklahoma Used in child care settings all over the US and Canada to meet licensure/accreditation requirements!

Focused Portfolios was written by Gaye Gronlund and Bev Engel. These two early childhood education professionals have helped guide educators in the use of authentic classroom assessment for many years.

WHAT ARE STUDENT PORTFOLIOS? Portfolios are collections of selected student work representing an array of performance. Beyond this simple definition, student portfolios vary widely in content and purpose and even in who decides what goes into the portfolio. A portfolio might be a folder containing a student's "best pieces" and the student's evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the pieces. Or, a portfolio may also contain one or more "works in progress" illustrating how a product, such as an essay, evolved through stages of design, drafting and revision. Decisions about what goes into the portfolio are typically made by the student creating the collection but may also involve teachers and peers as well as structural requirements for the entire project. The purpose of the portfolio may be simply to support instruction or it may also be seen to support administrative functions. This

Presents information on what has been learned about using portfolios for administrative purposes, some of the problems involved, and some possible solutions to those problems. HOW ARE PORTFOLIOS USED FOR INSTRUCTION? Many teachers, administrators, and policymakers have learned that portfolios can provide valuable support for quality teaching and improved learning in many ways, including the following.

Engaging students in activities that are likely to result in products worthy of sharing with others, retaining in a portfolio, and referring back to periodically. and

Chronicling student work and opening a new channel for substantive communication between students and classroom teachers that is focused on individual student work. HOW ARE PORTFOLIOS USED FOR ADMINISTRATIVE PURPOSES? While there is a growing understanding of instructional uses for portfolios, they are increasingly being called upon to serve administrative functions as well. Student portfolios are being used for accountability reporting, program evaluations, and a variety of administrative decisions affecting the future of individual students. Both inside and outside of schools, observers are uneasy about what role portfolios, commercial tests, and other assessment tools should play in these administrative activities. The foremost question being asked is.

What do we know about the technical adequacy of portfolios for administrative decision making and reporting? How comprehensive are portfolios in covering important cognitive skills? How valid are they for the purposes schools set for them, and for the uses that go beyond these purposes? How reliable are the ratings we assign to a student's portfolio? Would someone else give a different rating? How generalizable are portfolio assessments in a specific curriculum area? Would a different assessment of the same students in that curriculum area yield different results? These questions concerning technical quality take on heightened importance because of the potentially enduring effect of various administrative decisions on individual students. A wide variety of administrative decisions (such as retaining some students in grade, providing special services for others, and admitting still others to special programs) affect students' futures with or without assessment information from student portfolios. The issue is whether current portfolio systems are sufficiently informative and technically strong enough for these added functions. If they are, fine. If they are not, teachers and administrators need to understand what would be involved in making them technically adequate. A second question spins off the first.

How will using portfolios for administrative decisions and reports affect their utility as instructional tools? Any move to adopt structural and content requirements that may be needed to make portfolios more suitable for accountability, evaluation, and student-level administrative decisions may well have implications for both the attractiveness and utility of portfolios as instructional tools. Here, the crucial question is whether portfolios that have been revamped to satisfy technical requirements can still play a constructive role in teaching for understanding and in motivating students to be active learners? For example, would students work as enthusiastically on assigned projects as they would on projects they were allowed to choose on their own? Would the amount and quality of their work suffer? Before turning to a discussion of these two concerns, it is appropriate to step back and consider the use of portfolios in administrative decisions and reports. WHY ARE PORTFOLIOS USED IN ADMINISTRATIVE DECISIONS AND REPORTS? Experience shows that portfolios--as well as any other data source--will be used for any number of administrative matters, with little regard to their original purpose or limitations, simply because they are available at the time information is needed. Moreover, those who have observed how traditional multiple-choice tests narrow curriculum are determined not to tolerate continued dominance of multiple-choice items in any area that would influence curriculum and instruction. Thus, many educators find themselves willing to try portfolios as a way to support reform of both curriculum and assessment. WHAT DOES THE RESEARCH SAY? Experience with classroom-level portfolio projects shows that many portfolios are currently highly individualized, if not intensely personal. Judged in light of available standards--some district and school policies, court decisions, and professional association standards--many of our existing student portfolios appear to contain too little information for "high-stakes" administrative uses. Despite the obvious importance of student learning, no single measure of student knowledge--not even richly documented, broad-based portfolios--should be used as a mechanism for meting out rewards and sanctions for students, schools, or programs. Other indicators must be considered for fair and rational decision making. For example, even within the area of student learning, additional information can be gleaned from systematic teacher observations, short-answer quizzes, multiple-choice tests, and other assessment tools. Practical procedures for addressing technical problems in performance assessments, including portfolios, are discussed below. WHAT ARE SOME PROBLEMS AND POSSIBLE REMEDIES? Below are some of the problems and possible remedies concerning the use of portfolios for administrative decision making and reporting.

Students are ill-prepared to carry out work that is a required part of a portfolio. This, in fact, is an ever-present bundle of problems, which extends well beyond portfolios and assessment. Several strategies are needed.

If students have not had an adequate opportunity to learn the subject matter and appreciate some of the linkages among various concepts and procedures, any form of assessment--not just portfolios--will be both meaningless and unfair. Addressing this problem will likely involve changes in course offerings, curriculum coverage, and instructional strategies (as well as staff development programs and possibly school finance). Some assessment paradigms (Baker. See Ron Dietel, National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing--CRESST, below) mitigate the problem of student differences in background knowledge by providing fairly extensive subject matter material with each task.

Teachers have used different criteria for rating portfolio work or come up with different scores even when they use the same criteria. This problem can be solved with training, planning time, and the involvement of teachers and other people with subject matter and instructional expertise. Teachers need to be involved in the development of a common set of criteria and the selection of rubrics that very specifically define performance. Research shows that under these conditions teachers and other raters can be trained to rate student work consistently (referred to as high inter-rater reliability).

Parent, sibling, or other help may also present a problem in assessing student performance based on portfolio projects that extend over a period of time. Sending notes home with guidance for parents has been one approach, and student honor codes have been another.

Students have worked on only a small number of tasks. Because performance tasks and extended projects take time to plan and carry out, many portfolios contain a small number of products. However, since not all tasks are alike, it is difficult to specify how many should be required. But researchers (Shavelson et al. See CRESST, below) have learned that about 10 tasks are needed to assess a student's understanding of a particular subject area, such as science. With fewer than 10 tasks, we can only judge how a student did on the particular tasks undertaken (the student might perform quite differently on a different set of tasks). This problem of limited generalizability of tasks can be addressed by increasing the number of tasks for all students or by not relying solely on portfolio work to judge a student's accomplishments. Occasionally, fewer tasks would be needed if each task came with fairly extensive passages of task-related information, such as those used by some researchers (Baker, See CRESST, below) to assess deep understanding of history, social science, and science. On the other hand, more tasks would be needed if the tasks were less carefully structured or less carefully researched, or the content area to be assessed were defined more broadly, for example, mathematics and science combined. Increasing the number of tasks in a portfolio may not be a bad idea anyway. It would give additional emphasis to student production of papers and other work products. In terms of administering tasks or assigning work, the 10 might be carried out over an extended period of time as a continuing cycle of instruction, performance, and assessment. At the opposite extreme, 10 tasks that require 15 minutes each might be administered in a single morning at the high school or junior high school level. In addition to these problem-specific strategies, several general strategies have been used to buttress the technical underpinnings of portfolios--that is, training raters to criterion (a pre-established standard of acceptability), continued in-service training for teachers, periodic sharing of portfolios across classrooms, auditing, and various research and development activities. WHAT INSTRUCTIONAL UTILITY DO TECHNICALLY STRENGTHENED PORTFOLIOS HAVE? Where the sole purpose of portfolios is to provide instructional support or curriculum reform, they and the rules that govern them can be created and changed by students in collaboration with their own teacher. Adding administrative uses to portfolios results in an increasing standardization and at least a partial shift in ownership. The shift is away from individual students, teachers, and classrooms, and to the education system in general--a broader but less well defined audience. A student's sense of ownership of his or her portfolio may well be linked with interest, motivation, and actual engagement and learning, but this is no reason to conclude that students must have complete control over their own portfolios to make portfolio systems work. Some compromise between centralized structure and local, classroom-level discretion may work just as well. Moreover, a variety of other factors may be equally important in fostering student motivation and learning. More experimentation and research may provide an answer to this controversy. Meanwhile, giving priority to staff development and equity issues--which is essential if portfolios are to be used in administrative decisions and reporting--can be an area of agreement and an important step in advancing student performance.

(a publication of the Portfolio Assessment Clearinghouse). It provides 20 to 30 pages of articles, project briefs, and other materials by teachers, project directors, and researchers about local and state portfolio projects and serves as an information exchange for people interested in portfolios.

PROPEL is a continuation of ARTS PROPEL, a cooperative research project involving the Pittsburgh Public Schools, Harvard Project Zero, and Educational Testing Service (ETS). Throughout both stages of the project, portfolios have been used along with classroom observations and external assessments to assess learning in three content areas. imaginative writing, music, and the visual arts. Information on the PROPEL/ARTS PROPEL approach is now available from ETS in four handbooks. a general overview handbook and one for each of the three content areas. The handbooks describe program and teacher strategies and illustrate student production, perception, and reflection in projects that extend over time. PROPEL has also used an audit procedure to verify portfolio ratings. (See PROPEL/ARTS PROPEL, below.)

Several states are using student portfolios in combination with other information on student accomplishments in their accountability systems. For example, Vermont is assessing 4th and 8th grade students in writing and mathematics using three methods. a portfolio, a "best piece" from the portfolio, and a set of equivalent performance tasks. California has also launched 21 pilot projects (11 with portfolios) involving the collaborative efforts of school districts for improving alternatives in assessment. Kentucky will be monitoring schools on the changes, over time, in their percentage of successful students and has established an elaborate system that includes portfolio work for measuring success.

Lauren Resnick and Marc Tucker are co-directors of the New Standards Project. They are developing a new assessment system to support world-class standards of performance for all students. The system employs advanced forms of performance assessment, such as portfolios, exhibitions, projects, and timed performance examinations. Among its partners are the following states. Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington.

Dozens of research projects are investigating new forms of assessment, including portfolios. Most of those cited in this Consumer Guide were carried out by CRESST researchers, with funding from OERI, the National Science Foundation, or both. A listing of all large projects in this area is maintained by CRESST.

ARTS PROPEL Educational Testing Service (ETS) 18-R Princeton, NJ 08541 Dale Carlson California Department of Education 721 Capitol Mall Sacramento, CA 95814 (916) us. Winfield Cooper Portfolio News Portfolio Assessment Clearinghouse San Dieguito Union High School District 710 Encinitas Boulevard Encinitas, CA 92024 Ron Dietel CRESST--National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing UCLA 145 Moore Hall 405 Hilgard Avenue Los Angeles, CA us. (310) us. Joe McDonald Coalition of Essential Schools Brown University Box 1969 Providence, RI 02912 (401) us. Richard P. Mills Commissioner of Education Vermont Department of Education Montpelier, VT 05602 (802) us. New Standards Project Learning, Research and Development Center/University of Pittsburgh 3939 O'Hara Street, Room 408 Pittsburgh, PA 15260 (412) us. PROPEL/ARTS PROPEL Pittsburgh Public Schools 341 South Bellefield Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Ed Reily Office of Assessment and Accountability Kentucky Department of Education 19th Floor Capitol Plaza Tower 500 Mero Street Frankfort, KY 40601 (502) us. Ed Roeber Council of Chief State School Officers 1 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Suite 700 Washington, DC us. (202) us.