Exploring the many tools there are used to create a portfolio seemed endless. There are so many different tools that can be used to create an e portfolio. I played around with a few of them and want to share my thoughts on three specific tools and how they could be beneficial for you in creating your very own portfolio. I played around with Wikis, Google Sites, and Microsoft Office. Each one of these tools has its own way of letting its users to create and gather information in order to share that in a portfolio. I believe that my using these educational technology tools to create a e portfolio with your students you can use them in a better fashion than any assessment every could. These portfolios can show the growth in each student over the school year. It can allow students to then reflect on their own learning as well as their peers. This helps your students be more involved in their own learning. I want to share in more depth a little more about each of these tools in order to share how they could help you in creating your portfolio.
When playing around with Wikis I found that there are so many different things that you can find and use a wiki for. First off, I didn't know that a Wiki is a database for browsing, creating, and searching through information. This surprised me that I never knew that about this application. Wikihow was one of my favorite ones to explore as it literally can show you how to do just about anything you are needing to do. So, this one would be great for helping you figure out how to create a portfolio. Wiki books was also another one that I found to be a great tool because you can find books on almost every topic to help you with gathering information. One affordance that wiki has is that it allows all users, not just experts, to edit any page or create new pages within the wiki site. Wikis are also great for collaborating within teams or groups in order to gather and share information.
While using the google sites tool, I discovered that it is actually a structured wiki and a web page tool that is free for its users. This tool is an easy one to use and used by a lot of students for that reason. You can create and publish your website for free. Google sites allows multiple users on its website at the same time which makes it a great tool for group projects in classrooms. There are lots of templates and themes you can choose from however you can also edit those to make them more for what you are wanting as well. You can also integrate google sites with other tools such as google drive, google sheets, and google docs. Google sites is also very user friendly on mobile devices as it automatically optimizes to fit the mobile device screen. This has been the easiest tool for me to use so far and probably the one I will use for my e portfolio.
Microsoft office was a proprietary tool that I discovered and played around with. Within Microsoft office there are a suite of applications that you can use in order to help you with many tasks including creating a portfolio. Microsoft word is a tool within Microsoft office which can help you make brochures, business proposals, artistic creations, and many more things. It offers many different templates to help get you started which you can also edit to make fit your needs. Microsoft PowerPoint is another tool within Microsoft office that will help you in creating many different items. It can help with creating a visual resume, and many projects for different purposes. These both are great tools that can help you create an amazing portfolio.
If I were going to ask my students to create a portfolio, I think that I would have them use Microsoft office simply because it has templates that could help guide the students and they wouldn't have to start from scratch and they could also use the many different tools within Microsoft to help design and make their portfolio in the way that they would like it. I believe that most students have used Microsoft word and power point so this would let us focus more on creating the portfolio than having to learn how to use the application we are using to create the portfolio.
In thinking about student work that you can create with using a portfolio I struggled because I work with such a young learner that I don't feel like this would apply to my age group. After doing a little research I think I have found something that may be beneficial for older students and help enhance their learning. I think that having students add a page on their portfolio that tracks their individual goals for the year would be a great student guided work assignment. This would be a great tool for students to create within their portfolio and use all year to trach their learning goals. I think this will enhance their learning because they will be deciding on their goals and tracking if they are reaching them or not. This could be a great motivator. Another student lead work I feel would be great to add to their portfolio would be writing examples from the beginning of the year and throughout the year. Adding all different types of writing samples in order to see their writing growth throughout the year which could help the teachers see what skills students are needing to focus on in order to differentiate their teaching for that student need. There are so many different ways to use the portfolio in order to enhance student growth in the classroom so take a deeper look for yourself and dive into how you can use a portfolio in your classroom to help grow your students even more than you already are.
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